Everyone is an expert now.
Sales experts. Leadership experts. Martial arts experts. People who complete a course and suddenly speak with authority about the entire field.
I’m skeptical of that. A certification can represent meaningful training. But completing that training and knowing how to respond when a situation changes are different accomplishments.
And before this sounds like a criticism aimed only at other people, I’ve been that guy too.
During COVID, I was working with a nonprofit on how we would deliver services. I was the military guy on the team. Planning was familiar territory, so I put together an extensive write-up.
On paper, I thought it was strong.
Then someone with roughly thirty years in that field got angry with me. She saw problems I hadn’t seen. Things my plan didn’t account for. I had brought confidence and a document into an environment I didn’t understand nearly as well as I thought I did.
Her delivery was rough. The gap in my understanding was real.
That experience stayed with me because it exposed something uncomfortable: you can be good at organizing a plan before you’re good at understanding the problem.
What kind of problem are you solving?
While I was on active duty, I spoke with a leader at a major firm about leadership and management. His advice challenged my attachment to frameworks. He was more interested in how people made decisions.
That conversation led me to Cynefin.
Cynefin is itself a framework, which makes the story a little ironic. But what appealed to me was its starting point: understand the situation before deciding how to respond.
It distinguishes several decision contexts:
- Clear: The relationship between cause and effect is readily understood. Follow an established process. Buying a bottle of water is usually this kind of problem.
- Complicated: There is an answer to work out, but finding it requires analysis or relevant expertise.
- Complex: You cannot reliably determine the outcome in advance. Try small, bounded experiments, observe what happens, and adjust.
- Chaotic: You cannot discern dependable cause-and-effect relationships in the moment. Act to establish some stability, then reassess.
- Confusion: You have not yet established which kind of situation you are facing.
These distinctions concern how a situation behaves, rather than simply how difficult it feels. Read more from The Cynefin Company.
The danger is applying the wrong approach with complete confidence.
You can keep demanding a more detailed plan in a complex environment, even though you need feedback from action. You can keep analyzing a chaotic situation when something first needs to be stabilized. You can also treat an ordinary, solvable problem like a crisis.
Before asking whether your answer is right, ask whether your approach fits the problem.
Knowledge has to become judgment
I listen to audiobooks, and one I highly recommend is Varg Freeborn’s Violence of Mind: Training and Preparation for Extreme Violence.
One idea I took away from it is that becoming good at something and explaining everything that makes you good at it are different abilities. A skilled performer may recognize timing, pressure, and opportunities without being able to put every part of that recognition neatly on paper.
That is my recollection and interpretation, rather than a direct quotation.
It connects with how I think about learning martial arts. An instructor introduces the fundamentals. You practice them, struggle with them, and begin discovering what their application feels like. The instructor continues correcting and refining you as your understanding develops.
Knowing the sequence is a beginning. Recognizing what needs to change while the situation is changing takes further work.
I see a similar distinction in sales and management.
You can learn MEDDIC. You can learn ADKAR. You can memorize the steps in a change-management process. Those tools can help you organize your thinking and notice omissions.
But a customer doesn’t owe you a conversation that follows your framework. An organization doesn’t stop changing because you finished the implementation plan.
You still have to listen, interpret, act, and adjust.
Experience needs examination too
In my Army career, changes in jobs, units, and leaders repeatedly changed the environment around me.
A new leader brought different expectations. A new unit brought different habits and relationships. I had to work out what mattered in that setting and how to contribute to the mission.
That repeated adjustment became a practice of its own.
But experience can also make you overconfident. Something worked in your last assignment, so you assume it will work here. You recognize a familiar detail and overlook the differences around it.
Years in a field matter. So does what you have learned from those years—and whether you are willing to revise it.
The nonprofit experience reminded me of that. My planning experience was useful, but it did not automatically give me the judgment of someone who had spent decades delivering those services.
I needed to ask better questions and listen earlier.
Rehearse with intent
This is why I care about how we practice.
You can go through the motions, complete the rehearsal, and feel prepared because everything happened in the expected order. Then a real problem changes the conditions.
What did the rehearsal teach you to notice?
Where did your assumptions fail?
Could you explain why you changed your approach—or why you stayed with it?
Practice becomes more useful when you examine those decisions. Seek feedback. Introduce appropriate variation. Pay attention to what happens when the familiar approach stops working.
A certificate, a framework, or a well-written plan can be valuable. I want to know what someone can do with it, where their understanding ends, and whether they can recognize when they need help.
That includes me.
Before defending the plan, look again at the problem. Ask someone who sees it from another angle. Be willing to discover that the situation is different from the one you prepared for.
You don’t know what you don’t know.
The work is learning to notice.