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Professional experience accumulates as cases. A difficult transformation. A successful assessment. A process improvement that changed the process without improving the underlying capability. A framework that gradually became more important than the purpose it was introduced to serve. Over a long career, practitioners encounter hundreds of situations like these.

The value of that experience, however, does not lie only in remembering what happened. Its greater value may lie in recognizing what different situations have in common.

Experience Is More Than a Collection of Stories

Individual cases are always contextual. The organization was different, the people were different, the technology was different, the constraints were different, and the intervention was different. This makes experience difficult to transfer directly.

A practitioner may say, “We tried that twenty years ago and it didn’t work.” That may be a useful warning, but it is not yet reusable professional knowledge. The more interesting questions are why it did not work, which conditions mattered, which mechanisms were involved, and whether those mechanisms are present in the situation being considered now.

Professional experience becomes more transferable when practitioners move from remembering cases to recognizing patterns.

Consider three apparently different situations. One organization assesses its testing capability against its existing testing process. Another evaluates a transformation according to how completely an external framework has been implemented. A third replaces a legacy product but treats the existing product as the implicit definition of what its successor should become.

The subjects and circumstances are different, yet the same underlying mechanism may be present. An explicit reference is missing or insufficiently developed, so an available object gradually becomes the reference.

The individual cases are useful. The recurring pattern is more powerful because it may allow us to recognize the same mechanism somewhere we have never encountered before.

Pattern Recognition Is a Form of Expertise

Experience changes professional reasoning. A less experienced practitioner may encounter each situation primarily as a new problem, while an experienced practitioner may recognize similarities with situations encountered previously.

That does not mean the experienced practitioner already knows the answer. It means experience can provide better hypotheses.

Someone who has repeatedly encountered reference substitution may become suspicious when framework compliance is discussed as though it were synonymous with organizational effectiveness. Someone who has seen organizational rituals outlive their purpose may ask why a governance mechanism exists before recommending that it be preserved. Someone familiar with the Local Hero pattern may investigate whether apparently strong organizational performance actually depends disproportionately on a few exceptional individuals.

Pattern recognition directs attention. It suggests questions and identifies potentially important evidence. It can tell us where to look, but it cannot tell us what we will find.

Recognition Is Not Proof

This distinction becomes increasingly important with experience. A familiar situation can tempt a practitioner to conclude, “I have seen this before. I know what the problem is.” But similarity does not establish equivalence. The current situation may involve different causes, relationships, constraints or consequences.

A more defensible conclusion is: “I have seen this pattern before. It gives me a hypothesis worth investigating.”

Experience therefore complements evidence rather than replacing it. In fact, the more patterns a practitioner recognizes, the more disciplined the distinction between recognition and judgment needs to become.

Perhaps this is one of the less obvious characteristics of professional maturity. Experience allows us to form hypotheses earlier. Maturity reminds us that we still have to test them.

Different Cases Reveal the Pattern

One example can illustrate an idea. Several substantially different examples can do something more: they can help reveal the abstraction.

If the same proposed mechanism appears in a testing organization, a transformation programme and a product replacement, the differences between those cases help separate what is incidental from what may be fundamental. Apparently redundant examples can therefore be valuable when they demonstrate the same proposition under meaningfully different conditions.

Examples from other practitioners are particularly useful. Someone may recognize a pattern and respond, “I have seen this too,” then contribute a case from a completely different environment. Another practitioner may respond that their situation looked similar but was caused by something else. Both responses improve the idea.

The objective is not to accumulate anecdotes that appear to prove a theory. New cases should be capable of corroborating a pattern, revealing its boundaries or challenging it altogether. A useful professional pattern must remain open to all three.

This also makes examples more than illustrations of theory. They become tests of it. Does the proposed mechanism explain substantially different situations without forcing them to fit? Does it help distinguish superficially similar situations that actually have different causes? Does recognizing the pattern suggest better questions or useful evidence? Where does the explanation stop working?

A pattern becomes more interesting when it continues to explain different observations while remaining capable of being challenged by observations that do not fit.

Naming What We Repeatedly See

Some recurring patterns are particularly useful because they describe ways in which apparently reasonable organizational behaviour produces undesirable consequences.

The process becomes the capability. The framework becomes the target. Everyone is responsible, so coherence becomes ownerless. The assessment becomes the roadmap. The Local Hero compensates for missing organizational capability. The current realization becomes the reference for its own assessment.

Giving these patterns names makes them easier to recognize and discuss. The name does not establish that the pattern is present. It gives practitioners a shared concept with which to investigate whether it might be.

This is an important distinction. A named pattern should improve our questions, not replace them.

From Personal Experience to Shared Professional Knowledge

This suggests a deliberate way of treating accumulated professional experience. Preserve enough of an interesting case to understand its context and reasoning, then ask what mechanism it may reveal. Compare it with other cases, abstract cautiously and expose the proposed pattern to other practitioners.

Their experiences can then challenge the abstraction. Some cases may strengthen it. Others may reveal its boundaries. Counterexamples may force it to be revised or abandoned. What began as personal experience can gradually become shared professional knowledge without pretending that experience itself constitutes proof.

Over time, something that began as “something interesting happened on one of my assignments” may become “we repeatedly observe this mechanism under these conditions.”

That is a substantial transformation.

A useful working principle is:

Experience provides cases. Reflection reveals patterns. Evidence challenges them. Shared experience makes them transferable.

The objective is not to turn every professional story into a universal rule. It is to prevent valuable experience from remaining trapped inside the people who accumulated it.

When practitioners can preserve, recognize, articulate and challenge the patterns behind their experience, thirty years of professional work becomes more than thirty years of memories.

It becomes something the next practitioner can build upon.

Organizations often depend on people who make things work despite the organization around them. They build professional communities. They connect people who would otherwise remain disconnected. They maintain methods and knowledge. They support Sales. They create training. They solve recurring problems. They preserve relationships between organizational units. They know whom to call when something needs to happen.

These people are often extremely valuable. They can also make organizational weakness remarkably difficult to see.

Success Does Not Necessarily Demonstrate Capability

Capability concerns organizational ability. If an organization repeatedly produces a valued effect, it is tempting to conclude that the organization possesses the capability required to produce it.

That conclusion may be premature. Sometimes the effect exists because one or a few individuals continuously compensate for weaknesses in the surrounding organization.

The organization may lack clear ownership, coherent processes, sufficient knowledge, effective collaboration, appropriate decision rights, or sustainable mechanisms for learning. Yet an experienced and motivated individual bridges those gaps personally.

The desired effect still appears. From the outside, the capability seems to work. But the organization may actually be observing exceptional individual performance rather than robust organizational capability.

The Local Hero Paradox

This creates a paradox. The better the local hero becomes at compensating for organizational weakness, the less visible that weakness becomes.

Management sees that:

• problems are being solved;
• people are being connected;
• knowledge is being maintained;
• customers are being supported;
• initiatives continue to move;
• important outcomes are still being produced.

The immediate organizational need therefore appears to have been satisfied.

Why invest further?

The answer only becomes obvious when the local hero becomes unavailable, overloaded, changes role, or leaves. Suddenly relationships disappear. Knowledge becomes difficult to find. Activities that seemed routine stop happening. Decisions take longer. People discover that nobody knows why particular arrangements exist. The organization then learns that an apparently functioning capability depended upon a person rather than upon a sustainable organizational ability.

The Hero Can Preserve the Problem

There is a more uncomfortable consequence. Local heroes do not merely compensate for missing capability. Their success can help preserve the conditions that made their heroics necessary. Investment is easiest to justify when organizational weakness produces visible consequences. The local hero prevents those consequences. The stronger their performance, the weaker the apparent case for investing in the underlying capability.

A self-reinforcing pattern can emerge:

Weak organizational capability

→ individual compensates

→ desired effects continue

→ weakness becomes less visible

→ investment appears unnecessary

→ dependency on the individual continues

The organization receives the benefit without developing a sustainable ability to produce it. Success therefore becomes misleading evidence.

Look Beyond the Effect

Capability Assessment should therefore not ask only whether the intended effect currently occurs. It should also investigate how reliably the organization can continue producing that effect under relevant conditions.

Important questions include:

• What happens when key individuals are unavailable?
• Is important understanding distributed or concentrated?
• Can responsibilities be transferred without substantial loss?
• Are important relationships institutional or primarily personal?
• Can another competent person reconstruct why current arrangements exist?
• Does the organization have mechanisms for maintaining and evolving the capability?
• Would the capability survive reorganization, growth, turnover, or changing priorities?

A capability that works only while particular individuals remain personally engaged may still produce considerable value.

But its resilience is limited. That limitation should be visible in the assessment.

Local Heroes Are Not the Problem

The lesson should not be to suppress exceptional individual initiative. Organizations need people who see gaps, connect knowledge, challenge existing arrangements, and make things happen.

The problem arises when the organization treats their extraordinary contribution as evidence that no further organizational development is required.

A local hero may actually provide some of the strongest evidence about where capability needs strengthening.

Their work reveals which relationships matter, which knowledge must be preserved, which decisions require coordination, and which organizational mechanisms are currently missing.

Instead of asking:

How do we make this person less important?

a better question is:

What organizational ability is this person currently making possible, and how can we make that ability sustainable?

The objective is not to eliminate individual excellence.

It is to ensure that excellence strengthens organizational capability rather than permanently substitutes for it.

From Heroism to Capability

Capability Development can use successful local practice as evidence. The organization can examine what the individual actually does:

• which functions they perform;
• which relationships they maintain;
• which knowledge they preserve;
• which decisions they enable;
• which gaps they bridge;
• which effects their contribution produces.

The objective is not necessarily to formalize every activity. That would risk replacing useful human judgment with bureaucracy.

Instead, the organization should understand the functions behind the successful behavior and determine which of those functions need to become sustainable organizational abilities. Some may remain dependent on professional expertise.

Some may be distributed across several people. Some may require explicit stewardship. Some may benefit from better information, authority, processes, tools, communities, or governance. The realization can vary. What matters is that the organizational ability no longer disappears when one person does.

A Continuity Problem

Local-hero dependency is therefore also a Continuity problem. Understanding may exist, but remain concentrated. Relationships may work, but remain personal. Decisions may be effective, but their rationale may remain undocumented.Learning may occur, but remain inside one person’s experience. The organization possesses knowledge without necessarily possessing continuity of that knowledge.

A useful test is therefore:

Can the next generation continue the reasoning rather than merely inherit the artifacts?

If not, the apparent capability contains significant Understanding Debt.

The Management Trap

There is a final irony. Organizations sometimes respond to highly capable individuals by giving them even more responsibility. Because the person repeatedly solves difficult problems, additional problems are routed toward them. The local hero becomes increasingly valuable and increasingly overloaded at the same time.

This further concentrates knowledge and relationships. Eventually the organization has created a critical dependency around precisely the person who appeared to demonstrate that the capability was strong.

The appropriate response to successful local heroism may therefore be investment rather than additional dependency.

The question for management is not merely:

How much more can this person deliver?

It is:

What does this person’s success teach us about the capability we should build around them?

Closing Thought

Local heroes can create extraordinary organizational value. But the effects they produce should not automatically be mistaken for evidence of sustainable organizational capability.

Sometimes the opposite is true. Their success reveals how much organizational ability currently depends upon individual effort. The strongest organizations should therefore learn from their local heroes rather than simply depend upon them.

Because a local hero can compensate for missing capability. And, paradoxically, the better they become at doing so, the longer that missing capability may remain hidden.

Organizations often associate continuity with keeping systems, products, or capabilities running. Yet continuity can require the opposite: knowing when something can safely cease to exist.

A mature portfolio does not only make informed decisions about what to add. It also makes informed decisions about what to remove.

One provocative measure of product-portfolio maturity is therefore the number of systems an organization has been able to retire. The measure should not be taken literally—retiring more systems is not inherently better—but the reasoning behind it is revealing. Retiring a system confidently requires understanding what the system still contributes and what depends upon it.

Consider an old mainframe environment.

Over many years, applications may have been migrated elsewhere. New development has stopped. Most known business functionality has disappeared. The organization believes that the mainframe has effectively become redundant.

Yet it remains operational. Why? Because nobody is sufficiently confident that it can be switched off.

There might still be a batch process running somewhere. An obscure interface may still exchange data with another system. A business process performed only once a year may depend upon it. Some responsibility may have been assumed to have migrated but never actually did.

The organization does not know that the mainframe is necessary. It does not know that it is unnecessary. That distinction can keep an obsolete system alive for years. Loss of understanding can preserve obsolete realizations

This exposes an interesting inversion. Normally, understanding is associated with an organization’s ability to maintain and develop something. But understanding is equally important when deciding to stop maintaining it.

As organizational understanding disappears, the realization can become increasingly difficult to change or remove. Its known value may decrease while uncertainty about its unknown value increases.

Eventually the organization may preserve the realization not because it believes the realization is valuable, but because it cannot establish that removing it is safe.

Loss of understanding can increase the persistence of something whose value has already disappeared.

The resulting portfolio contains systems that survive through uncertainty.

They consume infrastructure, licenses, operational effort and scarce expertise. They may constrain architectural change and introduce security or operational risks. Yet attempts to remove them encounter the same question:

Are we absolutely sure nothing important still depends on this?

Without sufficient understanding, the organization cannot answer.

Retirement is an assessment problem

Retiring a system is therefore not merely a technical activity. It requires an assessment. The organization needs sufficient understanding of the system’s purpose, current contribution, dependencies, users, data, business processes and outcomes to form a justified judgment about what will happen when it disappears.

Evidence may need to be collected: usage information, interface traffic, batch execution, dependency analysis, business-process mapping, stakeholder knowledge or controlled interruption.

The question is not simply whether the system appears obsolete.

The question is whether there is sufficient evidence and understanding to justify the judgment that its removal is safe.

This connects retirement directly to Continuity.

Continuity does not mean preservation of the object

Continuity can easily be misunderstood as an argument for keeping things alive. It is not.

The continuity that matters is continuity of what remains significant: intent, outcomes, responsibilities, knowledge and necessary relationships. A particular realization may cease to be the appropriate way of providing them.

Sometimes maintaining Continuity therefore requires replacing a system. Sometimes it requires transferring responsibilities elsewhere. Sometimes the purpose itself has disappeared and nothing needs to replace it. And sometimes the correct decision is simply to switch the system off.

The ability to make that decision confidently depends on understanding.

Poor Continuity may not cause an old system to disappear. It may be precisely why nobody dares to switch it off.

The portfolio implication

This has consequences for portfolio management. Portfolio development is often associated with investment: selecting new products, approving initiatives and allocating resources to new opportunities.

But a portfolio also develops through subtraction. Removing redundant elements releases resources, reduces complexity and risk, and allows investment to concentrate on elements that continue to contribute to portfolio intent.

A mature portfolio-management capability therefore needs to understand its existing portfolio well enough to answer not only:

What should we add?

but also:

What can we safely stop?

This makes retirement capability an interesting indicator of portfolio understanding. An organization that continually adds new systems but cannot confidently retire old ones may not have a technology problem at all.

It may have accumulated understanding debt at portfolio scale.

And I think this one is particularly valuable because it produced a candidate generic insight for A:

Sufficient understanding is required not only to develop and assess a subject, but also to determine when it can safely cease to exist.

I want to become better at videography, and the obvious way to approach that would be to start learning video: camera settings, frame rates, codecs, Log profiles, color grading, stabilization, camera movement and editing. There is certainly no shortage of technical subjects to explore.

The more I think about it, however, the more I suspect that starting there would teach me the wrong thing first. Before learning how to make better video, I need to learn how to see a story.

Modern cameras already make technically good images remarkably easy. My Canon EOS R can produce beautiful photographs and perfectly respectable video. My iPhone can record excellent footage with almost no preparation, while a GoPro can capture perspectives that would have required specialised equipment not very long ago. I therefore don’t think the technology is currently my biggest limitation. The more difficult question is much simpler: what should I point the camera at, and why?

That question is equally relevant to photography. It is quite easy to return from a trip with dozens of attractive photographs of buildings, landscapes, food and interesting objects. Each image may be perfectly good in isolation, yet the collection does not necessarily communicate what happened, what we experienced or why a particular moment mattered. A beautiful photograph records something worth seeing. A visual story has to do more: it needs to help someone understand an experience.

For now, I have reduced that problem to three simple questions.

Where are we? What are we doing? What makes this moment special?

The first question establishes the environment. A wider image gives the viewer enough context to understand where the story takes place. The second moves closer and shows the activity or interaction that gives the scene its purpose. The third searches for the detail that gives the moment its character: an expression, a gesture, a texture, steam rising from a cup, a hand adjusting a camera, or something else that might easily have gone unnoticed.

Conveniently, these three questions also correspond reasonably well with the way I already think about focal lengths. A wide-angle view can establish the context, a normal focal length can show the activity, and a telephoto or macro view can isolate the meaningful detail. It is certainly not a complete theory of visual storytelling, nor is it intended to be. Its value is precisely that it is simple enough to remember while actually taking photographs.

Imagine, for example, that my partner and I arrive somewhere with a beautiful landscape. My natural photographic instinct might be to find the strongest composition and make the best landscape photograph I can. There is nothing wrong with that, but if I want to communicate the experience of being there, the landscape itself is only the beginning. One photograph could establish the vista. Another could show Elena enjoying the view. A third might show her photographing it, perhaps followed by a detail of the resulting photograph on the back of her camera. None of those additional photographs needs to be as visually impressive as the landscape itself. Together, however, they communicate something the landscape photograph cannot: the experience of being there.

The same idea works on a much smaller scale. In a café, I might begin with an image that establishes the place, then photograph the preparation of the coffee, and finally notice the steam rising from the cup or the texture of the foam. Instead of collecting several unrelated attractive images, I am deliberately looking for images that have a relationship with one another.

This led me to a slightly unusual conclusion. Perhaps the best way for me to begin learning videography is not with video at all, but with photography.

Photography slows the problem down. I can stop and think about what establishes the scene, what activity matters and which detail completes the sequence. I do not yet have to worry about camera movement, clip duration, stabilisation, sound or editing rhythm. I can concentrate entirely on recognising the story and expressing it through a small sequence of images. My initial exercise can therefore be very simple: whenever something seems worth recording, try to tell its story in at least three photographs—introduction, activity and detail.

Once that way of seeing becomes natural, the transition to video should be much less dramatic. Instead of taking the photograph that establishes the location, I can record a short establishing clip. Instead of photographing an activity, I can allow it to unfold for several seconds. Instead of isolating a detail in a still photograph, I can give the viewer time to observe it. The medium changes, and with it many technical possibilities, but the basic storytelling structure remains remarkably similar.

Thinking about videography this way also changes how I look at my equipment. My EOS R is clearly the more capable photographic tool when I want maximum image quality, control over depth of field, different lenses or simply the deliberate experience of using a dedicated camera. That does not automatically make it the best tool for learning video. Using it for video introduces additional decisions about lenses, the 4K crop, resolution, support and eventually perhaps a larger rig. None of those questions is unreasonable, but none of them helps me recognise a story either.

For the foreseeable future, the iPhone therefore makes more sense as my primary video camera. It removes much of that friction, is always available and quick to deploy, and its different focal lengths already provide something close to the wide, normal and telephoto perspectives I use when thinking about photographic stories. The GoPro adds another useful capability: viewpoints. It can go on a bicycle, be attached to something, sit very low to the ground or capture immersive walking and driving sequences without requiring a large support system.

This means I no longer need to decide which of these cameras is somehow the best. They can simply have different roles. The Canon remains my deliberate photographic camera, particularly when image quality, lenses, portraits or the pleasure of photography itself matters. The iPhone becomes the everyday storytelling camera and, at least initially, my primary video camera. The GoPro provides movement, immersion and viewpoints that would otherwise be inconvenient or impossible. They complement one another rather than compete.

There is also a broader lesson in this that I recognise from other areas. When learning something new, it is tempting to begin with the most visible tools and techniques of the discipline. Videography appears to be about cameras, codecs, camera movement and editing because those are the things we can observe videographers using. Yet those techniques are supporting a more fundamental capability. In my case, that is the ability to recognise a story and decide what someone needs to see in order to experience it.

That is the capability I want to develop first. I want to become better at recognising the context that establishes a story, the activity that moves it forward and the detail that gives it meaning. Photography gives me a deliberately simpler environment in which to practise that skill. Once I can reliably tell a small story with three photographs, I can start replacing those photographs with moving images and gradually introduce everything else that videography makes possible.

The technology can become more sophisticated as my needs become more sophisticated. The EOS R can always return to the video workflow if it eventually provides a creative advantage that I actually understand and need. There is no reason to introduce that complexity merely because the camera is capable of it.

For now, I would much rather make a technically ordinary video that tells an engaging story than a technically beautiful video that says very little.

Perhaps learning videography does not begin with learning video after all. Perhaps it begins with learning to see.

When I first started writing Practice Notes, I mainly saw them as a way to preserve observations.

An idea emerges during a conversation, a project, an experience or simply a moment of reflection. If I capture it, it remains available. If I do not, there is a good chance that it will eventually disappear. This became part of what I now think of as continuity of understanding: preserving enough of what we learn that someone, somewhere, can make use of it later.

Recently, however, I realized that this may only be the first part of the story. The individual Practice Notes are probably not the end product. They are source material.

As the collection grows, connections begin to appear between notes that were written at different times and about very different subjects. An observation about assessment turns out to have something in common with an idea about product development. A family story raises the same question about lost context that appears in system documentation. Even something as ordinary as choosing a watch can become an exploration of judgment, context and suitability.

I did not set out to connect all of these subjects. In many cases, the connections only became visible afterwards.

That suggests that a sufficiently large collection of observations can contain something that none of its individual pieces contains on its own: recurring patterns in the way its author understands the world.

This gives the Practice Notes a second possible purpose.

The first is preservation. Capture observations, experiences and ideas before they disappear.

The second is discovery. Once enough material has accumulated, look across it and ask what keeps returning. Which assumptions shape apparently unrelated conclusions? Which mental models appear in different contexts? Which ideas have gradually evolved over time without that development ever being planned?

Until recently, doing this with decades of material would have been difficult. Someone would have to read everything, categorize it, compare ideas across hundreds of fragments and somehow reconstruct the relationships between them.

AI changes what is practical.

It can help examine a large body of material and identify recurring concepts, relationships, tensions and patterns. Not to invent a philosophy on behalf of its author, but to help reveal patterns that may already be present.

That makes me wonder what could eventually emerge from my own collection of Practice Notes.

A working title might be:

Method in the Madness

It would not be a philosophy book that I deliberately sat down to write. Instead, it would be a reconstruction of the recurring ways I appear to think, derived from observations accumulated over many years and across many different subjects.

And once that possibility exists, another one follows.

Every person carries a different body of understanding. Our experiences differ, as do our professions, cultures, histories and assumptions. If more people preserved fragments of that understanding over time, each collection might reveal its own patterns.

But there may also be patterns between those collections.

Ideas might emerge independently in different professions or different parts of the world. Similar mental models might appear under completely different names. Experiences that initially seem unrelated might reveal common structures when viewed together.

AI could potentially help us discover those patterns as well.

A working name for that idea is:

Pluribus

From many individual bodies of understanding, something larger may emerge — not because everyone thinks alike, but because the differences and similarities between their experiences become visible.

This suggests a progression.

Continuity preserves understanding so that it does not simply disappear.

Method in the Madness looks across one person’s accumulated understanding and discovers the patterns within it.

Pluribus looks across many such bodies of understanding and searches for patterns that transcend the individual.

Perhaps that is where the Practice Notes eventually lead.

Not towards one enormous collection of notes, and not towards a book I already know how to write.

Towards enough preserved understanding that we can eventually discover what the collection has been telling us all along.

This version also makes Pluribus feel less like a sudden sci-fi leap: it follows naturally from the same mechanism applied first to one body of knowledge and then to many.