Author: Marcel

I have been thinking about watches. This has proved unexpectedly dangerous, not because choosing a watch is particularly difficult, but because somewhere along the way I stopped thinking about the watches themselves and started thinking about the collection.

At first that seemed like a small shift in perspective. A watch is obviously something that can be understood and assessed. It has characteristics, functions, limitations and qualities of its own. A collection, by contrast, can easily look like little more than several watches placed next to one another.

But that is not quite true. The moment we draw a boundary around several individual watches and consider them together, new characteristics appear. We can ask whether the collection provides useful variety, whether important situations are poorly supported, whether several watches contribute almost the same thing, whether one member carries too many important roles, or whether removing a particular watch would materially weaken the whole.

None of those questions belongs to any one watch. They arise from the composition. The collection has become a subject in its own right.

Changing the Boundary

Suppose four watches are placed on a table. Each can be assessed independently. One may be unusually robust, another elegant, another highly functional and another particularly enjoyable to wear. Those qualities belong to the individual objects.

Now imagine drawing a conceptual boundary around all four.

The questions change. Do these watches complement one another? Does the collection provide meaningful choice? Are some situations represented strongly while others are not represented at all? Is there deliberate overlap, or merely repetition? Does the collection depend heavily on one member for several important situations?

Nothing about the watches themselves has changed. Only the boundary has changed. Yet changing the boundary changes the subject.

This is important because it means that a portfolio cannot always be understood by aggregating what we know about its members. Some of its most relevant characteristics exist only at the level of the whole.

Individual Quality Does Not Determine Portfolio Quality

This creates a distinction between the quality of a member and the quality of the portfolio it belongs to. A collection may consist entirely of excellent watches and still be poorly composed.

Imagine four outstanding watches that all serve roughly the same role. There may be nothing wrong with any of them, and there may be perfectly good personal reasons for owning all four. But their individual excellence tells us surprisingly little about whether the collection as a whole is suitable for what its owner wants from it.

The reverse can also be true. A comparatively ordinary watch may make a disproportionately important contribution because it provides something the rest of the collection does not.

The relevant question is therefore no longer simply whether a watch is good. It is what the watch contributes to the collection.

That is a different assessment problem.

The Whole Needs Its Own Intent

Once the collection is treated as a subject, another question becomes unavoidable.

What is the collection actually for?

That purpose cannot be inferred safely from whatever happens to be in the watch box today.

One collection might be intended to cover the realistic situations in which its owner wears watches. Another might explore historically important designs. A third might focus on mechanical movements, a particular manufacturer or watches associated with personal memories.

The same set of watches could therefore make sense against one intention and make very little sense against another.This means that the collection needs an intent of its own.

Without that intent, composition becomes difficult to judge. More watches may look like progress simply because there are more of them. Greater variety may look desirable simply because variety is conventionally associated with collecting. Missing categories may appear to be gaps even when they have no relevance to the owner. Once intent becomes explicit, those assumptions can be challenged.

A Portfolio Reference Model

From there, the idea of a Portfolio Reference Model follows quite naturally. Such a reference would not prescribe which watches should be owned. Instead, it would describe what the collection as a whole should enable.

It might express the situations that matter, the forms of variety that are valuable, the level of overlap that is useful, the dependencies that should be avoided, the constraints that matter and the areas the collection deliberately does not need to support.

The distinction between requirement and realization is important here. A conventional watch category such as dive watch, dress watch or chronograph may be one way of satisfying part of the reference, but the category itself is not automatically the requirement. If I begin by assuming that a complete collection must contain one of each recognized type, then the classification system has already started dictating the answer.

The reference should come from the purpose of the collection. The watches come later.

Composition Is the Realization

For an individual product, realization is usually the product itself. For a portfolio, realization is largely its composition.

The watches are individual objects, but the collection exists through which watches are included, what roles they play and how they relate to one another. This means that the portfolio can change even when none of its members changes.

A watch may be added. Another may be removed. A previously central watch may become secondary because the owner’s circumstances have changed. A new watch may make an existing one redundant. An inherited watch may enter the collection for reasons that have nothing to do with functional coverage but still become highly significant.

Portfolio development is therefore not the same as developing the individual subjects within it. It is the intentional evolution of composition.

That evolution can involve adding, retaining, repositioning, replacing or retiring members. The important question is not whether the collection is changing, but whether the change makes it a better realization of its intent.

Assessment Changes Too

If composition is the realization, portfolio assessment must also operate at the level of composition. Assessing the individual watches tells us whether those watches satisfy the expectations placed upon them. Assessing the collection tells us whether we have the right combination.

The questions therefore become different. Where does the portfolio provide strong support for its intended purposes? Where is that support weak? Which contributions are unique? Which are heavily duplicated? Does apparent variety represent meaningful variety, or are several members different mainly in appearance while performing essentially the same role? Which important purposes depend on a single member? Which members remain even though nobody can clearly explain what they contribute?

These conclusions cannot be produced simply by averaging individual assessments. Every watch could assess well on its own while the collection still assesses poorly. The whole must be assessed as the whole.

Emergent Portfolio Characteristics

This is where the idea becomes more interesting. A portfolio has characteristics that cannot sensibly be assigned to any one member.

Coverage is one example. It describes how much of the intended domain the portfolio collectively supports.

Redundancy is another. It arises when several members provide similar contributions.

Concentration describes how dependent the portfolio is on a small number of members.

Complementarity concerns the extent to which members strengthen the usefulness of one another.

Resilience concerns whether the portfolio can continue to satisfy important needs when one member disappears.

Diversity concerns whether differences between members are actually meaningful against the portfolio’s intent.

These characteristics emerge from relationships and composition. They are not hidden properties of the individual members waiting to be discovered. That is why individual assessment is necessary but insufficient.

Portfolio Risk

The same applies to risk. Each watch can have risks of its own. It may be fragile, difficult to service, unsuitable for water or expensive to replace.

The collection introduces other risks. An important situation may depend entirely on one watch. Resources may be concentrated in alternatives that add little additional value. Several apparently different watches may depend on the same underlying technology or share the same weakness. The collection may continue to reflect needs that were important years ago but no longer matter.

There is also a more subtle risk. The owner may gradually forget why particular members are there at all. At that point, the existing composition begins to acquire authority simply because it exists.

When the Portfolio Becomes Its Own Reference

This is a familiar danger in another form. Once a collection has existed for a while, it becomes tempting to develop it relative to itself.

I already have this kind of watch, so the next one should be different.

I do not own that category, so perhaps I should.

Serious collectors seem to have one of those, so maybe mine is incomplete without one.

The reasoning has quietly reversed. Instead of asking what collection is appropriate for the owner’s life and interests, the owner starts asking how the current collection compares with a conventional idea of what a collection ought to contain. The realization has started replacing the reference.

A Portfolio Reference Model provides a way out of that loop. It creates an independent basis against which both the existing collection and possible changes can be judged.

The Portfolio Can Outlive Its Reasoning

This is also where continuity enters the picture. Portfolios rarely appear fully formed. They develop over time.

A product is launched for a market opportunity. Another arrives through acquisition. A system survives a migration. A capability is created for a strategic initiative. A watch is inherited. Another is bought because its owner simply loves it. The members remain, but the reasoning behind their presence can gradually disappear.

Eventually the organization, or the collector, can describe what is in the portfolio without being able to explain why the portfolio has that shape. That loss of understanding matters because composition decisions depend on context.

Without preserved reasoning, something may remain because nobody is confident enough to remove it. Something new may be rejected because it does not resemble what is already there. A historical accident may become a requirement. A member may continue occupying an important place long after the purpose that justified it has disappeared.

Portfolio Continuity would preserve the understanding needed to avoid that. Not merely what the portfolio contains, but why it contains those things, what they are expected to contribute and under which circumstances that composition should change.

Beyond Watches

Watches make this easy to see because the stakes are low. The same structure appears in much more consequential domains.

A product portfolio is not simply a collection of individually successful products. Two excellent products may compete unnecessarily with one another, while an apparently minor product may occupy a strategically important niche.

A capability portfolio is not simply a collection of mature capabilities. An organization may be exceptionally strong in several areas and still be constrained by one capability it does not possess.

A systems portfolio can contain individually stable systems while being collectively expensive, redundant, fragile or strategically incoherent.

In each case, the members matter. But composition matters too.

Portfolio Continuity

This suggests a possible specialization of the broader Continuity idea. If Product Continuity preserves the understanding needed to develop and assess a product, and Capability Continuity preserves the understanding needed to develop and assess an organizational capability, Portfolio Continuity may preserve the understanding needed to intentionally develop and assess the composition of a portfolio over time.

The structure would be familiar. Portfolio intent establishes what the portfolio is meant to accomplish. A Portfolio Reference Model describes the significant characteristics expected of the portfolio as a whole. Portfolio Development changes its composition. The realized portfolio consists of the current members and the relationships between them. Portfolio Assessment determines how well that realized composition satisfies the reference. Learning then informs what should be added, retained, repositioned, replaced or retired.

Portfolio Management may therefore be understood, at least in part, as maintaining continuity through that cycle.

Reflection

There is a deceptively simple lesson in all of this. When several things are assembled to serve a larger purpose, it is natural to keep looking at the things themselves.

Are these good products?

Are these strong capabilities?

Are these reliable systems?

Are these good watches?

Those are all useful questions.

But once the boundary expands around them, another subject appears. That subject has characteristics the individual members do not have, risks that do not exist at member level and development actions that can change the whole without changing any of its parts.

At that point, the portfolio question is no longer:

Are these good things?

It is:

Do we have the right ones?

And answering that requires a reference for the whole.

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.