Practitioner Voice

Three ways to disappear

Thought leadership started as a real thing. It meant ideas worth following. Insight that moved a field.

Then it became a content category. Then a marketing function. Then a LinkedIn post with a hook, three lessons, and a call to follow for more. The corruption was gradual and then total. Now “thought leadership content” is a phrase that means almost nothing, or worse, signals the opposite of what it claims. Polish over substance. Brand over argument. Engagement over truth.

The academic route looked like the alternative. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you built the scaffolding. Citations. Caveats. Literature reviews. You buried the lead because that's what rigor looked like. You suppressed your own voice because the author wasn't supposed to show. The problem isn't academic rigor. The problem is when rigor becomes camouflage.

I've done versions of both. I write for PMI where I sit on a thought leadership advisory group. I've written six books. But from the beginning I kept looking for ways to stay in the frame — mountaineering as an analogy for software development in Adaptive Software Development, dialogue to open each chapter of Agile Project Management, interviews with the founders of the major methodologies in Agile Software Development Ecosystems because I wanted their voices, not merely a summary of their ideas. The pressure to conform was real. I was lucky to work with people who either encouraged my instincts or didn't push back on them. That's rarer than it should be.

The problem isn't academic writing or thought leadership individually. At their worst, both do the same thing: they edit consequential human judgment out of the prose. The practitioner disappears behind the rigor or the polish, and what remains is correct but weightless. Academic writing hides behind rigor. Thought leadership hides behind polish. Now a third option has arrived — LLM Voice — that doesn't require hiding at all, because there's no one there. That was a problem worth solving before AI arrived. Now it's urgent.

To come out of hiding, I propose a new writing category: Practitioner Voice.

What Practitioner Voice does

Academic writing builds to the claim. Thought leadership makes the claim and explains it. Practitioner Voice starts with the claim and trusts the reader to close the gap. The author's judgment stays visible throughout. The whole piece organized around what the author has concluded from experience, not what the evidence might tentatively suggest. Practitioner of what? Of anything. The word here means anyone whose authority comes from having done the work and lived with what happened next — mechanical engineer, surgeon, project manager, marketing manager, manufacturing executive. The field varies. The source of authority doesn't.

Underneath all of it sits judgment. You can learn the moves. The judgment has to be earned.

Martin Fowler writes this way. His best pieces don't build to the conclusion, they open with it. The rest is a practitioner showing his reasoning, not constructing a case for a jury. The reader either recognizes the pattern from their own experience or doesn't. He doesn't write for the ones who don't.

When Martin pushed me to put more of myself into Wild West to Agile, he was pushing me toward this writing category. He recognized it before I had a name for it — and he knew the book needed it because the alternative was a history that anyone could have written. Practitioner Voice is the thing only you can write, because it's built from what only you have lived.

What makes it different

Four things separate Practitioner Voice from the alternatives.

Authority from experience, not credentials. Academic authority comes from credentials and methods. Thought leadership authority comes from platform and reputation. Practitioner authority comes from having been in the situation, not as a researcher studying it, but as a person responsible for the outcome. That difference shows in every sentence. You can't fake it and you can't credential your way into it. For consultants the authority takes a slightly different form. We rarely carry direct accountability for outcomes. But if we do our work well, we've been close enough to consequence, across enough contexts and enough years, that the pattern recognition is real. Earned differently. Still earned.

Tension without resolution. Academic writing resolves tension — that's what conclusions are for. Thought leadership resolves it in the three takeaways. Practitioner Voice names the tension and leaves it live. The practitioner knows the tension is real and the reader has to navigate it themselves. Resolving it for them would be lying.

The author stays in. Academic writing never allows this. Thought leadership allows it only as personal brand. In Practitioner Voice the author's judgment is the point. Not the data. Not the framework. The accumulated perspective of someone making consequential decisions for a long time, with something to say about what that's actually like.

The readership contract. Academics write for peer reviewers. Thought leadership writes for eyeballs. Practitioner Voice writes for people who recognize the pattern from their own experience. It's comfortable with limited context — this worked here, under these conditions, judge for yourself whether it fits yours. It doesn't chase universality. It trusts specificity.

Why it matters now

This isn't new behavior. Scroll LinkedIn or Substack and you'll find it: practitioners writing from earned judgment, starting with the claim, keeping the tension live. It's been building for a decade. Nobody called it anything. Without the category, there was no way to teach it, no way to recognize it, no way to say: that's the thing, do more of that.

Now AI produces competent writing at scale — fluent, well-organized, correctly structured, optimized to say nothing wrong. Call it what it is: LLM Voice. The most insidious failure mode of the three because it's indistinguishable from the real thing until you notice nothing is at stake.

AI can mimic the sound of Practitioner Voice. It cannot own the consequences behind it. That's the distinction that holds: not style, not compression, not even the rhythm of earned judgment. Accountability. The willingness to put your name on a call and live with what happens next. That can't be automated.

Practitioner Voice survives the current moment not because it's protected from AI, but because the thing it's made of — accumulated consequence-bearing experience stated plainly — has to be earned. There's no shortcut and no simulation that closes the gap.

I've been doing this in my PMI articles for the last few years. Not loudly. Not by announcing a new approach. Just by not editing myself out, leaving the judgment visible, letting the tension stand, trusting the reader. If something in those pieces felt different to you, that was deliberate. Consider this the explanation.

We've been doing this for years. We just called it something else because we didn't have a better name.

How to use AI without losing your voice

A year ago, I started thinking of it as alternative intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. Intelligence without consciousness: a different kind of mind, not a lesser one. That reframe matters for how you work with it.

How writers use AI, and what they owe their readers about it, is still unsettled. Two practitioners I respect have landed in opposite places.

Mik Kersten writes: “I decided to write every word in this book and did not use AI for any of the ideating, outlining, or writing. The writing process helped me slow down and contemplate, and I hope the process of reading this book will do the same for you.” The writing process itself is the point. AI would have short-circuited it. Mik’s approach would please William Zinsser, who wrote: “Writing is a form of thinking, whatever the subject.” AI makes it possible to produce without learning. That’s the trap.

Jurgen Appelo takes the opposite position. He wrote with a team of one human and multiple AI agents: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others. Some sections originated with him; others started with the agents and he refined them. His argument: creativity has always been collaborative. AI is the latest in a long lineage of tools that amplify human capacity. What matters is the experience the reader gets, not who or what generated each sentence.

Both positions are principled. I landed somewhere else.

Parkinson’s changed my cognitive processing. Not all at once. A word that used to surface instantly now takes a beat longer. A thread of argument that once held itself in working memory needs an external anchor. Sixty years of consequence-bearing experience didn’t disappear. The pattern recognition I built across careers in software development, management consulting, and organizational leadership stayed. What changed was the biological system I’d always run it through.

Parkinson’s is my version of a universal condition. Every practitioner has something: attention that fragments under pressure, memory that loses threads, processing that slows with fatigue, language that doesn’t always surface on demand. The biological system we run our judgment through is never perfect. AI, designed well, augments what each of us needs. The discipline is the same regardless of what you’re augmenting: keep the judgment constitutive, or the writing stops being yours.

I started working with AI the way most people do: as a tool. Draft this. Summarize that. Speed up what I was already doing. That lasted six months. Then something shifted. I was in the middle of a complex argument, the kind that used to hold itself together through a long writing session, and I noticed the AI wasn’t helping me execute the thinking. I was thinking through it. My judgment, my pattern authority, my accumulated perspective finding its way forward through an architecture that could hold what my working memory no longer reliably sustained. The argument didn’t happen inside me and get recorded. It happened across both minds.

That was the moment the tool became something else.

Andy Clark and David Chalmers called this the extended mind, proposed as philosophy in 1998, arrived at out of necessity in my case in 2024. They offered a thought experiment. Otto has Alzheimer’s and uses a notebook the way others use biological memory. The conventional view says the notebook is a tool. Clark and Chalmers argue it is part of Otto’s cognitive system, coupled in a direct, here-and-now causal loop. Thinking happens across both. Otto directs his notebook. The notebook does not direct Otto. That asymmetry is everything.

The coupling can build the practitioner or quietly replace them. I developed a test and kept returning to it: is this judgment I earned, or fluency I accepted? It doesn’t catch everything. It catches enough.

That distinction shapes every interaction with AI. Treat AI output as first material, not final material. Use it for structure, contrast, and clarity testing. Use it to find the gaps in your own argument. Do not let it finalize voice. A practitioner who defers judgment to AI one interaction at a time loses the capacity to exercise it independently. The skill erodes quietly, below the threshold of awareness, until the moment it’s needed most.

Augmentation builds the practitioners. Automation replaces them.

What the writer brings

In the first part of this essay, I established where pattern authority comes from. The craft question is how it shows up in the prose.

Practitioner authority rests on consequence-bearing experience, not credential. Academic authority comes from method and institutional affiliation. Thought leadership authority comes from platform size and reputation management. Practitioner authority comes from having been responsible for an outcome, not studying it, not advising on it from a safe distance, but owning what happened next. That weight shows in every sentence or it doesn’t show at all. You can’t install it and you can’t fake it.

This holds whether you write about surgery, software, organizational change, or bridge design. The field is incidental. The relationship to consequence is not.

For consultants the authority takes a different form. Few of us carry direct accountability for outcomes. But years of proximity to consequence, watching patterns across organizations, being trusted with decisions you don’t formally own, learning whose experience to trust and why, builds something real. You know what good judgment looks like under pressure because you’ve watched it fail and succeed across dozens of organizations. That’s not the same as owning the outcome. It’s not nothing either. Earned differently. Still earned.

That different foundation creates a different contract with the reader. Academic-essayistic writing builds the scaffolding first: define, contextualize, qualify, then deploy. Practitioner Voice drops a term into a lived context and trusts the reader to close the gap from their own experience. The scaffolding isn’t missing. The reader is the scaffolding.

Show the scar. The practitioner who has only succeeded has limited range. The one who has failed, learned, and kept going has the full picture. Academic writing contains failure in a limitations section, safely quarantined from the argument. Thought leadership avoids failure entirely; it undermines the brand. Practitioner Voice uses failure as a source of credibility. The scar is the credential. Ground your authority in consequence, not in the degrees on the wall.

Staying visible is harder than it sounds. The framework, the data, the existing literature — these earn their place when they serve your judgment. They become camouflage when they replace it. Your judgment is the point. Stay in the frame.

How the form works

One practical technique before you start: write the back cover first. For a book, this forces three questions before a single chapter exists: who is this for, what will they get from it, and why does it matter now. For an article, write the LinkedIn lede first. Same discipline, different form. If you can’t state the claim in three sentences for a practitioner audience, the piece isn’t ready to draft.

Four principles define how Practitioner Voice works on the page:

Start with the claim. Academic writing earns the conclusion through evidence, argument, and qualification. Practitioner Voice opens with the conclusion and “lets the rest of the piece be explanation, not proof. If the reader has lived the pattern they’ll recognize the claim immediately. If they haven’t, no amount of scaffolding will convince them. Trust the reader to close the gap.

Compression as respect. Write as if the reader already knows more than they can easily articulate. Fewer definitions. Shorter transitions. Declarative statements over explanatory ones. Space between ideas. If something feels obvious to an experienced practitioner, don’t apologize for that; let recognition do the work. Completeness is optional. Resonance is not.

Inspiration and information, blended. Practitioners often write as if these are separate: lead with a story, then deliver the lesson; open with a hook, then provide the data. Practitioner Voice doesn’t separate them. The information arrives inside the inspiration. The insight carries the evidence with it. When it works, the reader doesn’t experience a gear shift from engaging to informative. The piece stays in one register throughout because the judgment and the data are inseparable. If you find yourself writing a section that is purely inspirational or purely informational, that’s the signal. Blend it back.

Consider the tension between Mik Kersten and Jurgen Appelo earlier in this piece. One wrote every word himself; the other co-wrote with a team of AI agents. Both positions are principled. Both carry risk. Naming that tension without collapsing it gives the reader something more useful than either answer alone.

Leaving tension live is harder than it sounds. Name it. Illuminate it. Step back. Do not resolve it for the reader; resolving it would be lying. The tension is real and the reader must navigate it themselves. This is the closing constraint that separates Practitioner Voice from every other professional writing form. Academic writing resolves tension in the conclusion. Thought leadership resolves it in the three takeaways. Practitioner Voice leaves it live because that’s where the judgment lives.

Story: the mechanism that makes ideas move

Facts inform. Arguments persuade. Stories move people to act.

Chip and Dan Heath put it plainly: “A credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care. The right story makes people act.” That hierarchy matters for practitioners who write. Most professional writing stops at credible. Practitioner Voice reaches for all three.

Consider the Agile Manifesto, one of the stickiest ideas in software history. The value, “working software over comprehensive documentation”, has been cited, debated, and misapplied for more than twenty years. What made it stick? It was simple without being simplistic, a complex idea in direct language that guides action without prescribing it. It was unexpected; until then, methodologies emphasized architecture and design, and code just followed blueprints. It was concrete; anyone in the software business immediately knows what working software means. It carried credibility from recognized practitioners. It carried emotion for developers exhausted by failing traditional methods.

And it had a story. The Snowbird ski resort. Seventeen people in a room. A manifesto written in two days. That origin narrative has been retold thousands of times. The story of how the idea was born is often stickier than the idea itself.

Practitioners underestimate the power of story. We get tangled in technology and methodology, facts and figures, analysis and concepts. Good ideas get neglected because we fail to engage people emotionally as well as intellectually. A story doesn’t decorate an argument. It is the argument’s delivery mechanism, the thing that makes the reader feel tension before they understand it.

Practitioner Voice is built for this. The scar is a story. The moment of recognition is a story. The project that failed, the client who pushed back, the decision that turned out wrong; these are not digressions from the argument. They are the argument, carried in narrative form. Show the scar is a storytelling instruction as much as a credibility instruction.

Stories don’t have to come from the conference room. A mountaineering moment, a physical consequence, a landscape that forced a decision; these carry the same authority as a project war story, sometimes more. The terrain metaphor earns its place in Practitioner Voice because it connects abstract judgment to embodied experience. Readers who have never managed a software project have still stood at the edge of something uncertain and had to decide.

Craft the story before you craft the argument. Know what happened, who was there, what the stakes were, and what changed. Then build the argument around it. The story is not the illustration. It is the foundation.

Structure: braided narrative

Most professional writing defaults to one of two structures: chronological or logical. Chronological moves through time. Logical moves through argument, problem to solution, claim to evidence. Both are serviceable. Neither is the only option.

The braided narrative weaves multiple threads simultaneously, each developing independently while reinforcing the others. A reader follows several strands at once, and the meaning emerges from their intersection rather than from a single linear argument. The structure is common in literary nonfiction and almost unknown in technical and management writing, which is exactly why it’s worth naming here. It is more difficult to execute than either chronological or logical structure. When it works, it is more rewarding than either.

My Wild West to Agile uses five braids across four eras of software development:

• The evolution of methods and methodologies
• Personal experiences and growth across six decades
• The pioneers who drove each era forward
• The explosion of technology innovation
• The progressive management trends that shaped the field

No single braid carries the book. The argument lives in how they weave together.

John Willis’s Rebels of Reason combines braided narrative with chronology: a spine running from Aristotle to ChatGPT with multiple threads running through it, philosophical, technical, and biographical. The chronology orients the reader. The braids create the texture and the surprise.

The braided narrative suits Practitioner Voice because it keeps tension live across multiple dimensions simultaneously. No single thread resolves while the others are still running. The reader holds several things at once, which is closer to how experienced practitioners think than any single-thread argument allows.

When to consider braids: when your subject has more than one dimension that can’t be subordinated to a single argument without losing something essential. When you find yourself writing parallel tracks and forcing them into sequence, that’s the signal. The braids want to run together.

Three levels of editing

The most common editing mistake is fixing the spelling before the argument is worth saving. I once coached a colleague on his first book. He would write a paragraph, then polish it to death before moving to the next. The momentum never built. I kept pushing him to write more and write faster, get the argument down before refining the sentences. It wasn’t his natural style. He resisted, then adapted. The book got finished and published. The polish habit didn’t kill the book. It nearly did.

Mixing levels too early distracts from the work that matters most at each stage. Three levels of editing serve different purposes and need to happen in sequence.

Developmental editing (challenges thinking). It looks at the piece as a whole: purpose, argument, structure, audience, flow, missing ideas, weak logic, and unnecessary material. The goal is to strengthen thinking and architecture before polishing the prose. Claims that may eventually need support should be flagged, but citation mechanics and reference formatting should not derail development before the argument has settled. Key question: does this work as a piece of writing?

Line Editing (improves the writing). It works at paragraph and sentence level to improve clarity, flow, emphasis, voice, rhythm, transitions, word choice, and concision without changing the core argument. Each paragraph should carry a clear idea, develop it coherently, and connect naturally to what comes before and after. Key question: does each paragraph carry one clear idea, and does the language say what I mean in the way I want to say it?

Proofreading (cleans up the writing). It catches grammar, spelling, punctuation, typos, formatting inconsistencies, and other mechanical errors. This is also the right stage for a final check of citations, references, links, and source formatting. Key question: is this clean, correct, and ready to publish?

One rule on citations: identify gaps early, fix mechanics late. The point is not to ignore evidence. It is to keep the reference apparatus from becoming the tail that wags the article. First make sure the argument deserves to survive. Then make the citations impeccable. Citation placement breaks the train of thought at the moment it matters most. Name the source naturally in prose when it’s relevant, put the full reference at the end, and trust the reader to follow up if they want to.

Citations also exist out of respect for other writers. Years ago I was reading an article online. The further I read, the more familiar it felt. I pulled out my Agile Software Development Ecosystems book and found the entire article copied word for word from one of my chapters. No reference. No attribution. That was more than a citation failure. That was plagiarism. Citations exist because ideas belong to people. Put them at the end so they don’t interrupt the reading. But put them in.

Word choice and context calibration

Simple words are not weak words. They are precise words that don’t require the reader to translate. Every technical term should earn its place by doing something a plain word cannot. When a simpler word exists, use it. When the technical term is the right tool, use that. The test is precision, not prestige.

Before you calibrate the vocabulary, identify the reader. Your target audience is narrower than you think. The more precisely you can picture the person reading this, the easier every word choice becomes.

Context calibration is the deeper skill, and it applies to every vocabulary choice a practitioner makes. A cardiologist telling a colleague that a patient presented with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis uses precise shorthand among people trained to receive it. She tells the family the lungs are scarring and breathing will keep getting harder. Same condition, same doctor, same precision, different context. The clinical vocabulary doesn’t disappear. It stays where it belongs. Before reaching for any term, technical or otherwise, the practitioner asks: does this reader share the context that makes this word useful? If yes, use it. If not, translate.

The same discipline applies to consultant vocabulary. “Organizational agility” in a room full of practitioners who live inside that definition is efficient shorthand; everyone knows you mean how fast we can change direction without breaking and saying it the long way wastes their time. The same term dropped into an executive briefing without translation becomes camouflage; it signals tribal membership instead of transferring meaning. The first time you use a term with a mixed audience, define it once in plain language, briefly, then move. After that the shorthand is earned. Context calibration isn’t a prohibition on professional vocabulary. It’s the judgment call that determines when vocabulary serves the reader and when it serves only the writer.

Here is what that looks like in practice. A recent draft contained this sentence: “The contracting model prices the surface and is silent on the substrate, not because the substrate doesn’t matter, but because it was never in the model. It is the same blind spot as your dashboard, in peer-reviewed form.” Correct, precise, and written for an audience that will stop and work through the sentence.

Rewritten for a practitioner: “The contracting model measures what it can see and misses what it can’t. Same blind spot as your dashboard. Just peer-reviewed.” Same idea. One beat of support. Reader closes the gap. That is the difference, and it is not a cosmetic one.

At the sentence level:

• Use active verbs. Reduce “is” and “was”; build sentences around what things do, not what they are.
• Minimize gerunds ending in -ing where a direct verb works better.
• Use “that” sparingly.
• Plan sentence lengths deliberately; short sentences accelerate, long ones slow the reader down.
• A period is a stop sign. A colon announces something ahead. A dash is a tree branch in the road. Use each one knowing what it does to the reader’s pace.

Who you write for

Knowing who you write for changes every sentence. Academics write for peer reviewers. Thought leadership writes for eyeballs. Practitioner Voice writes for people who have lived the pattern and will recognize it when someone states it plainly. You are not writing for everyone. You are writing for the reader who has lived this pattern or will. Close enough to recognize it when they do. Far enough out that your experience arrives before theirs does.

Practitioner Voice is comfortable with limited context. This worked here, under these conditions; judge for yourself whether it fits your situation. That’s a different contract with the reader than academic or thought leadership writing offers. Both push toward universal claims: academic writing for impact factor, thought leadership for audience size. Practitioner Voice trusts specificity. A piece that says “here’s what I saw and what I concluded, in this context,” is more honest and often more useful than one dressed up as universal truth.

A piece is as long as the tension requires and no longer. Short is not a virtue; unnecessary length is a failure.

Most pieces earn a carry phrase: a closing line that sticks. Not a summary. A reorientation. The reader finishes thinking: yes, that’s the tension I’ve been living with. Not every structure calls for it. The inverted pyramid lets the reader exit once they have what they need. But when the form allows it, know what line you’re building toward before you write the opening.

The category now has a name. The Practitioner Voice now has craft guidelines. What it still needs is practitioners willing to write this way, to stay in the frame, show the scar, and trust the reader to close the gap.

That part can’t be outlined.

Reactions, pushbacks, and examples from your own practice are welcome. The conversation is on LinkedIn.