HumanWORKS

Tag: education

  • You aren’t reading enough, and you definitely aren’t thinking enough – so read and think about this

    I’m reading Henry Fairlie this weekend. Bite the Hand That Feeds You – collected essays from one of the sharpest provocateurs the English language produced, and a man whose photograph on the cover alone – cigarette in hand, glasses slightly askew, typewriter lurking in the foreground like an accomplice – communicates something about the relationship between a writer and their craft that no amount of productivity guru content has ever come close to replicating.

    (The typewriter is doing real work in that image. It isn’t decorative. It is the instrument through which the provocations were forged, and there is something quietly honest about having it visible – no pretence that the words simply materialised from some frictionless creative ether. They were hammered out. Key by key. Which is, when you think about it, rather the point of what follows.)

    Those of you who know my influences will know that Christopher Hitchens occupies a significant position in how I approach both writing and argument. Not because Hitch was provocative – though he demonstrably was – but because his provocation was deployed with genuine intellectual scaffolding beneath it, which is a distinction that matters enormously and that most people confuse with volume. You don’t awaken someone from the torpor of collective slumber with a gentle suggestion. You use a bucket of cold water. The trick – and it is a trick, albeit requiring genuine craft – is ensuring the bucket contains substance rather than merely noise.

    Fairlie understood this. Hitch understood this. Whilst in an age where we have outsourced the generation of text to systems that are, by any honest assessment, genuinely impressive at producing words whilst being fundamentally incapable of the thing that makes words matter, understanding this distinction has become rather more urgent than it was when Fairlie was bashing away at his typewriter.

    the agent provocateur’s actual job, or why being uncomfortable is the point

    Fairlie’s polemics were, I suspect, constructed partly for effect – closer in spirit to the work of an edgy comedian than to some earnest manifesto designed to reshape civilisation overnight. There is nothing wrong with that assessment. In fact, there is something deeply undervalued about it, because it misunderstands what the effect actually is.

    Here’s the thing.

    Understanding how to construct an argument – not merely to have an opinion, which is approximately as difficult as breathing and roughly as intellectually demanding – but to deploy that opinion with knowledge, precision, and persuasive architecture that forces the reader to genuinely engage rather than simply scroll past – is one of the foundational skills of anyone who wants to make a real impact on anything beyond their immediate surroundings.

    I learned this in amateur debating societies, where the single most valuable lesson was not how to win an argument but how to understand the opposing position well enough to articulate its strongest case and then use that knowledge to dismantle them.

    Those who cannot do this aren’t debating. They’re performing. The distinction matters because performance can be detected, dismissed, and scrolled past in approximately 0.3 seconds. Genuine argument – the kind that actually lands – requires the reader to do cognitive work. It requires friction. By comparison, spouting rhetoric – that pervasive performance that many think sits as some actual substitute for argument rather than the piss poor presentation of idiocy – is not debating at all.

    Fairlie understood this instinctively. His essays don’t simply assert positions – they construct them with enough rigour and enough provocation that the reader finds themselves genuinely wrestling with the ideas rather than passively absorbing them. The discomfort is not a bug. It is, in the most literal sense, the mechanism by which thinking actually occurs.

    (And yes, I recognise the recursion here – I am arguing, via essay, about why essays matter, whilst simultaneously doing the thing I’m describing. My therapist, Becky, would note this with a raised eyebrow and the observation that “Matt is doing the recursive analysis thing again.” She would be correct. The recursion never stops. Welcome.)

    the cognitive friction complex™ (or a lack thereof)

    We live in a moment of extraordinary and largely unexamined paradox regarding information and capability. We have, quite literally, more collective knowledge accessible through our fingertips than at any previous point in human history. Simultaneously – and this is the part that deserves rather more attention than it currently receives – the tools now available to generate text on our behalf have created an environment where the process of engaging with ideas is increasingly being outsourced to systems that, whilst impressive in throughput, cannot replicate the cognitive friction that actually changes how you think.

    This matters more than most people appreciate. Considerably more.

    The ability to cultivate not merely awareness of information but the capacity to use it effectively – to construct arguments, to identify the weak points in positions that appeal to us, to hold genuinely opposing views in tension without immediately dismissing them as wrong because they’re uncomfortable – is a skill that degrades with disuse. It is, in this sense, rather like physical fitness. Nobody loses the capacity to run by deciding not to run once. The degradation is gradual, imperceptible, and by the time you notice it, you’ve lost ground you didn’t know you were standing on.

    Erudition – whether formally acquired or built through the kind of autodidactic discipline that involves actually sitting with difficult texts until they yield rather than asking an LLM to summarise them – isn’t a luxury. It’s infrastructure. Cognitive infrastructure, specifically, and infrastructure that societies require to function at anything beyond the level of collective reflex.

    Now, here’s where it gets interesting. And by “interesting” I mean “slightly existentially destabilising if you follow the thread far enough, which I obviously intend to do.”

    (Stay with me.)

    what an LLM actually does, and what it doesn’t

    An LLM – a large language model, for those who have somehow avoided the last three years of breathless discourse on the subject – is, at its core, an extraordinarily sophisticated pattern-matching system. It has consumed vast quantities of human-generated text and learned to predict, with remarkable accuracy, what sequence of tokens is most likely to follow any given input.

    This is genuinely impressive. I say this without irony or false modesty on behalf of the technology. The statistical inference involved is staggering, and the outputs are frequently useful, occasionally insightful, and – in the right hands – genuinely productive.

    Here is what an LLM does not do.

    It does not think. Not in the sense that Fairlie thought when constructing his provocations, or that Hitchens thought when dismantling an opponent’s position with surgical precision. It does not experience the cognitive friction of encountering an idea that genuinely challenges its existing framework – because it has no existing framework in the sense that you or I possess one. It has statistical weights. These are categorically different things, in much the same way that a photograph of a fire is categorically different from an actual fire, despite being visually recognisable as one.

    (The photograph will not warm your hands. The LLM will not change your mind. Both will give you the impression of the thing whilst being, in some fundamental sense, the total absence of it.)

    What an LLM produces when asked to write an essay is therefore not an essay in the sense that Fairlie wrote essays, nor the way that Hitch did, or how I do.

    Instead, it is a statistically probable approximation of what an essay looks like – the textual equivalent of a very convincing forgery. Smooth, competent, occasionally even elegant. Entirely devoid of the thing that made the original worth reading in the first place. It’s technologically driven sophistry with the depth of a puddle.

    The thing being: a consciousness grappling with something it found genuinely difficult, and producing language as a byproduct of that grappling.

    which brings us back to the question of what reading actually does

    Here is an uncomfortable observation that I have been turning over for some time, and which Fairlie’s essays have crystallised rather neatly.

    When you read a genuinely provocative essay – one constructed by a mind that was actually wrestling with the ideas it presents – something happens in your own consciousness that is categorically different from what happens when you read competent but friction-free text. Your assumptions get disturbed. Your pattern-matching gets interrupted. You are forced, briefly but genuinely, to consider a perspective you hadn’t previously entertained, and the cognitive effort of doing so leaves a trace.

    This is not metaphor. This is, in the most literal neurological sense, how minds change. Not through passive absorption of information – which is what scrolling, summarising, and LLM-assisted reading largely provides – but through active engagement with ideas that resist easy consumption.

    Sometimes people can consider my non-dualistic thinking to be the rough equivalent of getting splinters in my arse as I sit on the fence. In reality, it’s nothing like that – it’s just having an openness to be able to let in the message of things that are being said, not only because it may make your ego feel vulnerable as new data arises, but specifically because we should seek to challenge what we think with the tools of finding what is right.

    In short, to learn you have to accept the reality that you may be wrong and move on from that rather than entrenching yourself in a position. It’s deeply uncomfortable, stirs up emotion, and is prone to make you wonder what’s going on – arguably the opposite of what our increasingly intellectually soporific state offers as the easy option.

    Sometimes you need a wake up call. Fairlie’s essays resist easy consumption with the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the temple. As essays, they are deliberately constructed to create an impact. The provocation isn’t decoration – it’s the mechanism of delivery. The discomfort is the point of entry telling you to wake the fuck up.

    (Which raises a question that I find genuinely fascinating, and which I’ll pose here before I disappear down the rabbit hole it opens – which, knowing my brain, I absolutely will: if the value of an essay lies not in the information it contains but in the cognitive friction it generates in the reader, then what happens to that value when the reader outsources the reading to a system that experiences no friction whatsoever? The information survives. The transformation does not. And it is the transformation that was ever the point. In short, we end up with well written but pointless AI photocopies of thinking whilst thinking goes the way of the dodo)

    the attention span question, handled honestly for once

    The conventional narrative about attention spans runs something like this: they’re shrinking, long-form content is dying, the future belongs to thirty-second video clips and algorithmically optimised dopamine delivery systems designed by people whose own attention spans are, presumably, slightly longer than the products they’re creating.

    This narrative is partially true and almost entirely beside the point.

    Yes, the average attention span appears to be contracting – though one might reasonably question whether it ever existed in the unified form we nostalgically imagine, or whether we’ve simply become more honest about the distribution. The person genuinely engaged with something they care about will still read five thousand words. They always have. What’s changed isn’t human cognitive capacity but the competition for the first thirty seconds of attention before someone decides whether a piece of writing deserves the effort of genuine engagement.

    (If you like my work, you’ll take the time to appreciate it. Others will bounce at just seeing the word count and that’s OK too – although I’d argue that they need to find topics that they find sufficiently interesting to keep their own attention spans healthy without implying my work is going to be for everybody. By design is explicitly isn’t, and is designed to create discomfort in much the way as my mate Tom’s gut reaction is to mushrooms albeit with less toilet based carnage)

    The real question – and this is the one that actually matters – isn’t whether long-form writing will survive as a format. It’s whether the capacity to engage with it will survive in sufficient numbers to maintain the intellectual commons that civilisations actually require to function.

    This isn’t abstract philosophising. This is a structural question about the cognitive infrastructure of societies.

    Fairlie’s essays represent exactly the kind of material that either sharpens one’s capacity or reveals the absence. There is no middle ground with genuinely provocative writing. You either engage with the argument and find yourself thinking differently afterwards – which is to say, you find yourself changed, however slightly – or you bounce off it immediately because the cognitive infrastructure required to absorb the friction simply isn’t there.

    The uncomfortable bit follows.

    The capacity to absorb that friction – to sit with an argument that challenges you, to resist the impulse to dismiss it because it’s disagreeable, to actually do the work of understanding why an intelligent person might hold a position you find uncomfortable – is itself a skill. A skill that requires practice. A skill that atrophies without it.

    Essays are one of the primary instruments through which that practice occurs.

    the uncomfortable implication, or what fairlie actually teaches you in 2026

    Here’s what reading Fairlie in 2026 actually teaches you, stripped of nostalgia for a different era of political discourse and stripped, equally, of any romanticised notion that things were better when writers bashed away at typewriters whilst smoking in black and white photographs.

    (I will, unashamedly, claim my preference for one of Hitch’s favourite drinks – Johnnie Walker’s Amber Restorative – but acknowledge that as one of my role as a Gen X/millenial whereas many young people will see such a tipple as equivalent to chain smoking Marlboro in the 1970s)

    Getting back to the study of essays, it teaches you that the ability to write well about something – to construct prose that forces genuine intellectual engagement rather than merely confirming what the reader already believes – is vanishingly rare, increasingly undervalued, and arguably more important now than at any previous point in history.

    Not because we lack information. We are drowning in information. It’s literally everywhere and injected into your eyeballs at ever increasing speeds.

    Not because we lack the tools to generate competent text. We have more of those than ever.

    Because we are, as a civilisation, systematically undermining the very cognitive capacity that makes information meaningful – the capacity to be changed by it. This in particular is the Achilles heel of modern LLMs – they are architectural designed to kiss your arse so hard it may leave a mark. Essays, by contrast, tend to leave a mark of intellectual whiplash when they are deployed correctly.

    Instead, we have unprecedented tools for generating text. We have, comparatively speaking, a dwindling investment in developing the human capacity to think through text rather than merely consume it. The essays of someone like Fairlie represent the product of a mind that did the latter extensively and the former with genuine craft – a mind that understood, whether consciously or instinctively, that the value of writing lies not in what it tells you but in what it does to you.

    (And here, if I’m being honest – which I am, because this is a version of an essay I’m putting on my website and not LinkedIn given the whole point of this platform is that I don’t have to pretend otherwise – I should note that writing this essay has done precisely that to me. It has forced me to articulate something I’d been circling for months without quite landing on. The cognitive friction works in both directions. The writer is changed by the act of writing, and the reader is changed by the act of reading, and neither transformation is possible without genuine resistance. Without difficulty. Without the uncomfortable sensation of ideas that don’t slide smoothly into place.)

    If you value that kind of intellectual friction – the productive discomfort of encountering an argument that genuinely challenges your assumptions – Bite the Hand That Feeds You is well worth your weekend. The political context is historical, certainly. The underlying skill on display – how to make someone actually think – is timeless. Although one might argue that the desire to challenge the political status quo is needed now more than ever.

    That skill of writing is worth studying. Worth practising. Worth protecting from the comfortable assumption that competent text generation is the same thing as meaningful writing. It isn’t – and I’ll strongly argue it never will be.

    LLM sophistry is not an essay and it isn’t designed to provoke. The difference between writing content and actually changing opinions through discomfort might be one of the more important distinctions of the next decade.

    The world moves forward. How we choose to respond is in our hands.

    Do me one favour, ideally before we collectively forget how to think.

    Read the fucking book.

  • Effective Interview Techniques: Think Beyond Recall

    Have you ever sat through an interview where someone treated your ability to recall the SSH port number as some profound indicator of professional competence?

    If you’re an engineer with any breadth of experience, you’ll recognise this particular form of intellectual theatre – the worst interviews I’ve attended invariably focus on the recall of specific data points as a proxy for actual understanding. This sort of posturing (because let’s call it what it is) amounts to technical peacocking masquerading as dialogue, as if remembering that SSH runs over port 22 has any measurable impact on one’s ability to build systems that actually work.

    The challenge isn’t merely that these questions are pointless – though they demonstrably are. The deeper problem is that they reveal a fundamental confusion about what we’re trying to assess and why.

    The Metacognitive Distinction

    Having built much of our current technical advisory capability at CGI, I’ve sought to disrupt this interviewing paradigm, not through any particular genius-level insight, but by understanding the difference between information recall and metacognition – the capacity to think about thinking itself.

    The reason metacognitive questions prove more illuminating in interviews is straightforward: asking someone to examine their own thought processes reveals far more about their intellectual architecture than basic recall exercises ever could. These questions possess an authenticity that standard interview scripts cannot replicate – they require organic thinking in real time, demand genuine self-awareness, and resist the kind of rehearsed responses that ambitious candidates memorise for predictable enquiries about “biggest weaknesses.”

    Consider the practical implications. Whether you operate in technology or any other organisational domain, you work within systems that combine processes and tools in ways broadly similar to how our organisation functions. The specific technologies may vary – from quantum computing to a shovel and an expanse of dirt – but the underlying cognitive demands remain consistent: how do you approach problems you haven’t encountered before? How do you adapt when familiar solutions no longer apply?

    This is where traditional interview design fails most spectacularly. We test for information that becomes outdated, forgetting that paradigms shift with uncomfortable regularity. There was a time when serious people believed the sun revolved around the earth, and suggesting otherwise carried genuine personal risk. The SSH port number that seems so crucial today may prove entirely irrelevant tomorrow when some new protocol architecture emerges.

    The Learning Method Question

    My initial attempt to address this focused on adaptability: how might someone approach a new technology following a paradigm shift? The technology itself was deliberately irrelevant – it could range from a programming language to woodworking tools to organisational design methodologies. I wanted to understand method, not specific knowledge.

    Where this approach proved limiting was twofold. First, candidates often missed the point entirely, providing detailed implementation steps when I was seeking insight into their learning architecture. Second, whilst the responses effectively revealed learning styles – visual, auditory, kinesthetic approaches dressed in less technical language – they offered limited scope for understanding the person’s broader intellectual character.

    The question that replaced it has proven far more illuminating: “Of all your strongly held beliefs, which one do you think is most likely wrong?“

    The Authenticity Detection System

    What makes this question particularly valuable is not the specific answer – I obviously cannot know what beliefs you hold or which deserve questioning – but rather what becomes evident in the response. You will either engage intellectually or you won’t. You will tell the truth or you won’t. The difference between authentic intellectual engagement and what I can only describe as shorthand nonsense becomes immediately apparent.

    I don’t claim expertise in behavioural analysis, but distinguishing genuine thinking from performative cleverness requires no special training. Those who can engage with this question create what people have described as genuinely conversational interviews – some have called them podcast-like, others have mentioned experiencing something approaching an existential crisis when forced to examine whether they actually believe in God or whether faith serves as an elaborate coping mechanism for mortality anxiety.

    Those who cannot or will not engage with this process find themselves in probably the most uncomfortable interview of their professional lives. This discomfort emerges not from sadistic design but from the simple reality that our team’s success depends on the ability to think differently and, by extension, to think about thinking itself.

    The Purpose Dimension

    The second question I deploy explores something larger than immediate professional competence: “What cause or purpose would you consider worth significant personal sacrifice – or even your own death – to advance?”

    Again, no right or wrong answers exist. Whether someone finds meaning through military service, family protection, religious conviction, or community volunteering reveals their personal values architecture, not their professional suitability. What I’m examining is whether they’ve developed any sense of purpose beyond immediate self-interest.

    This matters because – perhaps worryingly – most of my professional and personal heroes ended up dying for their convictions. I was initially going to note that all my personal heroes are dead, but that seemed rather obviously true for anyone with historical perspective. The specific truth is that those whose commitment to principles transcended personal safety created the kind of impact worth emulating.

    I ask this because teams function effectively when members understand something beyond their individual advancement. In my experience, those who believe the world begins and ends with their personal success need to stay as far away from collaborative environments as possible. I have said in casual conversation that a team of Cristiano Ronaldos can be, and often is, outplayed by a cohesive team – individual brilliance, admirable as it is, yields little without the benefits of collaboration.

    The Anti-Pattern Advantage

    This approach draws from my background in amateur debating societies, where I learned that those who cannot articulate the benefits of opposing arguments are merely spouting rhetoric, regardless of eloquence. Understanding why intelligent people might reasonably disagree with your position provides strategic advantage that pure advocacy cannot match.

    The same principle applies to organisational assessment. Rather than testing whether candidates can recite information available through thirty seconds of internet searching, we examine how they process uncertainty, approach unfamiliar problems, and integrate new information with existing frameworks. These cognitive capabilities determine actual job performance far more accurately than memorised technical specifications ever could.

    The Implementation Reality

    The questions I’ve described cannot be gamed through preparation. They require authentic self-reflection and real-time intellectual processing. When someone attempts to provide a rehearsed response to “which belief is most likely wrong,” the artificiality becomes immediately obvious. When they genuinely engage with the question, you witness actual thinking in action – precisely what you need to evaluate.

    This methodology has proven particularly effective because it bypasses the entire infrastructure of interview preparation that has evolved around predictable question formats. Career coaches cannot script responses to genuine metacognitive enquiries. ChatGPT cannot generate authentic self-doubt. The candidate must actually think, and in thinking, reveal the intellectual qualities that determine whether they can contribute meaningfully to complex, collaborative work.

    Beyond the SSH Port Fallacy

    The next time you prepare to interview someone into your organisation, consider what your questions actually assess. Are you validating the candidate’s suitability, or are you satisfying your own desire to demonstrate superior knowledge? Are you testing abilities that matter for the role, or are you engaging in the kind of intellectual preening that mistakes Google-searchable information for professional competence?

    The difference matters more than most organisations recognise. In an era where information becomes obsolete increasingly rapidly, the capacity to think clearly, adapt effectively, and collaborate authentically determines success far more than the ability to recite technical specifications. Interview design should reflect this reality.

    The SSH port will always be 22 until it isn’t. The ability to think well about new problems will remain valuable regardless of which protocols emerge next. Design your assessment process accordingly.

    Finally, as I prepare to close, let me ask you to think about some of your beliefs and what purpose they serve for you. Are they identity reinforcing? Of value? Or worth examining more closely? This might pertain to questioning your political allegiance by seriously considering the opposing view, examining your position on Brexit by genuinely engaging with the alternative perspective, or any other strongly held conviction that deserves scrutiny.

    Because the truth is that whatever we think we know about evaluating human capability – or anything else for that matter – there remains scope to learn more, particularly if we’re willing to think seriously about how we think about these problems in the first place. The only way we progress as beings is by fundamentally questioning everything, including our own internal wetware.

    That willingness to examine our own assumptions might be the most valuable capability of all.

    This article was initially written on July 10th, 2025 on my personal LinkedIn profile as Beyond Technical Peacocking: Designing Interviews That Reveal How People Think – the original is available via this link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beyond-technical-peacocking-designing-interviews-how-matt-turvey-frsa-eausf/?trackingId=7ba5tMAyT9%2BOo7TPy7NENQ%3D%3D

  • The Curse of Competence: Why Excellence Makes You a Hostage to Your Own Skills

    Let’s talk about probably the most perverse reward system ever devised outside of experimental psychology labs: the modern workplace’s response to demonstrated competence.

    It goes something like this:

    You solve a problem effectively.

    People notice.

    They bring you more similar problems.

    You solve those too. Congratulations! You’ve now been rewarded with a permanent problem-solving role that will follow you like a particularly clingy ghost through the remainder of your professional existence. I hope you enjoy whatever it is you were doing!

    Welcome to the Curse of Competence – that strange phenomenon whereby doing something well once guarantees you’ll be doing it repeatedly until either your skills deteriorate from soul-crushing boredom or you fake your own death and restart your career under an assumed identity in a different industry.

    The Competence Trap: Hotel California for Skills

    The competence trap functions with the elegant simplicity of a particularly well-designed venus fly trap. The initial experience is quite pleasant – recognition! appreciation! the warm glow of being needed! – right until the moment you realise you’re now permanently stuck doing that one thing you happened to be good at during that meeting in 2019.

    “But surely,” I hear you protest, “organisations would want to develop their talented people? Move them around to leverage their abilities? Create growth paths that capitalise on demonstrated excellence?”

    Oh, my sweet summer child. That would require both forward thinking and the willingness to temporarily sacrifice immediate efficiency for long-term gain – two qualities approximately as common in corporate environments as unicorns who are also certified public accountants. (Why think of the future when you have next quarter breathing down your neck!)

    The reality operates on a principle I’ll call Organisational Path Dependence: once you become known as “the Excel person” or “the one who can calm down Client X” or “the presentation wizard,” that identity becomes fixed in the corporate hivemind with a permanence that ancient Egyptian stonemasons would envy. (The pyramids may be magnificent but I’m sure Sarah has been doing that trick with the finance software for as long as it took the slaves – I mean aliens – to build them)

    This phenomenon creates magnificent absurdities like:

    – The senior developer still fixing basic code because they were good at it as a junior five years ago

    – The marketing director still writing all the copy because once, in 2015, they composed a particularly effective email

    – The finance executive who can’t escape quarterly planning because they created a spectacular spreadsheet during the Obama administration

    Each trapped in their own personal Groundhog Day of competence, doomed to repeat their past excellence in perpetuity while watching less capable colleagues fail their way upward with spectacular regularity. (It’s amazing how there’s a waterline where you fall upwards once you get into the management realm, whilst the mere plebs of the world huddle around metaphorical fires worrying about the 675 metrics they have to hit just to keep doing the actual fucking work.)

    The Reward for Carrying Water: A Bigger Bucket

    The corporate response to demonstrated capability follows a pattern so predictable it should be taught in business schools under the probably-more-honest-than-most-bootcamps “How to Systematically Burn Out Your Best People 101.”

    Step 1: Identify person who executes Task X effectively

    Step 2: Give person more of Task X

    Step 3: When they handle that well, add even more Task X

    Step 4: Express confusion when person becomes increasingly desperate to never see Task X again and/or goes off sick citing mental burnout

    This system operates with the precision of a Swiss watch designed by particularly sadistic engineers. Its elegance lies in how it masquerades as recognition while functioning as punishment. “You’re so good at this!” translates directly to “You’ll never escape doing this!” – a sort of Sisyphean life where rocks and infinite hills got replaced with the mind numbing shuffling of digital detritus in a tastefully styled office with seemingly unironic motivational quotes. It’s up to you which is worse (I’ve always liked rocks).

    In that sense, the demonstrated empathy on show is rather like responding to someone who swims well by throwing them into progressively deeper bodies of water while adding increasingly heavy weights to their ankles.

    “But you’re so good at not drowning Hannah! We’re just creating opportunities for you to further develop this clearly demonstrated capability!”

    What makes this particularly diabolical is how it’s presented as a compliment. “We keep giving you these projects because you’re so good at them!” they say, nodding earnestly, as though permanently consigning you to the same repetitive task is a recognition of your value rather than an exploitation of your reliability. Meanwhile, those who don’t have any obvious skills spend at least 75% of their time practicing their acceptance speech for the invariable falling upward promotion trajectory that invariably awaits. (That’s because the generally accepted way to deal with awful leaders is by throwing them somewhere else in the hope that maybe that person might have a semblance of a backbone, and the ability to have an uncomfortable conversation rather than palming them off because their current manager has neither.)

    The effective people by comparison? Well the reward for carrying water is, inevitably, a bigger bucket, and a PIP if they fail to carry the bucket that may or may not now contain all of Earth’s water system.

    The Competence/Growth Inversion Principle

    Behold the magnificent irony at the heart of professional development: the relationship between demonstrated competence and actual career growth typically exhibits a strong negative correlation.

    I call this the Competence/Growth Inversion Principle, and it works like this:

    – The more crucial your current contribution, the less the organisation can “afford” to move you. (In the corporate world, why would we want to move people out of roles that get stuff done as it might mean we’d have to think about one or more of succession planning, increased competition at the next level of hierarcy, or pulling ones thumb out of one’s backside.

    – The more reliably you solve certain problems, the more tightly you become identified with those problems (so you’ve worked out how to use functions beyond =SUM? You’re the Excel “guru” now – no, there’s no payrise).

    – The more irreplaceable you become in a specific function, the less likely you are to escape it (it’s like a black hole has appeared in space yet rather than being able to observe light falling into the abyss, it’s your career prospects disappearing over the event horizon).

    Meanwhile, observe the person who is mediocre at multiple things rather than excellent at one thing. They often advance with puzzling speed, largely because:

    1. They’re never quite good enough at any one thing to become indispensable in that role

    2. Their consistent mediocrity creates no specific attachment to any particular function so they are always ready to go (mostly to shit, but in a way that allows them to tell management what they want to hear abstract of what reality is)

    3. Their broad but shallow exposure creates the illusion of versatility

    4. Nobody fights to keep them in their current role because nobody particularly values what they’re currently doing

    This creates the magnificent spectacle of organisational advancement functioning almost as natural selection for a particular type of non-excellence – not outright incompetence (though that certainly happens), but rather the careful cultivation of being just good enough at many things to avoid the curse of being excellent at one thing. (In that sense, it’s a skill – but probably not the sort of skill we should be lauding if we’re being honest).

    The competence trap thus creates a perverse incentive structure where rational career actors might deliberately avoid demonstrating too much excellence in any single domain lest they become permanently associated with it. Is that what a company should look like?

    The Specialist’s Lament

    For those caught in the competence trap, work often devolves into a peculiar form of specialised repetition that feels less like career development and more like being a particularly well-educated hamster on a wheel.

    I recently spoke with a mid-career professional – let’s call her Grace – who made the career-limiting mistake of creating an exceptional PowerPoint presentation in 2018. This singular event, which lasted approximately 45 minutes, has somehow become her professional identity for the next seven years.

    “I have two degrees and fifteen years of experience,” she told me with the thousand-yard stare of someone who has created one too many slide transitions, “but I’m now introduced in meetings as ‘our PowerPoint person’ like I’m some sort of sentient template. I’ve debated changing my surname to PPTX-Smythe.”.

    Another victim of the competence trap – we’ll call him Marcus – described being “the data guy” despite having originally been hired as a strategic planner with significant decision-making responsibility.

    “I made one particularly good PowerBI dashboard during my first month,” he explained, “and now I haven’t been invited to a strategy meeting in three years. Meanwhile, I’ve watched three consecutive bosses implement catastrophically bad strategic decisions that I could have helped prevent, but apparently, my only role now is to create colourful visualisations of the resulting disasters.”

    The specialist’s lament echoes across industries and functions: “I am so much more than this one skill, and yet this one skill has somehow become my entire professional identity.”

    The Three Deadly Career Virtues

    Particularly prone to the competence trap are those who exhibit what I’ll call the Three Deadly Career Virtues: reliability, efficiency, and conflict avoidance.

    These seemingly positive attributes combine to create the perfect victim profile:

    1. Reliability ensures you’ll get the job done without requiring management attention, making you the path of least resistance for similar future tasks

    2. Efficiency means you can handle increasing volumes of the same work, creating the illusion that this arrangement is sustainable (I mean why wouldn’t it be given companies operate under the idea of continuous, infinite growth as if that’s really a thing)

    3. Conflict avoidance makes you less likely to push back when your role becomes increasingly narrowed to your area of demonstrated competence

    Together, these virtues create what appears from the outside to be the ideal employee but is actually a person being slowly entombed in their own capabilities like a museum exhibit: “Here we have a perfectly preserved specimen of an Excel wizard in their natural habitat. Note how they continue to pivot tables despite their growing despair.”

    In short, the exploitable get exploited. It’s a tale as old as time, but without the whimsy of listening to a song about Beauty and the Beast (bite me, I’m a Disney fan).

    These qualities typically combine with a work ethic instilled since childhood that makes refusing tasks feel morally wrong, creating the perfect conditions for indefinite exploitation of specific skills at the expense of broader development. (The reward for childhood trauma that likely made you a people pleaser to mitigate anger? Some adult trauma, delivered digitally via the Microsoft office suite.)

    The Double-Bind of Demonstrated Expertise

    Those caught in the competence trap face a particularly cruel double-bind when they attempt to escape:

    Scenario 1: Do you continue demonstrating excellence in your pigeonholed role, further cementing your association with it while watching growth opportunities go to others?

    Scenario 2: Deliberately perform worse in hopes of being released from your specialisation, thereby risking your professional reputation and potentially confirming the organisation’s unspoken belief that you’re only good for this one thing anyway. (PIPs are available for those below the “safe” watermark of those who operate the metrics rather than those who have to comply with them).

    Neither option offers a particularly appealing path forward. It’s rather like being asked whether you’d prefer to be slowly suffocated by a pillow or a duvet – the instrument differs but the outcome remains distressingly similar.

    This double-bind often leads to the most reliable people in organisations quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles at 11pm while sighing heavily into their third glass of wine. (Or, in my case, manipulating my psychology by engaging hyperfocus simply by waiting till the last second before I have so much adrenaline and cortisol in my system, there’s approximately zero chance I’m going to be sleeping).

    The only apparent escape routes involve:

    1. Leaving the organisation entirely (the “corporate witness protection program” approach)

    2. Finding a sponsor powerful enough to override the organisational imperative to keep you exactly where you’re “most valuable”

    3. Developing such a spectacular new skill that it overshadows your existing competence trap (approximately as likely as teaching your cat to prepare your taxes, but if you can say AI in every other sentence, you may have a shot)

    The “Go-To Person” Paradox

    Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the competence trap is how it’s disguised as a compliment. Being the “go-to person” for anything sounds like recognition rather than the professional equivalent of being sentenced to repeat the same year of school indefinitely.

    “Sarah’s our go-to for client presentations” sounds like praise until you realise Sarah hasn’t done anything except client presentations since the iPhone 7 was cutting-edge technology.

    “We always rely on Dave for the monthly reporting” seems like an acknowledgment of Dave’s value until you notice Dave gazing longingly out the window every 30th of the month like a prisoner marking days on a cell wall, grappling with an Excel spreadsheet so large and creaky that it might masquerade as a haunted house on the weekend.

    Being the “go-to person” is less an honour and more a subtle form of organisational typecasting – one where you’re permanently cast as “Person Who Does That One Thing” in the ongoing corporate production of “Tasks Nobody Else Wants To Learn and How We Found Suckers To Do Them.”

    The Organisational Amnesia Phenomenon

    Compounding the competence trap is what I call Organisational Amnesia – the curious inability of workplaces to remember anything about you except the specific skill for which you’ve become known.

    You may have:

    – Published thought leadership in your industry

    – Successfully led cross-functional projects

    – Developed innovative approaches to longstanding problems

    – Demonstrated exceptional leadership qualities

    – Acquired three new languages and the ability to communicate telepathically with squirrels

    Please be aware that, much like that stock market advice you got, past performance does not indicate any potential future likelihood of similar success.

    Instead in planning meetings, you’ll still be referred to as “Morgan from accounting who does the thing with the spreadsheets.”

    This selective institutional memory creates situations where highly capable individuals with diverse skills and interests become one-dimensional caricatures in the organisational narrative – reduced to a single function like characters in a particularly lazy sitcom that runs for seventeen years with no sign of stopping, serving as escapism for the masses who can say “hey my life is bad, but I’m not as bad as Seymour from Uncomfortable Conclusions”.

    The Competence Escape Velocity Theory

    For those determined to break free of the competence trap, I propose the Competence Escape Velocity Theory, which states that escaping your pigeonhole requires simultaneously:

    1. Building a coalition of influential advocates who see your broader potential

    2. Secretly training replacements who can take over your current responsibilities (extra points if AI does is – management love that stuff, i.e. less spending on people who might complain)

    3. Creating visible wins in areas unrelated to your competence trap

    4. Developing a reputation for something – anything – other than your current specialisation (perhaps not soiling oneself at the Christmas party – keep some standards)

    5. Being willing to risk the identity security of being “the person who does X well”

    This multi-pronged approach represents your best chance of achieving escape velocity from the gravitational pull of your own competence – a manoeuvre approximately as complex as launching a rocket while simultaneously convincing mission control that you’re actually still on the launchpad.

    The difficulty explains why so many choose the simpler option: updating their CV and finding an organisation where they haven’t yet revealed their particular talents, creating a brief window of opportunity before the whole cycle begins again.

    The Mediocrity Advantage

    This analysis reveals a counterintuitive truth: there are significant professional advantages to strategic mediocrity – or at least to the careful management of where and when you demonstrate exceptional capability.

    The truly savvy career operator maintains a carefully calibrated performance level:

    – Good enough to be considered valuable

    – Not so good as to become indispensable in any one function

    – Visibly competent at politically advantageous skills

    – Carefully average at career-limiting responsibilities

    This calculated approach to skill demonstration represents a sophisticated response to organisational incentive structures that routinely punish excellence with more of the same work rather than growth opportunities. The sad reality is that this is ultimately bullshit of the highest order – and something that needs to be addressed at a broader level.

    After all, it’s not that organisations consciously design systems to reward mediocrity and punish excellence – it’s simply the emergent property of prioritising short-term efficiency over long-term development, immediate needs over strategic talent deployment, and the path of least resistance over optimal resource allocation. Who’d have thought focusing solely on the next thing – be that a quarter, task, or fixing a catastrophe might have such a significant impact?

    Beyond the Competence Ghetto

    So is there an alternative to this dysfunctional system? Perhaps. But it requires organisations to fundamentally reconsider their approach to talent development and individuals to strategically manage their skill demonstrations.

    For organisations, escaping this trap means:

    1. Creating systematic rotation programs that prioritise development of people over short-term efficiency

    2. Rewarding knowledge transfer rather than exclusive ownership of capabilities – which creates structural problems for both the business and the poor souls who get trapped

    3. Explicitly valuing versatility alongside specialisation

    4. Building redundancy for critical skills rather than relying on individual “heroes”

    5. Measuring managers on their team members’ growth rather than merely their output

    For individuals navigating existing systems, survival strategies include:

    1. Deliberately cultivating multiple, visible areas of competence to avoid single-skill typecasting

    2. Strategically training others in your “special skills” to reduce your uniqueness

    3. Explicitly negotiating skill deployment and development pathways before demonstrating new capabilities

    4. Creating alternative identity markers in the organisation beyond your functional skills

    5. Recognising when the only escape route might be the exit door – sadly, sometimes it becomes the only option if your organisation isn’t willing or able to change.

    The Uncomfortable Conclusion

    The competence trap reveals an uncomfortable truth: organisations frequently talk about developing talent while implementing systems that systematically prevent it. The gap between rhetoric and reality creates the professional equivalent of quicksand – the harder you work to prove your value, the more firmly you become stuck in a narrowing role.

    It may not be a conscious decision that is manifested by an evil corporate mind, but its impact on the wellbeing of their staff, and the associated headaches created by the need for mental gymnastics creates problems that are both human and financial.

    Perhaps the final irony is that recognising this dynamic represents its own form of competence – one that, if demonstrated too visibly, might land you permanently in the “organisational development” role where you can spend the remainder of your career explaining this phenomenon to others without actually being able to escape it yourself. (I fear I may have fallen into this hole by writing articles but, hey, at least I may have a future in some form of corporate stand up).

    The true meta-skill, then, might be learning exactly when to display competence, when to conceal it, and when to decide that an environment incapable of appropriately developing talent deserves neither your excellence nor your loyalty – being good at things you don’t want to do probably isn’t the route forward if you want to do bigger and better things.

    In that sense, the most valuable skill in navigating modern organisations might not be any particular technical capability but rather the wisdom to recognise when your competence is being weaponised against your own development – and the courage to seek environments where excellence is a pathway rather than a prison.

    The original copy of this article was published on my personal LinkedIn on April 25th, 2025. You can find the original link here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/curse-competence-why-excellence-makes-you-hostage-your-turvey-frsa-kympe/?trackingId=XmAsaUBPQQGJHP0dYoGpKw%3D%3D