Do You Still Do That?

The Argument

Genuine expertise is the one thing that compounds. Everything else depreciates.

That’s not a motivational observation. It’s a commercial reality that most organisations only begin to understand and appreciate when the absence of it has started to cost them.

Expertise in its truest form is not a credential, a title or a years-of-service marker. It’s the accumulated product of sustained attention to a discipline over time. A thousand decisions made and interrogated. The failures absorbed and understood. Where patterns are recognised not because they were taught but because they were lived through, on repeat. It becomes instinctive.

It does not arrive quickly nor does it announce itself loudly. It builds in the quiet, in the hours when nobody is watching, in the projects that didn’t go to plan. In the conversations that required more than the corporate playbook could ever offer. Malcolm Gladwell gave it a number. Ten thousand hours. The number matters less than the intent behind it - the deliberate, sustained commitment to getting better at something that actually matters.

The world has found a faster alternative. Or more honestly, it thinks it has.

The performance of expertise - the language, the credentials, the confident summary of someone else’s thinking - has never been easier to construct or harder to distinguish from the real thing. At least in the short term. Time, as it always does, has other ideas.

The Threat

The problem with performance is that it works. At least for a while.

The professional who packages their thinking, blends it with the language of the room, has the right credentials and a confident summary. They tend to be the ones who advance because the systems reward them. The culture validates them. The organisation, optimised for visible output over quiet depth, selects for them without knowing it.

Jake Humphrey put it plainly. We’ve replaced ten thousand hours with the desire for ten thousand likes. The observation stings because it’s accurate - and because it applies as readily inside organisations as it does across social platforms. The personal brand has migrated from LinkedIn into the meeting room. Perception has become the currency. Expertise has become the costume.

The incentive structures that shape careers are rarely designed to reward depth. They reward visibility, activity, the appearance of progress. The appraisal cycle measures what can be counted. The promotion ladder moves people away before they’ve built genuine competence - rewarding breadth of exposure over depth of understanding, speed of advancement over quality of foundation.

The individual reads the signal correctly. Build the profile. Collect the credentials. Stay visible. Move quickly. The ones who choose differently - stay in the discipline, resist the pull toward the next rung, investing the quiet hours when nobody is measuring - are often the ones who get left behind in the short term.

Later, the organisation wonders, why the thinking isn’t there when it needs it.

The Cost

The cost of misplaced faith in performance over mastery rarely announces itself, nor is the impact immediate. It accumulates quietly, in the gap between what an organisation believes it knows and what it can actually do when the moment requires it.

Growth is the clearest measure. Organisations that have optimised for visible expertise over genuine depth find the same pattern repeating. The ambition is there, the capital available and the market opportunity is real. Conversion stalls because of what’s missing - the quality of thinking required to inspire and bring the spark to a flame. The strategy that should be driving the next phase reflects the process that produced it - the comfortable consensus of a room that confirmed rather than challenged, the decision made on data that was available rather than understood.

The talent that carried the depth left quietly without drama or grievance. Only the recognition that the signal was wrong - that what they had built, over years of sustained attention, wasn’t what was being rewarded. Some retired, others went where their value was seen. Either way, the organisation lost something that it didn’t fully value until it truly needed it.

The individual cost is quieter but no less real. The edge dulls gradually when mastery isn’t renewed and the inevitable drift goes unnoticed. Not a sudden change or loss but a slow recalibration toward what does get rewarded. The depth that once felt instinctive starts to feel like a memory. Then the question arrives, usually from someone outside the organisation who knew you before the drift:

Do you still do that?

It’s a simple question. The honest answer is often more complicated than it should be.

The Renewal

The answer should always be yes. Not as a defence of the past but as a statement of intent about the present.

Mastery doesn’t maintain itself. It requires continual investment, even when roles change or incentives have shifted and especially when nobody is measuring it. The ones who make that choice consistently are the ones who compound over time. The ones who don’t find that the drift and the dulling has taken more than they realised.

The assumption that commercial transition requires leaving technical depth behind is one of the most costly miscalculations a career can make. The move into advisory, into account leadership, into commercial roles is often framed as a step away from the discipline. It doesn’t have to be. It can be - and at its best, should be - a step that brings the discipline with it.

I’ve experienced both sides of that. The years when the depth was actively maintained alongside the commercial mandate and where the technical foundation informed the advisory position. The credibility in the room came from knowing what the data actually meant rather than what it appeared to say. There was a time when the drift was real too, when the edge had dulled without anyone noticing, including me.

The difference in what you can offer is significant. Not just to the client or the organisation, most importantly to yourself.

The commercial role that carries genuine technical depth doesn’t just translate more accurately - it compounds. The decisions are grounded, better informed. The relationships are built on something real. The advice carries the weight of someone who has been wrong before and learned from it, not just someone who has simply read about being right.

Do you still do that?

The ones who can answer yes - honestly, not performatively - are the ones who become genuinely difficult to replace.

The Profile

Thirty years in practice has never been about ticking boxes or developing skills to leave behind. This was never about following a template, but building a profile layer by layer - each discipline augmenting the one before it, nothing discarded, everything brought forward.

Process engineering laid the foundation. Transitioning into operations and flow assurance deepened it. Consultancy added the client lens. Account management brought the commercial mandate. Advisory extended it across portfolios and geographies. Each transition wasn’t a departure from what came before - it was a continuation of it. The technical foundation informed the commercial judgment. The commercial experience sharpened the technical instinct. The whole became more than the sum of its parts precisely because nothing was ever left behind.

So when the question arrives - do you still do that? - it can refer to anything across those thirty years. The process engineering principles that still inform how I read a system. The flow assurance thinking that still shapes how I approach uncertainty. The account management instinct that still drives how I build client relationships. The advisory perspective that still determines how I frame the commercial consequence of a technical decision.

The answer is yes. To all of it.

Seven Six Solutions and Keystone Coaching are the natural expression of that profile - not a departure from what came before but its fullest realisation. Built on the conviction that genuine expertise, honestly held and continuously renewed, is the foundation everything else is built from.

Do you still do that? Yes. Every day. That’s the point.