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Inside The Real Work
Real value is rarely discovered in discussion rooms.
Most of the time it is discovered inside the work — where conditions are felt, trade-offs are unavoidable, and consequences arrive whether anyone is ready or not.
There is a profound difference between being inside the work and talking about the work. One builds real capability, the other often builds confidence without traction.
Where real value
actually forms
Being inside the work means being exposed. Exposed to constraints that cannot be negotiated away, dependencies that only appear through action and timing, sequencing, and second-order effects that never show up cleanly in plans.
This is where value becomes real — not as an idea, but as something that either holds under pressure or fails.
Talking about the work happens at a distance. It interprets, explains, and packages learning after the fact, often without having carried responsibility for delivery.
Both exist in organisations, only one consistently builds capability that survives change.
The problem of
fake proximity
As organisations become more complex, a distortion appears. Language begins to imply closeness to delivery where none exists. Phrases like “we’ve been close to the work,” “we understand how this plays out,” “we’ve seen this before” signal authority without exposure.
This is fake proximity. It borrows the tone of experience without carrying its weight and sounds grounded, but it is insulated from consequence.
And because it reduces uncertainty and speeds conversation, it is rarely challenged.
Why this weakens
capability
Capability is not insight, explanation, fluency or narrative coherence. Capability is what remains when conditions shift, plans lose relevance, and coordination breaks down.
When interpretation is mistaken for participation, organisations overestimate what they can actually do. Strategy feels coherent, but delivery relies on improvisation. Value is promised confidently but realised inconsistently.
The gap is not intelligence, but distance from the work.
Why this matters more now
In fast-changing environments, capability is tested continuously. Climate impacts, demographic change, cost pressure, workforce turnover, and technological acceleration all compress the margin for learning at a distance. AI and analytics increase speed and pattern recognition, but they also increase the risk of abstraction — producing convincing answers without lived grounding.
When conditions tighten, only capability built inside the work holds, everything else is exposed.
An underused opportunity
There is, however, a powerful counterweight to fake proximity: Mature employees. Experienced practitioners. People who have lived through failure, recovery, and unintended consequences.
These individuals often hold tacit knowledge that cannot be summarised cleanly or translated into frameworks. Their value lies not in articulation alone, but in judgment — in knowing where plans tend to break, where optimism runs ahead of reality, and which signals matter first.
When their perspectives are combined with diverse inputs — across roles, disciplines, and lived experience — organisations gain something critical, the ability to read the real conditions and engage the real work.
Not noise or debate for its own sake, but grounded challenge that forces ideas to confront reality and decide what to do next.
The condition that
matters
Diversity of input only helps if it reduces distance from the work.
When experience is used as ornament or authority theatre, fake proximity increases. When experience is invited into real decisions, real trade-offs, and real accountability, then capability grows.
The question is not whether people are included, it is whether their proximity to consequences is preserved.
Staying where value
is created
In a world saturated with explanation (often AI generated synthetic coherence), the discipline is not better language.
It is staying inside the work long enough — and close enough — for reality to shape capability, and for experienced judgment to test confident assumptions before they harden.
The test is simple.
Are we building value by remaining accountable to what is happening — or are we explaining value from a safe distance?
Increasingly, that distinction determines who can deliver under pressure and who can only describe what delivery should look like.
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