Dear CIO,

I recently got the chance to read Jim Highsmith's article on the Practitioner Voice. As I read through it, I was surprised by how much it resonated with me, particularly his argument that a practitioner’s authority comes not from credentials but from the experience, judgment, and real-world consequences of their decisions.  This made me start to reflect on my own and others’ writing, and how it is a subset of what Jim describes. My particular interest is explaining complex systems through the experiences of people operating within them, which has informed my writing.

Best Regards,
John, Your Enterprise AI Advisor

Explaining Systems Through the People Who Live in Them

The writer who I believe has most influenced this approach is John McPhee, the legendary Princeton professor and pioneer of literary nonfiction. What I admire about McPhee is how he takes complicated subjects like geology, engineering, or transportation and makes them interesting by telling the stories of the people involved. He doesn't just explain how things work. He shows you the people who make them work, the decisions they face, and the world they operate in, in a style that feels like the practitioner voice. In other words, he can make the system itself visible through the story. The characters are not decorative additions, but rather central protagonists whose decisions, constraints, conflicts, and experiences reveal how the system actually works.

From my own experience, I have spent five decades working in technology, watching organizations struggle with systems they often only partially understand. Whether the subject is DevOps, artificial intelligence, organizational management, or the history of computing, I have become convinced that explaining the technology alone is rarely enough. Like John McPhee, I believe you have to explain the people, their assumptions, the decisions they made, and the circumstances in which those decisions seemed reasonable. This is even more important when writing or talking about complex systems where outcomes rarely follow neatly from intentions, people act on incomplete information, and situations only make perfect sense to someone operating within it.

For instance, take my book, Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge. Rather than simply explaining W. Edwards Deming's theories, methods, and contributions to management, I wanted to tell the story of the man himself, his experiences, the people who influenced him, the challenges he encountered, and the intellectual journey that shaped his System of Profound Knowledge. This is where John McPhee's influence on my writing becomes particularly relevant. I believe complex ideas become more accessible when readers understand the human experiences that gave rise to them. Deming's ideas matter, but understanding his journey gives a richer appreciation of how they developed and why they mattered in the first place.

In Rebels of Reason, I also tried to apply this approach to the history of artificial intelligence. Rather than presenting AI as a succession of algorithms, breakthroughs, and technological milestones, I wanted to explore the people behind those developments. This collection of rebels had different beliefs, problems they tried to solve, and misunderstandings that shaped their work and what came afterward. While the book is not light on technical ideas, the human experiences give those ideas meaning.

My latest book, The Fourth Monolith, represents another departure for me. For the first time, I'm writing fiction, and for the first time, I'm deliberately using AI as part of the creative writing process. This is where Jim's discussion of AI assistance in Practitioner Voice is particularly relevant. Jim makes an important distinction between using AI to augment a writer's judgment and allowing it to replace that judgment. AI can produce remarkably convincing prose, sometimes too convincingly, so the challenge is recognizing when it has genuinely helped develop an idea and when it has merely produced something that sounds good. As I am writing this new book, I consider this distinction regularly.

In The Fourth Monolith, I'm exploring some of the deepest questions in quantum mechanics, including the nature of reality, uncertainty, and the limits of what we can know. Instead of explaining those ideas through historical figures, as I did in Rebels of Reason, I am using fictional characters whose experiences and discoveries let readers encounter these scientific questions through a story. AI has become part of the writing process, but not just a means to generate prose. I am using it to challenge narrative assumptions, test the scientific consistency of ideas, spot contradictions, and experiment with different story structures. It has even helped me explore possibilities that I might otherwise overlook. At the end of the day, though, I still have to decide which possibilities matter, what the characters should experience, and what I ultimately want the reader to take away.

What interests me most is whether AI can help me become a better storyteller rather than simply a faster writer, and, to be honest, I don't have a definitive answer yet. The Fourth Monolith is as much an experiment in how I write as it is an experiment in what I'm writing about, and perhaps that's the connection to Jim's Practitioner Voice. The technology may change how we develop and express ideas, but the responsibility for deciding what matters, what is true, and what deserves to be said still belongs to the writer.

Jim’s Practitioner Voice is a useful lens for writing in which the author remains visible, drawing on accumulated judgment rather than hiding behind academic conventions or polished thought leadership. I agree with that. My variation is to use that judgment to select, connect, and interpret others' experiences. There is a tension here worth preserving. Stories make complex systems accessible, but they can also oversimplify them. Alternatively, a compelling individual narrative can obscure the larger forces that shaped an outcome. The challenge is to use the story to illuminate the system without allowing the story to replace it. That is the kind of book I aspire to write. What about you? Do you want to use people to illustrate systems? Or do you want to use their experiences to help readers discover the systems for themselves?