I’ve been called a Thought Leader.
I don’t love the term. But I’ve used it, because there wasn’t another
one. When PMI-Agile Alliance introduces me, when conference bios get
written, when someone asks what kind of writing I do. Thought leadership is
the label that fits the slot. It’s not wrong. It’s just not quite right.
Three times in my career — at Cutter Consortium, at Thoughtworks, and
from Martin Fowler reviewing a manuscript — someone in a position to know
told me the same thing: let your voice out. That it kept needing to be said
tells you something about the default pressure.
Martin is a co-author of the Agile
Manifesto, one of the most respected voices in software development,
and someone who has been writing about technical and organizational topics
on martinfowler.com for twenty years. His feedback on my Wild West to
Agile book was direct: put more of yourself in. I was holding back. I’d
written a software history book when I had a memoir trying to get out.
Martin saw the gap before I did.
What he was asking for had a character, a way of writing that neither of
us named at the time. I’ve been thinking about what to call it ever
since.
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.
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.
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