Main idea

A salesperson who sells better than the others does not know a better script. They understand their client's constraints, their fears, their vocabulary, and what they leave unsaid. A product manager does not build a better product because they know more frameworks: they have understood the user's habits, their friction points, the workarounds they resort to for lack of anything better. A sociologist does not understand a social movement by reading statistics, but by grasping a group's codes, its internal tensions, its relationship to the world.

Technique — the script, the framework, the statistic — is equally available to everyone practising the same trade. What is distributed unequally is how much of the situation a person has ended up holding in their head. Context is what turns information into understanding; the decision, the action and the production then follow almost mechanically.

Hence a consequence as soon as you work with an assistant: that is exactly the part it does not have. The technique it has — better than many. The depth of the situation, nobody has given it.

Why it matters

This shifts what you try to pass on when you want to bring someone forward, or when you want a machine to produce. Training in method takes a day and can be measured; passing on context has no format and is hard to see, and yet that is where the difference is decided.

It also explains why two people trained the same way produce incomparable results, without any competency grid accounting for the difference.

Nuances and limits

Technique is not neutral for all that: without it, a deep context stays unusable, and you fall back on unverifiable intuition. The point is that it plateaus quickly, not that it does not count.

And an internalised context can go stale without its bearer noticing: that is the mechanism by which an expert keeps applying what they understood about a market that has changed.

Open questions

• How do you recognise, when hiring, a depth of context that no diploma and no technical test measures?