A Label for the Writing That Only Practitioners Can Produce
Jim Highsmith has been called a Thought Leader. He doesn't love the term, but he has used it—when conference bios are written, when PMI-Agile Alliance introduces him, when someone asks what kind of writing he does. It fits the slot, he admits. It’s just not quite right.
Early in his career, at both Cutter Consortium and Thoughtworks, and again when Martin Fowler reviewed a manuscript, he received the same counsel: let your voice out. The fact that it needed repeating says something about the default pressure in technical writing.
Fowler, a co-author of the Agile Manifesto and a respected voice in software for over twenty years, was reviewing Highsmith’s Wild West to Agile. His feedback was direct: put more of yourself in. Highsmith was holding back, writing a software history book when a memoir was trying to get out. Fowler saw the gap before Highsmith did—and he recognized a style of writing that neither of them had a name for at the time.
Three ways the practitioner disappears
Thought leadership began meaningfully: ideas worth following, insight that moved a field. Then it became a content category, then a marketing function, then a LinkedIn format with a hook and three lessons. Now the phrase signals polish over substance, brand over argument.
The academic route looks like the alternative. It builds scaffolding with citations, caveats and literature reviews. It buries the lead in the name of rigor, and it suppresses the author’s voice entirely. The problem isn’t rigor itself—it’s rigor used as camouflage.
Highsmith has done versions of both. He sits on a thought leadership advisory group for PMI and has written six books. Yet from the beginning, he found ways to stay in the frame: mountaineering as an analogy in Adaptive Software Development, dialogue opening each chapter of Agile Project Management, and interviews in Agile Software Development Ecosystems because he wanted the founders’ voices, not just summaries of their ideas.
Both failure modes do the same harm. They edit consequential human judgment out of the prose, leaving correct but weightless writing. Now a third option has arrived—LLM Voice—distinct in that there is no one hiding at all because there’s no one there. That problem was worth solving before AI. The new category Highsmith proposes is Practitioner Voice.
What Practitioner Voice does differently
Academic writing builds to its claim. Thought leadership makes the claim and explains it. Practitioner Voice starts with the claim and trusts the reader to close the gap. It organizes the whole piece around what the author concluded from experience, not around what the evidence might tentatively suggest. The judgment stays visible throughout, and underneath all of it sits judgment itself. You can learn the moves, but the judgment has to be earned.
Fowler writes this way. His best pieces open with the conclusion, then show reasoning rather than constructing a case for a jury. The literature review doesn’t precede the insight; the insight becomes the point of departure, with lived experience as evidence. The reader either recognizes the pattern from their own experience or doesn’t. Fowler doesn’t write for the ones who don’t.
When Fowler pushed Highsmith to put more of himself into the Wild West book, he was pushing him toward this category—toward a history only he could write, built from what only he had lived.
Four marks of the practitioner’s voice
Authority comes from experience, not credentials. Academic authority derives from credentials and methods. Thought leadership authority derives from platform. Practitioner authority comes from having been responsible for the outcome, not from a researcher studying it from the outside. For consultants, the form is slightly different: rarely carrying direct accountability they have still been sufficiently exposed to consequence across enough contexts and years to earn genuine pattern recognition. Earned differently, still earned.
Tension stays live. Academic writing resolves tension with conclusions. Thought leadership resolves it in three takeaways. Practitioner Voice names the tension and leaves it unresolved because the practitioner knows it is real, and the reader must navigate it individually. Resolving it for them would be lying.
The author remains present. Academic writing never allows this. Thought leadership permits it only as personal brand. In Practitioner Voice, the author’s judgment is the point—the accumulated perspective of someone who has made consequential decisions over a long period of time with something to say about what that actually feels like.
The readership contract is specific, not universal. Academics write for peer reviewers. Thought leaders write for eyeballs. Practitioner Voice writes for people who recognize the pattern from their own experience. It is comfortable with limited context: this worked here, under these conditions; judge for yourself whether it fits your circumstance.
Why the category matters now
This behavior isn’t new. Practitioners have spent a decade writing on LinkedIn and Substack from earned judgment—starting with the claim and keeping the tension live—but without a name for what they were doing. Without the category there was no way to teach it, recognize it, or reinforce it.
Meanwhile, AI now produces fluent, well-organized, structurally competent prose optimized to say nothing wrong. Call it LLM Voice: the most insidious failure yet because it is indistinguishable from the real thing until you notice nothing is at stake.
AI can mimic the sound of Practitioner Voice, but it cannot own the consequences behind it. The distinction that holds is not style or compression—accountability. The willingness to put your name on a call and live with the outcome remains impossible to automate.
Highsmith has been working this way in his PMI articles for years—without announcing a new approach, simply refusing to edit himself out, leaving judgment visible, letting tension stand and trusting the reader. If those pieces felt different, that was deliberate. Naming the category is the first step; the craft guide for writing in it is planned as the next contribution.
