Theory Prepares You. Experience Grounds You.

I did not begin my career in technology.

When I was 18, I believed I was supposed to decide what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Looking back, that seems like an absurd expectation to place on anyone that age. At the time, it simply felt like the path I was expected to follow.

I studied psychology because I was fascinated by the brain and human behaviour. Shortly after graduating, I found work as a cognitive rehabilitation therapist supporting people who had experienced traumatic brain injuries.

The title sounded more specialized than the job had first been described to me. The work itself was far more complex.

I helped clients get out of bed. I supported people who were learning to walk or speak again, working alongside physiotherapists, speech-language pathologists and other specialists. Before long, I was also working with neurologists in different countries and trying to help clients and families navigate conflict, grief and profound changes none of us could make simple.

Some families were grieving the person they remembered while still caring deeply for the person in front of them. Clients were trying to recover parts of their independence while being surrounded by professionals and family members with different ideas about what progress should look like.

I had studied cognition, behaviour and the brain. I understood the theory reasonably well.

Very little about the work felt theoretical.

There was no model that could tell me exactly what to do when a client’s goals differed from a family’s hopes, or when the priorities of one specialist competed with those of another. Progress could be physical, cognitive or emotional. What looked like resistance might be fear, fatigue, grief or a reasonable response to losing control over one’s own life.

The theory was not wrong. It was simply incomplete.

I had to listen, adjust and learn from people whose training and experience differed from my own. I also had to recognize that the person receiving care was not a problem to be solved. They had a history, relationships, ambitions and a view of what made life worth living.

It remains the most challenging work I have done.

It also shaped how I entered technology.

Technology is filled with processes, tools, frameworks and best practices. These can be useful. They give people a place to begin and a shared language for working together. But I have also watched organizations become so confident in the process that the human complexity in front of them is treated as an inconvenience.

We create categories because they help us think. We reduce situations to binary states because systems often require us to. We define users, requirements, success measures and expected outcomes because work needs structure.

Yet the structure is never the person, the team or the organization itself.

Oliver Sacks became an important influence on me because his writing never seemed to lose sight of the person inside the clinical case. He brought scientific curiosity and human curiosity together. His work reminded me that understanding a condition was not the same as understanding the life of the person experiencing it.

I did not fully appreciate at the time how much those early years would influence the rest of my career. I can see it more clearly now.

Theory gives us language. It helps us recognize patterns and benefit from what others have already learned. We should not have to rediscover everything through experience alone.

But experience reveals where the language stops helping. It exposes the assumptions hidden inside a model. It forces us to notice what does not fit and decide whether we will remain curious or defend what we already believe.

That lesson has followed me from healthcare into technology, design, product delivery and organizational change. The work changes. The tension does not.

We need enough theory to enter the work with care. We need enough experience to know that reality will be more complicated. And we need enough humility to let what we encounter change our judgment.

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