Long ago, one of my teachers told me, “You know Naz, most people know how to add, but they don’t know how they add.”
That line stuck with me for years. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but I kept coming back to it. Eventually, I realized it explained something I was seeing everywhere in my work: the gap between being able to do something and being able to teach it.
This article is about why knowing how you do what you do matters for knowledge transfer, increased productivity, and improved business outcomes. Too often we focus on the outcomes and not how we get to them.
Quick, what’s 48 plus 27?
You got 75, right?
Now tell me exactly how you did that.
Most people pause here. “I just... knew it?” Or maybe you say something vague like “I added them.” But that’s not really an answer. That’s just restating the question.
What actually happened in your brain? Maybe you rounded 48 to 50, added 27 to get 77, then subtracted the 2 you borrowed. Or you added 20 to 48 to get 68, then added 7. Or you noticed 8 and 7 make 15, carried the 1, and added 4 and 2 and 1 to get 7.
The point is, you did something. You had a strategy. But you probably couldn’t tell me what it was in the moment.
I’ve spent a considerable amount of my time walking people through steps like these. Not arithmetic, obviously, but the actual work. Every procedure, every decision point, every little thing I do without thinking. It’s tedious. Sometimes it feels absurd, like narrating how to breathe. But it’s the only way anything actually transfers.
We’re All Running on Autopilot
This is what being competent actually feels like. You execute complex procedures fluently, automatically, without conscious access to the steps.
You don’t think about how to ride a bike while you’re riding it. You don’t think about grammar rules while you’re speaking. You don’t think about the individual keystrokes while you’re typing.
Cognitive scientists call this “procedural knowledge.” It’s knowing how to do something without being able to fully explain how you do it. The knowledge gets compiled down into something smooth and fast and mostly invisible to your conscious mind.
And the better you get at something, the more invisible the process becomes.
The Expert’s Curse
This creates a real problem when you need to teach someone else.
You’re good at your job. You can look at a spreadsheet and see the problem immediately. You can talk to a difficult client and navigate the conversation skillfully. You can prioritize a chaotic inbox in minutes.
But when your report asks “how do I do that?”, you find yourself saying deeply unhelpful things like:
“You just need to get a feel for it”
“You’ll understand with experience”
“Just use your judgment”
You’re not being evasive. You genuinely don’t have conscious access to your own process anymore.
This is what separates okay managers from great ones.
“Just Hire Experts”
Some people will say, “That’s why you hire experienced people. That’s why you pay for expertise.”
But experience is neither good nor bad until you can extract value from it in your context. I’ve seen plenty of people with ten years of experience who really just lived one year ten times. They show up with a decade on their resume, but they never learned how they do what they do. They can execute, sure. But they can’t teach. They can’t adapt. They can’t articulate why something works.
Raw experience doesn’t compound unless you’re actively learning from it. And you can’t learn from something you can’t see.
This is why two people can do the same job for the same amount of time and one becomes genuinely expert while the other just becomes... experienced. One person is examining their process, refining it, understanding the mechanics. The other is just repeating it.
Teaching Paths, Not Destinations
Bad managers manage to outcomes. “Increase sales by 20%.” “Improve customer satisfaction scores.” “Make the client happy.”
These are destinations. They’re important. But they’re not actionable for someone who doesn’t already know the route.
Good managers teach the path. They make their invisible thinking visible:
“When I’m on a call with an upset client, I let them vent completely without interrupting. I’ve learned that people need to feel heard before they can hear you. Then I restate their concern in my own words to show I understood. Then, and only then, I offer solutions. Watch me do it on this next call.”
Or: “When I look at this report, I’m checking three things in order. First, does the overall trend make sense given what we know about the market? Second, are there any outliers that seem off? Third, what story does this tell about where we should focus next quarter? Let me walk you through my thought process on this one.”
This is cognitive apprenticeship. This is how crafts used to be taught before we moved everything into classrooms and PowerPoints.
Making the Invisible Visible
The most valuable thing you can do as a leader is to slow down and narrate your own thinking.
Before your next decision, pause and explain your reasoning out loud. Before you send that email, talk through why you structured it that way. Before you prioritize your day, explain how you’re making those tradeoffs.
Yes, it feels slower. Yes, it feels obvious to you.
But your expertise is invisible to everyone else. They see you do the magic trick. They don’t see the technique.
When you force yourself to articulate your process, you often discover you’re doing things you didn’t even realize you were doing. You find the patterns in your own behavior.
You learn how you think by teaching others how to think.
The Real Work of Leadership
Anyone can set goals. Anyone can demand results.
The real work is building the capacity in your team to achieve those results independently. And you can’t build capacity by just showing people the finish line.
You have to walk the path with them. You have to narrate the turns. You have to make your compiled knowledge explicit again.
It’s the difference between saying “get to 75” and saying “when you have 48 and 27, try rounding one number first to make the math easier.”
Most people never learn to do this. They stay stuck in their own heads, frustrated that others can’t just see what they see.
But the ones who figure it out? They build teams that don’t need them. They create organizations that know not just what to do, but how to do it.
They teach people how to add.