I Am Capability

Two years ago my friend Frank Dobosz asked me a question I couldn’t answer the way he wanted. “I don’t understand, Will. What is your product?”

I said, “I’m the product.”

He said, “No — but what are you selling?”

“I am capability. Will Tygart is capability.”

He didn’t understand it. Most people don’t. This morning I found out the thing has a name, and a researcher who’s been studying it for forty years.

His name is Gary Klein. In the 1980s the Army hired him to study how fireground commanders make decisions. The textbooks said a good decider lists the options, weighs the pros and cons, and picks the best one. The commanders did almost none of that. One of them told Klein, “I don’t make decisions.” Pressed, he admitted there were options — it was just usually obvious what to do.

Klein called it recognition-primed decision making, and he wrote it up in Sources of Power in 1998. Here’s how it actually runs:

You recognize, you don’t analyze. A lifetime of situations is stocked in your head. A new one shows up and it rhymes with the old ones. You don’t build a spreadsheet. You see it.

The pattern carries its own move. Every stored situation brings the action that worked last time. You’re never starting from a blank menu.

You run the tape. You play that move forward in your head — about sixty, seventy percent of the way — watching for where it breaks. If it holds, you go. If it breaks, you throw the path away and run the next one.

That’s the whole engine. And here’s the part nobody prices: every path up a mountain is uphill. So the skill was never the climbing. The skill is pricing the paths before your legs are spent.

It’s the supermarket line. You’re standing in a slow line and the one two over looks shorter. Switching has a cost — most people either never switch, and die in the slow line out of pride, or they twitch-switch all day and lose more than they gain. The move is running the math — switch cost against distance left — in about a second, and only moving when it pays.

I always thought this was called paying attention. Customer service. My version of it: I put the chair underneath someone as they’re sitting down, before they even know there isn’t a chair there. Same engine, pointed at a person instead of a problem. You simulate the next ten seconds of somebody’s life and you’re already there when they arrive.

Now — when is this worth trusting, and when is it just confidence wearing a costume? Klein answered that too, and he answered it with his natural enemy. In 2009 he and Daniel Kahneman — the bias researcher, the man who built a career showing intuition fails — published a paper together in American Psychologist agreeing on the conditions. Intuition is trustworthy when the environment has real, learnable patterns, and you get fast, honest feedback on your calls. Mine qualifies. Jobs, clients, a screen that either shows the line or doesn’t. The feedback hits immediately and it doesn’t flatter. That’s why this is earned and not lucky. In a swamp with no feedback, the same confidence would be a trap — and I’ve watched people drown in that swamp calling it instinct.

Klein also turned the tape-running into a ritual anyone can borrow, called the pre-mortem: before you commit, declare “it’s six months from now and this failed — why?” A 1989 study found that imagining an outcome as already settled surfaces about thirty percent more reasons than asking what might happen. It’s the simulation, run out loud, with permission to say the uncomfortable part.

And then there’s the piece that closes the loop for me. An AI does pattern matching too — Klein just described what a model does. The difference is the feedback. The commander’s feedback hit his own skin. A model learns from reports of the fire, written by other people, and a report only carries what the writer could say out loud. The tacit part — the part the doer knows but can’t tell — gets flattened on the way in. So the model holds an inference of experience. Never the experience.

What’s left, the part that doesn’t flatten, is taste. Taste is a whole history of seeing, compressed into this, not that. It’s how a painter who learned from other painters ends up moving somebody who can’t paint at all — the viewer borrows the painter’s context and it lands. Capability can be hired. Taste transfers.

So can you bottle it? Honestly — partially. You can’t bottle the seeing. That lives in the reps. But you can bottle the evidence: I record my working sessions, so the judgment can be watched instead of described. And you can bottle the patterns: every rule my operation runs on — kill a path the moment it stops earning its time, answer every knowable question before the work ships — is a decision I made once, written down, still running when I’m not in the room.

That’s what a client actually buys from Tygart Media. Not deliverables. Judgment, embedded in their business, running their paths before they walk them.

Frank asked the wrong question two years ago. There was never a product on a shelf.

Where there’s a Will, there’s a way. Turns out there’s a literature on it.