An examination of how different professions attend to reality, solve problems, and miss what falls outside their field of vision.
This book grew out of a long-standing interest in how different professions pay attention — and how those patterns of attention make them exceptionally good at solving some problems while leaving others unseen.
Every profession develops a way of noticing the world. Over time, this becomes both its strength and its constraint. What is foregrounded becomes obvious, urgent, and actionable. What sits outside that frame quietly disappears, even when it matters.
How Professions Think explores this dynamic across roughly thirty professions, asking a simple question of each: what kind of problem are you brilliant at solving, and what do you reliably overlook? The book treats professional thinking not as abstract theory, but as a practical orientation to reality.
One application is cross-disciplinary learning. When people understand how other professions think, they can borrow ways of seeing rather than importing surface-level methods. This is often how innovation actually happens — not through novelty, but through translated attention.
Another application is organisational collaboration. Many of the hardest problems in modern organisations sit between functions. Risk, finance, HR, IT and strategy frequently struggle not because of capability, but because they are speaking different languages shaped by different attentional habits.
The book includes a section on common corporate functions, examining what each is trained to notice, what it is rewarded for prioritising, and how this shapes decision-making. Used well, this becomes a kind of translation guide — a way of speaking to others in terms that matter to them without losing your own perspective.
The intended audience includes people working in supporting and governance roles — particularly those who must influence without authority. For them, understanding how others think is not optional; it is the work.
There is also a creative strand. Writers, performers and artists often need to inhabit professional worlds with credibility. Understanding how a profession attends to reality is often the difference between caricature and truth.
At a deeper level, the book is an argument for multidisciplinary intelligence. Most of us cannot work in thirty professions across a lifetime. But we can learn to move between perspectives deliberately, rather than becoming narrower with experience.
The project draws inspiration from Peter Drucker’s insistence on the responsibility of the knowledge worker to actively shape their thinking over time — including his recommendation that people undertake sustained periods of deep inquiry into unfamiliar domains.
How Professions Think is a practical attempt to make that possible: a guide to expanding judgment by studying attention itself.
The book is currently in progress and expected in early 2026.
Juan Gris’s The Musician’s Table presents a world assembled through partial views, structure, and deliberate attention. It reflects the central idea of this book: that every profession brings clarity to some aspects of reality while obscuring others.
