Professionalism has ruined humanity.

I was watching an interview recently. Totally unrelated to work, just something that came across my feed. The interviewer wasn't running through his list of questions. He shared something personal, something that clearly still hurt, and he got emotional doing it. The actors he was interviewing got up and went to him.

Then they sat back down and did the rest of the interview, and it was better than any version of that conversation that would have happened otherwise. They told him things. He asked better questions because he wasn't performing neutrality anymore.

A lot of people in that industry would call what he did unprofessional.

Jung wrote that when two personalities meet it works like two chemical substances making contact: if there is any reaction at all, both are transformed. The correct, formal, well-mannered version of that interview would have produced no reaction. Nothing would have been transformed. It would have been perfectly professional.

That word is doing something ugly, and I've finally got the words for what.

Two different things wear the same word

There is professionalism as craft. You show up when you said you would. You know your work cold. You deliver what you promised, on the date you promised it, and when you're wrong you say so early. That kind is non-negotiable and I will defend it all day.

Then there is professionalism as theater. The register you switch into on a call. The email that takes four paragraphs to avoid saying the thing. The blazer. The formalities that circle the actual reason everyone is in the room without ever landing on it.

I'm not attacking the first one. I'm attacking the second, and the second has eaten the first one's name.

Jung had a word for the second one, and he took it from the theater. Persona is the Latin name for the mask an actor wore on stage, and he used it for the face we assemble to meet what the world expects. He never said having one was the problem. You need one. Everybody has a version of themselves for the office, the in-laws, the client dinner, and a person with no mask at all is exhausting to be near.

The problem is forgetting you have it on. When that happens the mask stops being something you put on for the room and becomes the only thing that walks into the room.

That's my whole complaint in one sentence. Not that people wear a mask at work. That entire industries have fused with theirs and can no longer locate the face underneath.

It isn't lost on me that in that clip, the people who took the mask off first were professional actors.

Distance is the product

Here's what the theater actually does. It converts people into roles. There's no longer a person across from you with a mortgage and a bad quarter and a boss breathing down their neck. There's a vendor. A stakeholder. A resource. A counterparty.

And it is much easier to do something selfish to a counterparty than to a person.

That's the whole mechanism. Most of what people do that goes against the collective good, the stuff that quietly breaks the social contract we all pretend we still have, gets easier the further you are from the human being who absorbs it. The formalities are what create that distance. Politely. With very good grammar.

Jung's other idea earns its place here. Whatever doesn't fit the mask doesn't evaporate. It gets pushed somewhere you don't look, and the less of it you'll admit to carrying, the denser it gets. He called that the shadow, and the part people skip is that it doesn't sit still. It comes out sideways, in the places you've quietly given yourself permission not to examine.

An organization hands out a lot of those places. A decision routed through four committees has no author. A layoff written up as a realignment has no people in the sentence. Ask anyone in the chain and not one of them did a thing they would call cruel, and something cruel happened anyway.

That isn't a gap in anyone's ethics training. That's the ordinary output of a room full of people fused to their personas, on a Tuesday, hitting their numbers.

Every business I've run, I've refused to do it that way. I talk to clients like people. I say the uncomfortable thing in the room instead of the safe version over email. That has brought me most of what I've built, and it has also cost me real work, because some buyers want the suit and the script and are actively unsettled when they don't get it. Both of those are true at the same time and I've stopped pretending otherwise.

The RFP is professionalism in purchasing form

I'm in a different industry now than I was for most of my career, and the exact same thing is happening here, wearing a different outfit.

Companies buying AI are selecting partners through RFPs. Scored matrices. Capability grids. The same instrument you'd use to bid out a construction project.

For a construction project, that instrument is correct. Forty yards of concrete is forty yards of concrete. The spec is the spec, the schedule is the schedule, and the cheapest compliant bid is genuinely the right answer. Nothing about the humanity of the supplier changes what shows up on the truck. The RFP exists to remove human variables from the decision, and for commodities, removing them is the point.

Now apply that instrument to a system whose entire value is human variables.

Hard data in, hard data out

In the early 2000s there was a whole industry that would digitize your paper. Scanning warehouses. You shipped them your filing cabinets and they shipped you back the same information in a new format. Useful work. Real businesses. I'm not knocking it.

But nothing new entered the building. Hard data in, hard data out, different container.

A lot of what's being sold as AI right now is the 2026 version of a scanning warehouse. Point the model at the documents you already have. Index the SharePoint nobody has cleaned since 2019. Summarize the tickets. That is part of the job and it should get done.

It is not the thing that changes your company.

The thing that changes your company is sitting in the heads of your most senior people. How your best estimator knows a job is going to go sideways before anyone can articulate why. Which client your principal will bend a rule for and what makes that one different. What your top operator looks at first, what makes them say no, what they quietly let slide because the policy is wrong and everyone knows it.

Michael Polanyi put it plainly in 1966: we know more than we can tell. He was describing how you recognize a face or stay upright on a bike, things you perform flawlessly and cannot explain. It describes your best estimator exactly.

There is no piece of paper with that on it. There never was. You cannot scan it, because it was never written down, and in a lot of cases the person holding it has never been asked to say it out loud.

You cannot extract that through a procurement process

Getting that knowledge out of someone requires them to tell you the real version. Not the org chart version. The real one, including the parts that would look bad written down, including the shortcut they've taken for eleven years that works.

People tell you that when they trust you. They tell you when the person asking has been straight with them, has admitted what they don't know, and has demonstrated they aren't going to use it against them in a status report.

Nobody has ever given that version of the truth to a vendor who was selected because their capability matrix scored 4.2 out of 5.

So the format has a hole in it exactly where the value is. An RFP can reliably select for certifications, insurance, formatting discipline, and previous experience answering RFPs. It cannot select for whether your people will tell this person the truth. And that, not the tech stack, is what determines whether the engagement produces anything.

I've written before about why we'll send our proposal to your other bidders, and about the fraud problem nobody wants to name. This is the same rot from a different angle. Those are about what vendors do. This one is about what the buying process makes impossible.

Two questions worth more than the whole document

If you're a company about to run a process to select an AI partner, you can replace most of the document with two questions.

Which specific line item in our budget are we trying to move? Not "improve efficiency." A number that already exists, that someone already owns, that shows up somewhere real. If nobody in the room can name it, the initiative isn't ready and no vendor can save it.

Who are the people we're trying to support, and what is actually hard about their day? Named humans. Not departments. The senior person who can't take a vacation because four decisions a day route through them. The junior who waits two days for an answer that lives in one person's head.

Any partner worth hiring can engage with both of those in plain language on the first call. Most of what's in the RFP is there to protect the buyer from having to have that conversation.

More on that distinction in what firms mean when they ask for integration.

The hardest sell

The hardest thing I do isn't technical. It's getting to the human level with an organization that has built an entire apparatus for staying out of it. Every formality, every layer of process, every carefully neutral email is load-bearing for somebody's protection, and I'm asking them to set it down and talk to me about how their business really works.

That interviewer got a better interview because he broke the format. Not because breaking formats is clever, but because the format was standing between him and the only thing worth being there for. He took the mask off first. That's why they did too.

Most business formats are doing the same work in the other direction. We just call it professionalism and put it on a letterhead.