When Anna Oh, Head of Product & Design at Norbert Health, first imagined her care robot, she wasn’t really aiming for a face. She pictured something sleek and subtle—the kind of clean, abstract shape many designers dream of signing off on.

He didn’t dodge the tough questions—he answered them before I even asked, already including the counterexamples.

We tend to picture skill as something inside us—portable, earned, ours. Some of it is. But a lot of what we call expertise is really a fit: a hard-earned balance between a person and a system they’ve lived in for years.