How to Extract Your Knowledge Before You Write a Book

Most coaches who decide to write a book open a blank document and start on chapter one. A week later they have three thousand words that read like their website, minus what clients actually pay for.

The knowledge is there; it just does not come out on demand. You have done the work so often that whole steps, and most of the decisions inside them, run without you noticing.

So treat extraction as its own job, done before drafting, with its own tools. Here is the kit.

Why sitting down to write misses the decisions

The evidence comes from surgery, not coaching, and the samples are tiny, so read it as a pattern. Our article on turning expertise into a book summarises it; here we only care what it says about how to extract.

In a 2012 study of ten trauma surgeons, those who described a familiar procedure unaided “omitted nearly 70% of necessary decision steps”. One surgeon questioned with cognitive task analysis, a structured interview method, gave a more complete account, and surgeons who talked it through with instruments and visual aids in hand described the steps more completely (Clark et al., 2012). A 2014 follow-up with three experts found they left out 73% of decision steps; structured prompts lifted the share of steps described from 44% to 66% (Sullivan et al., 2014).

Three rules follow for your kit:

• Questions beat free recall. Someone, even you, has to ask.
• Have the real material in front of you. The workbook or client file does for you what the instruments did for the surgeons.
• Expect a third to stay hidden even when prompted. That is why the kit has several parts and runs for weeks.

MIT Sloan’s Miro Kazakoff calls this the curse of knowledge: “we forget what it was like before we knew that thing” (MIT Sloan). You cannot fully think your way out of that alone.

The extraction kit, and what each part catches

Tool	Catches best	Misses	Time
Self-interview	Method, mistakes, opinions	Decisions you no longer notice	6–7 sessions of 40 minutes
Interview by someone else	Jargon, assumptions, skipped steps	What they do not know to ask	1–2 hours
Critical incident prompts	Judgement calls, cues, stories	The routine middle of your method	20 minutes per incident
Daily capture log	Fresh examples, real phrasing	Days you are too busy to note	5 minutes a day

With time for only two, pick the self-interview and the incidents.

Forty-five self-interview questions, in seven groups

Copy these and do one group per session. Answer about a real, recent situation. If an answer starts with “generally”, name a client (privately) instead.

1. The client’s problem

1. What does a new client usually say in the first call, in their own words?
2. What have they already tried, and why did it not work?
3. What do they think the problem is, and what is it actually?
4. What does it cost them if nothing changes for a year?
5. Which prospects look as if they have this problem but do not?
6. What finally makes someone pick up the phone?

2. Your method’s steps

1. What do you do in the first hour with a new client, in order?
2. What do you ask for before the first session, and why?
3. Which step do clients most want to skip?
4. Which step do you never skip, even under time pressure?
5. How do you know a client is ready for the next stage?
6. If you had one day to train an associate, what would you cover before lunch?
7. Which step did you add most recently, and what went wrong that made you add it?

3. Decision points and judgement calls

1. When do you change the order of your steps?
2. What are the first signs a client is not ready for this work?
3. When do you tell a client to stop, wait or go elsewhere?
4. What do you notice in the first ten minutes that a newer practitioner would miss?
5. When two of your own rules conflict, which wins?
6. What makes you speed up with a client, and what makes you slow down?
7. What do you ask yourself when you are stuck?
8. For the three questions you hear most, what does “it depends” actually depend on?

4. Mistakes you see

1. What is the most common mistake clients make before they reach you?
2. What mistake do senior clients make that junior ones do not?
3. What did you get wrong for years before you corrected it?
4. Which mistake looks like progress while it is happening?
5. What do clients do in month three that undoes month one?
6. Which piece of your advice is ignored most often, and what happens next?

5. Stories

1. Which client do you picture when you explain your core idea?
2. Which client did your method not work for?
3. What was the fastest turnaround you have seen, and what was different?
4. When did a client teach you something that changed your method?
5. When did you get it wrong in front of a client?
6. If the book could hold only one story, which would it be?

6. Disagreements with common advice

1. Which popular book in your field do you disagree with, and on what point?
2. What advice from conference stages makes you wince?
3. What did a client’s previous adviser tell them that you had to undo?
4. What do you believe that most of your peers would argue with?
5. Which “best practice” works for large firms but not for your clients?
6. What did you believe five years ago that you no longer do?

7. Evidence

1. Which results could you describe, and which clients would let you?
2. What do you measure at the start and end of an engagement?
3. Which claims do you make on sales calls that you could not source today?
4. Which figures do you quote from memory, and where did they come from?
5. What pattern across clients could you count from your own records?
6. What would change your mind about your method?

Groups 3 and 6 matter most. Decisions are what the surgical studies found missing, and disagreements are what stop a business book reading like a summary of the field.

Record your answers, then transcribe without tidying

Talk, do not type, as if a client were across the table, with the real material for that topic beside you. Forty minutes, one group.

Any recorder will do. As of November 2026, Apple says Voice Memos transcribes speech on iPhone 12 or later in English and several other languages, though not in every region, and can copy the whole transcript into another document (Apple Support). Other phones and meeting tools have similar features; the main site’s guide to turning podcasts and coaching calls into a book covers the options.

Do not clean up the transcript. Read it once and mark the margin:

• S for a step in your method
• D for a decision (“unless”, “if I see”, “that is when I”)
• M for a mistake or misconception
• St for a story, however short
• E? for a claim that needs evidence you do not have yet

People skip the E? marks, which bite later: a remembered figure is exactly what an AI drafting tool will happily “complete”. See stopping AI inventing facts in your book. Old talks and webinars need different repairs: see turning talks, webinars and sessions into a book.

Get a colleague or client to interview you

You cannot surprise yourself with your own questions. In order of usefulness, we would ask:

A colleague from an adjacent field. An HR director if you coach leaders, a finance consultant if you work on sales. Smart enough to follow, outside enough to ask “why?” where a peer would nod. We rate them above a peer in your own field, who shares your blind spots.

A former client, with care. Strong on group 1 and on before-and-after; weak on your method, which they experienced rather than ran. Agree in advance what the recording is for and whether anything about them could appear. Our guide to client stories and case studies in a book has a permission note to adapt.

A paid interviewer. A ghostwriter or book coach brings practised follow-ups.

Brief them on the reader, the problem and your thinnest question groups, plus three follow-ups for any answer: “What did you notice first?” “What would someone with two years’ experience have done?” “When does that not work?” Ask them to stop you at any term they would not use themselves.

Software can ask some follow-ups too. WritebookAI runs a source analysis on the PDF, Word and text files or pasted notes you give it (your interview transcripts, for example) and shows what they cover and what is missing; its verification interview then asks you about the conflicts and gaps it found. It is free to start. It can only ask about what your material shows or leaves out, so treat it as a second pass after a human interview, not a replacement for a colleague who knows your clients.

Critical incident prompts for decisions you forgot making

The self-interview gets your method. Incidents get your judgement. John Flanagan’s critical incident technique, published in 1954, gathered specific episodes with prompts of the form “Think of a time when…” (Flanagan, 1954). Gary Klein’s later Critical Decision Method applies “a set of cognitive probes to actual, non-routine events that require expert decision-making” (Klein).

Flanagan noted that “extreme incidents can be more accurately identified than behavior which is more nearly average”, so ask for best and worst cases, not typical ones. He also treated vague reports as a sign of poor memory, so if you cannot recall who said what, pick another incident.

• Think of a time when you changed your plan halfway through a session.
• Think of a time when you told a client something they did not want to hear.
• Think of a time when your usual approach failed.
• Think of a time when a client succeeded despite ignoring your advice.

For each, we use four passes, loosely adapted from that literature. Tell the story. Retell it as a timeline, marking each choice. At every choice, say what you noticed, what you rejected and what you expected. Then ask what would have changed your decision. That last pass is where unwritten rules appear.

A worked example: one incident, five pieces of a chapter

Imagine Ruth, a hypothetical executive coach who works with newly promoted finance directors. She records eleven minutes on “a time I changed my plan halfway through a session”: a client who arrived wanting help with a board presentation.

Mark	What she said, in short	Where it goes
S	She asks for the last board pack before session two	Method chapter, step 2
D	If a client talks about slides for five minutes, she stops and asks who they are worried about	Judgement section, same chapter
M	New finance directors over-prepare the numbers and under-prepare the question they fear	Early-mistakes chapter
St	The session itself, disguised, consent still to get	Chapter opening
E?	“Most new FDs have this in their first year”: no source	Claim list; find data or drop

Ruth had used the five-minute rule for years and never written it down. That line is worth more to her book than the method she had already drafted.

Run the capture over two to four weeks

Flanagan observed that “memory is improved if it is known in advance that the behavior to be observed is to be remembered”, and wanted details recorded while still fresh (Flanagan, 1954). So capture during normal client weeks, not at a retreat (more in writing a book when you have no time).

Week	Sessions	Daily log focus
1	Groups 1 and 2	One client moment
2	Groups 3 and 4; two incidents	Decisions only
3	Groups 5, 6 and 7; one outside interview	Disagreements you notice
4 (optional)	Second interview on the thinnest group	Evidence you could collect

When to stop extracting and start organising

Stop when your last two recordings added no new D marks. If group 6 is still thin, do one more interview on disagreements first; a book without a point of view is the hardest kind to rescue later.

What you have is a pile, not a book. Sorting it into chapters is covered in organising years of experience into book chapters. The St marks become a story bank (finding and organising real stories for your book), and if the D marks keep tracing the same sequence, creating a framework for your book will help you test it.

Tomorrow’s job is smaller: print group 3, put your latest client file beside it, and record forty minutes. More on this stage sits under frameworks, stories and original knowledge.