Skip to content
How to ThinkIn the Age of AI
Principlev1PR-2123

Prioritize schema interventions by cost-of-misalignment…

Prioritize schema interventions by cost-of-misalignment rather than by visibility or urgency to direct improvement efforts where they create the most value.

Why This Is a Principle

Grounds to Most organizational outcomes are products of system design… (most outcomes are system products), Every system is perfectly designed to get the results… (systems get the results they're designed for), and Human attentional systems evolved to prioritize signals… (attentional systems prioritize immediacy over importance). This is a decision principle that follows from recognizing that visible/urgent problems are not necessarily the most important ones. Actionable and general.

Source Lessons

The schema audit for organizations

Regularly assess whether organizational schemas match current reality — across all dimensions: currency, alignment, propagation, documentation, and debt. The schema audit is the organizational equivalent of the team cognitive audit from The team cognitive audit, scaled to examine the shared mental models that shape the entire organization's behavior.

Connections

Back to Concepts