What is bottom-up organization?

Bottom-up organization is a concept in personal epistemology: Ordered series are built by linking atoms together not by writing one long document.

Example: You have 40 separate notes about improving your team's decision-making process. Individually, each is an observation or a principle. But when you lay them out and start linking — this one follows that one, this cluster forms an argument, these five become a sequence on pre-mortem techniques — a coherent framework emerges that you never could have outlined in advance. The structure was always latent in the atoms. You just had to connect them.

This concept is part of Phase 2 (Atomicity and Decomposition) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for atomicity and decomposition.