Frequently asked questions about thinking, epistemology, and cognitive tools. 497 answers
Choose one strategic concept that your organization's leadership discusses regularly (a strategic priority, a cultural value, or a competitive positioning). Ask people at three different levels — executive, middle management, and individual contributor — to explain this concept in their own words.
Choose a request or proposal you need to make to a different function. Before presenting it, identify the receiving function's schema: What do they optimize for? What do they measure? What do they consider high-quality work? Then translate your request into their schema. If you are asking.
Conduct a schema audit using this eight-dimension framework. Rate each 1-5 (1 = severely outdated or broken, 3 = functional but inconsistent, 5 = current and well-maintained). (1) Identity schema — Does the organization's self-concept match its current reality? (2) Strategy schema — Is the.
List three decisions you have made as a leader in the past month. For each decision, ask: Was this decision about what to do in a specific situation, or was it about how the team should think about a category of situations? Decisions about what to do are operational decisions — they solve the.
Choose one organizational behavior you want to improve — meeting quality, decision speed, customer responsiveness, code quality, or any persistent behavioral challenge. Instead of creating a new rule or process to mandate the desired behavior, identify the schema that would produce the behavior.
Select one stated value from your organization (or team). For the next week, keep a private log of every decision, interaction, or policy you observe that relates to this value. Record two categories: (1) instances where the organization acted in accordance with the stated value, especially when.
Map your organization's cultural infrastructure across four dimensions. (1) Decision infrastructure: How are decisions made? Who has authority for what? How fast can decisions be made at each level? (2) Information infrastructure: How does information flow? Who knows what? How quickly does.
Identify one cultural pattern you want to strengthen or change in your team. Do not write a policy or make an announcement. Instead, identify three specific behaviors you can repeat daily that would deposit the desired culture. For example, if you want a culture of learning from failure: (1) Start.
Conduct a personal tolerance audit. List the three behaviors in your team or organization that most frustrate you or that you know violate the stated values. For each behavior, answer honestly: (1) Have I directly addressed this behavior with the person responsible? (2) If I addressed it, did I.
Review your last three hires (or the last three people added to your team). For each, assess: (1) What cultural behaviors has this person reinforced through their daily patterns? (2) What cultural behaviors has this person challenged or contradicted? (3) If you could go back to the hiring.
Audit your team's onboarding process by mapping what a new member actually experiences in their first two weeks. List every interaction, meeting, task, and resource they encounter, hour by hour. Then classify each experience: (T) Technical onboarding — learning tools, systems, and processes. (C).
List all recurring meetings, events, and shared experiences in your team or organization. For each, identify: (1) What cultural schema does this ritual encode? (A daily standup might encode 'transparency and accountability.' A retrospective might encode 'continuous improvement.' A Friday happy.
Identify the three most frequently told stories in your organization — the stories that come up in orientation, in team conversations, in the way senior leaders explain 'how we do things here.' For each story, answer: (1) What cultural schema does this story encode? (2) Is the encoded schema still.
Walk through your workspace — physical or digital — and inventory the artifacts. For physical spaces: What does the office layout communicate about what the organization values? What do the meeting rooms look like — are they designed for presentation (projectors, podiums) or for collaboration.
Choose one cultural value your organization claims to hold and measure it using all three approaches. (1) Behavioral observation: Identify two or three behaviors that would be present if this value were genuinely enacted. Track those behaviors for one week. How frequently do they occur? (2).
Identify one cultural pattern in your team or organization that has persisted despite explicit attempts to change it. Reconstruct the history of change attempts: What was tried? How long was each attempt sustained? What happened when the attempt ended? Then analyze the persistence through the.
Identify one cultural change you want to make. Instead of communicating the desired belief ('We should value X'), identify three specific behaviors that would constitute the culture you want. For each behavior, design a structural mechanism that makes the behavior the default rather than the.
Think of a recent change initiative in your organization that encountered resistance. Map the resistance across four categories: (1) Social pressure — Did peers discourage the new behavior through informal signals? (2) Institutional inertia — Did existing systems, processes, or tools make the new.
Map the sub-cultures in your organization. Start by identifying the groups: functions (engineering, marketing, sales, support), geographies (if applicable), hierarchical levels (leadership team, middle management, individual contributors), and tenure cohorts (founding team, early hires, recent.
Take your organization's current strategic priority and assess its cultural alignment. List the three to five key behaviors the strategy requires for successful execution. For each required behavior, assess: Does our current culture support this behavior (the cultural infrastructure makes it easy.
Design a cultural feedback loop for your team. Choose one cultural value that matters most and identify: (1) The sensing mechanism — how will you detect when behavior drifts from the desired pattern? This could be a periodic survey, a behavioral metric, a ritual that surfaces cultural health, or a.
Identify one thing your organization does well that competitors struggle to replicate. Ask: Is the source of that advantage a product feature, a technology, a process, or a cultural pattern? If it is a product or technology, it is vulnerable to replication. If it is a process, it is moderately.
Assess your team's or organization's culture along the conformity-sovereignty spectrum. List five areas of organizational life: (1) How work is done (methodology, processes). (2) What problems are worth solving (strategic priorities). (3) How ideas are evaluated (criteria, evidence standards). (4).
Identify one cultural evolution you want to make — a gradual shift from a current cultural pattern to a modified one. Design a 12-month evolution plan: (1) Month 1-3: Identify one context (a single team, project, or process) where the desired cultural pattern can be piloted without disrupting the.