Frequently asked questions about thinking, epistemology, and cognitive tools. 497 answers
Test your organization's purpose as a coordination mechanism using three scenarios. For each, ask: does our stated purpose help resolve this decision, or is the purpose too vague to guide the choice? Scenario 1: Two projects compete for the same engineering resources. Project A is more profitable;.
Conduct an information accessibility audit for your team. List the ten most important decisions your team makes in a typical month. For each decision, identify: (1) What information is needed to make this decision well? (2) Who currently has access to that information? (3) How does the.
Map your organization's current feedback systems at four frequencies. For each frequency, identify: (1) Real-time — what automated or immediate signals does the organization generate about its performance? Are they visible to the people who can act on them? (2) Weekly — what regular information.
Design and run a lightweight organizational retrospective with three to five representatives from different teams. Use this structure: (1) Individual brainstorm (5 minutes): each participant writes answers to three questions — 'What is working well across the organization?' 'What is frustrating or.
Select one governance mechanism in your organization — an approval process, a meeting cadence, a reporting structure, a resource allocation method — and evaluate it using four questions: (1) What purpose does this mechanism serve? What organizational need does it address? (2) Is it still serving.
Practice consent-based decision-making on one pending decision in your team. Follow this protocol: (1) A proposer presents the decision with a clear recommendation and supporting reasoning. (2) Each participant responds with one of three responses: consent ('I support this'), concern ('I have a.
Map the authority structure of your team or department. For each type of decision (technical, hiring, resource allocation, process, quality, communication), identify: (1) Who currently has the authority to make this decision? (2) Is this authority attached to a person (because of their position).
Conduct a knowledge audit of your team. Identify the five most critical types of knowledge your team possesses — the knowledge that, if lost (through attrition, role changes, or organizational restructuring), would significantly impact performance. For each knowledge type, assess: (1) Where does.
Identify one type of recurring problem in your team or organization — something that happens repeatedly, is handled individually each time, and never gets resolved at the systemic level. Document five recent instances. For each instance, record: what happened, what caused it, how it was resolved,.
Map the emotional landscape of your team or organization right now. Use an anonymous survey with three questions: (1) What emotion best describes how you feel about your work right now? (Choose from: energized, satisfied, frustrated, anxious, burned out, hopeful, confused, angry, grateful,.
Conduct a resilience assessment of your team using this stress test: imagine that tomorrow, one of the following disruptions occurs. For each, assess how long it would take your team to restore normal function. (1) Your team lead or manager is suddenly unavailable for two weeks — can the team.
Practice organizational sensemaking on a recent ambiguous event in your organization — a competitor action, a customer behavior change, an internal metric shift, or a market development. Gather three to five people from different functions or teams and run this 30-minute protocol: (1) Data sharing.
Assess the individual sovereignty conditions in your team using four dimensions: (1) Epistemic sovereignty — are team members free to form their own opinions, voice disagreement, and challenge the prevailing narrative? Or is dissent discouraged, and conformity rewarded? (2) Creative sovereignty —.
Assess whether your team or organization has the four components of a self-improving system: (1) Sensing — does the system automatically generate data about its own performance? (Automated metrics, customer signals, quality indicators.) (2) Reflecting — does the system regularly examine its.
Map your organization's epistemic infrastructure using the curriculum's core concepts. For each concept, assess the organizational equivalent: (1) Externalization (L-0001) — does the organization externalize its thinking into documents, models, and frameworks that can be examined and improved? Or.
Select one epistemic principle from this curriculum and trace it across four scales. Choose from: externalization, connection, retrieval, metacognition, or bias correction. For your chosen principle, describe: (1) How you practice it individually — what specific mechanism do you use? (2) How your.
This is the final exercise of the entire curriculum. It synthesizes everything. Write a one-page assessment of the epistemic infrastructure at three scales of your life: (1) Individual — rate your personal epistemic infrastructure across the five core functions: externalization (do you.