Frequently asked questions about thinking, epistemology, and cognitive tools. 100 answers
Choose one process your team follows routinely. Write down the process steps, then extract the assumptions embedded in each step. For each step, ask: 'What does this step assume about the risk, the people, the technology, or the environment?' For example, a code review process might embed these.
Choose one of your organization's stated values. For each, answer three questions: (1) What would this value look like if it were fully operational — what specific behaviors, decisions, and tradeoff resolutions would you observe? (2) What does your organization actually do in the situations where.
Map your organization's culture as a set of interacting schemas. List the organization's operating schemas in five categories: (1) Identity — 'We are a [type] organization.' (2) Strategy — 'We win by [approach].' (3) Process — 'Work flows through [mechanism].' (4) Values — 'We prioritize [X] over.
Identify one recurring cross-functional conflict in your organization. Ask each side to independently answer three questions: (1) 'What is the goal of our work together?' (2) 'What does quality look like?' (3) 'How should priorities be set?' Compare the answers. The divergences are schema.
Think about your first month at your current organization. What were the three most important things you learned — not technical skills, but how the organization works? How did you learn them: through formal onboarding, through a mentor, through observation, or through making a mistake? For each,.
Identify one organizational schema that has been stable for more than five years. Ask: (1) What environmental conditions was this schema adapted to when it formed? (2) Have those conditions changed? (3) If the conditions have changed, has the schema been updated to reflect the new conditions? (4).
Create a knowledge map for your team. List the five to ten most critical knowledge domains for your team's work. For each domain, list every team member and rate their knowledge level: 'can teach' (4), 'independent' (3), 'with documentation' (2), 'no knowledge' (1). Sum each domain's scores and.
Identify the three people on your team or in your organization whose departure would cause the most knowledge disruption. For each person, list their unique knowledge — the things they know that no one else knows. Then assess: How much of that knowledge is documented? How much is externalized in.
Choose one important system, process, or decision that your team is responsible for. Check the existing documentation. Does it capture only what (current state, procedures, configurations) or does it also capture why (design rationale, alternatives considered, tradeoffs accepted)? If the.
Identify one persistent problem in your team or organization — an issue that has been addressed multiple times without lasting resolution. For this problem, distinguish between single-loop and double-loop responses. Single-loop: What actions has the organization taken to address the problem within.
Conduct a schema debt audit for your team or organization. List five to seven core assumptions the organization operates from (use the schema surfacing methods from L-1623 if needed). For each assumption, answer: (1) When was this assumption formed? (2) What were the conditions when it formed? (3).
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.