Frequently asked questions about thinking, epistemology, and cognitive tools. 300 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.
Two symmetric failures. The first is treating processes as sacred — refusing to modify a process because 'it has always been done this way' or because the process was designed by someone with authority. This treats the process as a fixed instruction rather than a living schema, ensuring that the.
Standard operating procedures, workflows, and routines are not just instructions — they are codified organizational schemas that embed assumptions about how work should flow, who should be involved, and what quality means. When processes are treated as fixed instructions rather than living.
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.
Two symmetric failures. The first is value inflation — listing so many values that they provide no guidance. When an organization has eight or ten values, the values cannot function as schemas because they do not resolve tradeoffs. An organization that values 'innovation, quality, speed,.
Organizational values are not aspirational posters on walls. They are schemas — shared mental models of what matters — that determine how the organization resolves tradeoffs, allocates resources, and evaluates performance. The gap between stated values and operating values is one of the most.
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.
Trying to change culture directly rather than changing the schemas that produce it. Culture is an emergent property — it arises from the interaction of lower-level components (schemas) and cannot be changed by addressing the emergent property itself. Telling people to 'be more innovative' does not.
Culture is not a mysterious force. It is the emergent result of all the shared mental models — identity, strategy, process, values, risk, authority, time — operating simultaneously in the organization. When you change the schemas, you change the culture. When you try to change the culture without.
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.
Treating schema conflicts as one side being right and the other wrong. When engineering and marketing disagree, the typical organizational response is to decide which team's perspective is correct and force the other to conform. But schema conflicts between functions usually reflect different but.
Different departments, functions, and levels within an organization often hold conflicting schemas — different mental models of what matters, how work should flow, and what success looks like. These conflicts are not personality clashes or communication problems. They are structural: each group's.
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,.
Assuming that formal onboarding programs are sufficient for schema propagation. Formal onboarding covers policies, tools, and procedures — the explicit layer of organizational knowledge. But the most consequential schemas are implicit: who to go to for real answers, how decisions actually get.
New members absorb organizational schemas through onboarding, socialization, and observation — but the propagation process is largely undesigned. What new members learn is determined more by who they sit near, who mentors them, and what they observe in their first weeks than by any formal.
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).
Two failures that are mirror images. The first is schema rigidity — refusing to update schemas until a crisis forces the change. This produces organizations that are perfectly adapted to the past and catastrophically maladapted to the present, which is the pattern described in the example above..
Organizations must update their schemas as the environment changes — but most fail to do so until a crisis forces the update. The same mechanisms that make schemas useful (they simplify decision-making by filtering information) make them resistant to change (they filter out the very information.
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.
Confusing documented knowledge with operational knowledge. An organization can have extensive documentation — wikis, runbooks, architecture diagrams — and still have a fragile knowledge graph if no one has internalized the documented knowledge well enough to act on it under pressure. Documentation.
Every organization has a knowledge graph — a network of expertise, institutional memory, relationships, and documented information that its schemas operate on. Mapping this graph reveals where knowledge is concentrated, where it is fragile (held by a single person), where it is redundant, 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.
Treating knowledge transfer as a departure event rather than an ongoing practice. When an employee gives notice, organizations often schedule a two-week knowledge transfer period. But two weeks is not enough to transfer years of accumulated knowledge — especially the tacit knowledge that cannot be.
When people leave organizations, their schemas often leave with them — the tacit knowledge of why systems were designed a certain way, how processes actually work (versus how they are documented), and who to call when things break. This knowledge loss is invisible until the moment the knowledge is.