Build the diagnostic muscle for reading organizational culture, political signals, and network dynamics in real time. Learn the balcony/dance-floor discipline and the technical/adaptive distinction. Distinguish consensus cultures from hierarchical, conflict-avoidant from confrontational, low-trust from high-trust. Read what's not being said — and produce written surface maps you keep current. Surface-reading an organization is reading an unfamiliar codebase. Day one you read the schema and the routes and think you understand the application. Week two you've found the service objects holding the real business logic and the background jobs the schema never mentioned. Month two you've found the legacy controller serving the most-trafficked endpoint and the branch where half of next quarter's work already lives. The actual application is all of these surfaces simultaneously, plus the veterans' shared understanding of which parts are stable. Political surface-reading is the same discipline: don't trust the schema; map the actual flow; find the legacy controllers; find where decisions actually get made. And the log is observability. The signals were always there — whose face changes, who goes quiet, whose ideas get repeated back as someone else's. You've been failing to grep them. Thirty days of collection is how you discover your environment was emitting structured logs all along.
This course unlocks once you've finished its prerequisite. Open prerequisite →
The 30-day political log is going to feel paranoid for the first week, and I want to name that explicitly because the paranoia reading is the wrong reading. The right reading is o…
Power literacy (M1) tells you what kind of system you're in; M3 tells you how to read it day-to-day. Engineering training cultivates a specific blind spot: the assumption that org…
Approach: Essential
Approach: Essential
Approach: Essential
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Approach: Important
1. 30-Day Political Log. For 30 days, in your current role, track political signals daily in a private file: who interrupted whom; whose ideas got credit; whose decisions got reve…
8 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.