Surface the engineer's default avoidance pattern and cost it out honestly. Develop a clean, research-grounded definition of politics — one that distinguishes politics from manipulation, influence from coercion, power from authority. Make politics-at-work a named skill rather than an unnamed toll, and map the political surface you currently operate on.
The org chart is your User and Role tables; politics is the authorization layer. The unwritten policies — who actually greenlights a hire, whose objection in design review actually halts a ship, which Slack thread actually moves the decision — are not in the schema, and they run anyway. The engineer who says "I don't do politics" is the engineer who thinks the database schema is the system. Refusing to read the policy layer doesn't disable it; it means your unauthorized actions fail silently when you needed them to succeed.
And refusing to instrument your political environment is the same epistemological mistake as refusing to instrument production. You don't know what's happening; you can't fix what you don't measure; the silent failures compound. The Career Political Audit is a post-incident retrospective applied to your own career — and like every good retro, it focuses on the system that produced the failure, not on blame.
This is the module where the curriculum either earns your trust or loses it, and I want to say that out loud before you read a single page of Pfeffer or Reilly, because if M0 does…
You can't deliberately practice what you can't see. Engineers tell themselves: "I don't do politics," "I just focus on the work," "the work speaks for itself," "I refuse to play g…
Approach: Essential
Approach: Essential
Approach: Essential
Approach: Important
Approach: Important
1. Career Political Audit. Pick five situations from your career where political dynamics were load-bearing and you operated by default rather than by intent. For each: the situat…
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.