🎯 Taste moatstarter⏱ 12 weeks·Analyst, BizOps, project manager — anyone whose calendar is full of spreadsheets
Future-Proof Knowledge Worker
Survive the automation wave by becoming the person who decides what should be done — not the one who executes the spreadsheet.
Most spreadsheet-driven, report-driven, slide-driven knowledge work is on the AI chopping block. The defensible position is upstream: framing problems, judging which signals matter, and translating analysis into decisions stakeholders trust. This tract drags you out of pure execution and into the strategy layer over a quarter of focused practice.
What this builds
Primary moat
Taste moat
Knowing what to ship, what to leave out, what's good. AI models will keep getting better at execution; the part they're worst at is taste under ambiguity. Cultivating it is a deliberate practice.
Side-effects
📡 Network / distribution moat — Audience that won't migrate
Goals
Outcomes to drive toward over the tract
Replace one recurring report with a one-page recommendation
Move from 'here's the data' to 'here's what we should do' — with the data as appendix.
⏱ 6 weeks
Run one decision-quality retro on a past call
Build calibration. Most people never check whether their past decisions were actually right.
⏱ 4 weeks
Habits
Recurring practices that build the underlying skill
Daily 'Decision Memo of the Day' — 200 words
Forces you to practice the recommend-and-justify muscle, not just the analyze-and-summarize one.
daily
Weekly 1:1 with a senior decision-maker
Watch how they frame tradeoffs. AI can't substitute for taste cultivated this way.
weekly
Resources
Curated reading the steps assume you've absorbed
How to Decide · Annie Duke
Best practical book on decision quality vs. outcome quality — the core skill of strategy work.
Thinking, Fast and Slow · Kahneman
The bias catalog every senior leader can quote. Read it once, refer to it forever.
How to use this tract
- Start with the daily memo even if you have nothing to recommend on. Habit > content for the first 2 weeks.
- The 1:1 ask is the hard part — senior people say yes more than juniors think they will. Frame it as 30 min, recurring, you bring questions.
- By week 8 you should be visibly different in how you talk about your work. If not, the daily memo isn't sticking — fix that before adding more.
Adopt this tract
Habits and goals land in your plan. Resources go to your reading queue. Pro accounts get auto-scheduled briefings tied to the tract.