Commoncog asks members to file their reading of each disruption case before it publishes its own

The instruction that carries the method is one line. "the way to improve at your own sensemaking is to pre-commit your notes first!" the post says ^[8]. That fixes the order: your notes first, then his, on a case whose ending you already knew when you started. The author's reactions sit at the foot of each case, and a member can either read them or listen to them ^[7].

A firm can copy that order with what it already has. Take one finished case a week, have everyone write down what they think the company should have done and when, date the notes, and only then compare. The cases and the reactions themselves are member material, sold as a service to Commoncog subscribers ^[1]. What gets compared is two readings of one settled outcome, so the only date anyone has to put down is on their own notes.

The shelf is picked. How it was picked is worth knowing. Three of the five recent cases are framed as survivals and two as failures ^[15]. Ten of the fifteen predate the AI essays ^[14], and some of those deal with doing business under colonialism or war, which the post calls conditions far more disruptive than the current AI moment ^[12]. The author's stated purpose for the whole exercise is calibration: to know what good and bad sensemaking look like before you are in the middle of it ^[19].

Hindsight is built into the exercise: the endings were known before anyone started, and five known endings cannot tell you which of your own choices is which. The post's first point is aimed at exactly that reflex. "we all have a made-up disruption narrative in our heads", the author wrote, and the invented step is the second one, where the losers are simply stubborn ^[9][10]. He quotes the explanation he distrusts: "folks are disrupted because they are stubborn! Why else would they be 'fixated on the old way of doing things'?" ^[11]

The reason given for commissioning the series is partly emotional. Readers may be uncomfortable because of AI, or affected by predictions of societal disruption and job losses ^[16]. That is an honest account of demand, and demand is all it shows. The post promises three points and the available text ends mid-sentence during the first, so the other two are not on the record ^[17].

What this produces is a dated file of who judged a known situation which way. It does not help with a vendor contract that has to be signed this quarter. A year on, the firm that kept those notes can look up which of its people judged the case well.