Reading a System Before You Change It
Why the first week of any tech analysis should be spent listening, sketching, and resisting the urge to recommend.
Most failed tech changes start with a premature recommendation. Before proposing a migration, a vendor swap, or a new process, analysts need a quiet period of observation: who depends on what, which assumptions are documented, and which are only tribal knowledge. In our Ho Chi Minh City cohorts we ask learners to spend the opening sessions on maps and interviews only—no slide decks of solutions. That constraint feels slow at first, then becomes the difference between a confident guess and a grounded brief.