clear-eye

Read any document the way a detective reads a witness statement — surface what it is NOT saying. Unlike a summarizer (which tells you what a text says), this skill exposes the subtext: hedging and weasel words, conspicuous omissions, buried leads, frequency tells, tone shifts, and non-answers. Use it on earnings calls, shareholder letters, job postings, press releases, politician statements, news articles, performance reviews, legal language, and the email that's clearly avoiding something. Trigger on phrases like "what are they really saying?", "read between the lines", "decode this earnings call", "is this a red flag?", "what's this not telling me?", "what are they hiding?", or any request to analyze the subtext, spin, or evasion in a document rather than just summarize it.

Find what will kill a plan before it's committed to — by assuming it already failed and working backwards to the causes. Based on Gary Klein's pre-mortem technique. Unlike generic "what are the risks?" brainstorming, this skill imagines a specific, vivid failure six months out, reasons back to the most likely causes, ranks them by likelihood × impact, and prescribes the single highest-leverage fix. Use it on project plans, launches, strategies, architectures, migrations, investments, and big decisions. Trigger on phrases like "poke holes in this", "what could go wrong?", "stress-test my plan", "pre-mortem", "red-team this", "why might this fail?", or any request to surface the failure modes of a plan before acting on it.

Reason past the obvious, first-order consequence to the second-, third-, and long-tail effects everyone else stops short of. Where most analysis says "X causes Y", this skill asks "and then what?" — mapping the cascade, surfacing the non-obvious winners and losers, the reflexive responses, and the effects that only show up over time. Use it on policy changes, product/pricing decisions, market events, technology shifts, regulations, and strategy calls. Trigger on phrases like "what are the knock-on effects?", "play this forward", "what happens next?", "who actually benefits?", "second-order effects", "what's the unintended consequence?", or any request to think through the downstream ripple of a decision or event rather than just its immediate result.