A magic trick of foresight in organizations using techniques of cold reading.

Form a hypothesis about a thing that might happen

"this team will not like working with this other team because the other team is good at prototyping and they're more of a platform team"

"this area of the org will be reorged soon."

Base your hypothesis on a savvy summarization of the priors in the space.

Then try to find little snippets of disconfirming evidence.

Look for it everywhere.

In every 1:1 poke and prod (lightly and delicately) for it.

Even amorphous statements like "Sure is a lot of change happening!" will often solicit disconfirming or confirming evidence.

If you don't find any disconfirming evidence at all then that's a good sign that your hypothesis is right.

The less disconfirming evidence you find, the more you can cryptically plant hints. "I don't think we should assume that org structure is stable."

These are hints that if the hypothesis is correct will make you look like a wizard, but if they don't hit, no one will notice.

If people think you're smart and plugged in and have a good track record, they'll fill in any ambiguity in ways that are in your favor.

So even if you only know 1/3 of the reorg shape, if you keep details vague, people won't realize you only had a general vibe and will think you knew all of it.

This then makes people more likely to trust your vague predictions in the future, and also more likely to gossip with you to trade subtextual information, which helps you make significantly better predictions.

The asymmetry of this works because you need only one sliver of disconfirming evidence to disprove the hypothesis, so if you're searching for them and don't find it, it's likely to be true.

People don't want to lie, so if they know the information they might say things that individually aren't revealing, but they won't disconfirm the implied hypothesis if it's right.

If there's a secret that a lot of people know, there is information evaporating off of every interaction they have.

It's extremely subtle, but you can sense it if you suspect it might be there and blur your eyes just right, like a magic eye painting.