I have a client in Australia who's looking for someone who understands ICM and can help him work on his software. Obviously he would prefer someone a bit more technical, but he's happy to have some people who are trying to learn as well. It's a pretty large software, but he's created a pretty good automated system and obviously he's using my methods so it's very well organized. Anyone out here looking for a project to take on the practice or learn more? Or is there anyone in the morning to get a little bit more work done at a higher level? He's looking for multiple skill levels.

TLDR: As is the case for several of us here, we’re only allowed to use Microsoft Copilot at work. I wanted to take an ICM approach to a large scale contract audit and validation assessment using Copilot, so designed the workflow at home with Claude to generate a “work pack” of agents, Notebook instructions, and prompts to install at work. One key learning for me was that even though ICM shaped it well, I hit multiple session limits and an embarrassingly large number of tokens polishing the specification in Claude before implementing anything in Copilot. The problem: Part of my day job includes keeping a large ICT contracts register honest against the actual evidence sitting in SharePoint: renewal dates, pricing, which document supersedes which, etc etc. Often a case of reporting vs reality drift, plus the register has multiple scenarios difficult for a direct approach to analyse e.g. vendors that are intentionally duplicated as separate rows in the register (single reseller, multiple individual/separate software contracts), large single contracts that cover multiple major agreements, and invoices, managed separately, that extend a contract term based on annual payments. I don’t have a team supporting me, I’m ‘it’ and contract management is just one part of my job so I’m having to juggle over a hundred vendors along with managing finances and other commercial requirements for a large IT department. At work the rule is that it's Microsoft Copilot or nothing, so the design has to survive being executed manually inside Copilot Chat, Notebook/Researcher/Analyst, and Agent Builder, with a documented fallback for anything not currently available within our tenant e.g. we don’t have access to Cowork (yet). In my initial attempts with Copilot, using the “WorkIQ” functionality enabling it to reference SharePoint and internal documentation (including emails and Microsoft Teams), it pulled in old workbooks, unrelated vendor documents, and just a whole bunch of wrong data – despite trying to lock it down – and royally messed things up.

🎟️ PRIZE: FREE SEAT IN THE LYCEUM 🎟️ ($4,750 Seat) Pick your cohort. Technical, Business, or Creator. Your call. 📋 THE CHALLENGE This is a weird one, and you may feel lost at first. But it's up to you to make a map for those who come after and if there is no map, you must get lost to make one. Build a folder-based cartographer that can walk a body of work and leave a map a later reader can wander and show what that map is. The later reader is often an AI. Sometimes it is a new person. Same map. Same job. Not why it failed. Not how to fix it. Not a tour of how the week goes. What the nouns are. How they move. What else moves if you touch one. What is live, what is leftover, and what is a ghost with a name and no wiring. This week's deliverable is one cartographer folder someone can drop into a Claude project, point at a real body of work, and get back a map a cold reader can enter without reading the whole thing. 🎯 PICK YOUR TERRITORY Pick a body of work you have actually been inside. Something a new person or a cold model would get lost in. Something someone will change, not something you will only describe. A few sparks: 💻 A repo you own. Even a small one. The map is for the next developer, or the next session, that has never seen it. 📂 A client delivery folder a VA or a contractor has to inherit next month. 🧩 A Make, GHL, or n8n pack someone else will edit without you on the call. 📒 An Obsidian or Notion vault a collaborator has to add to without breaking the spine. 🧾 The live records behind how a job gets quoted, approved, and invoiced in your shop. The files. The objects. Not the story of a bad month. 🎓 A course or L&D library someone will update after you. 🏭 The asset and work-order objects in a plant system you actually touch. The more specific, the better. Maps how our business works is too broad. Maps the five objects a new hire has to understand before they touch the invoicing folder is right. 🧠 WHAT YOU ARE ACTUALLY LEARNING ICM has six forms. You have been living in the first ones. Pipeline. Coach. Editor. Diagnostician.

It’s live. Starting today, everyone in Clief Notes has access to the new Clief Notes AI. The easiest way to use it? Don’t overthink it. Ask it the question you would normally ask me. “Where should I start?” “What should I focus on next?” “Where did you talk about [topic]?” It’ll use what’s already inside Clief Notes to help answer you and point you toward the right lesson or resource when there’s something worth going deeper on. The goal isn’t to give you another AI tool to play with. It’s to make everything already inside this community easier to actually use. If you want Access to it Comment "READY" and we'll send you access to it!

📋 The brief I wanted to run a basic data exercise: take one dataset, organize it three different ways, and measure what each structure actually costs an AI agent to search. A controlled comparison I could point to instead of arguing about it in the abstract. Three versions of the same data: 1️⃣ Raw — the dataset exactly as downloaded. One file, no structure, no metadata. 2️⃣ ICM — files and folders. A mechanical breakdown into a directory hierarchy, the kind of structure I've been building into ICM workspaces for a while now. 3️⃣ "Second Brain" — an Obsidian-style vault. Same content, but with per-item notes, cross-linked [[wikilinks]], character/theme pages, the whole living-notes treatment. Then I built a small tool that fires the same question at all three, using a real agent for each run (not a canned lookup), and logs tokens, time, and cost per stage. Point the same question at raw, ICM, and Obsidian, and see what each structure actually buys you. 📚 Why I chose Shakespeare I needed something big enough to be a real test, public domain, and — critically — already broken down at a fine grain (act, scene, sonnet) so I wasn't inventing structure that wouldn't exist in a messier real dataset. I looked at the U.S. Code first. It's the right shape (title → chapter → section mirrors book → chapter → verse almost exactly), but it's enormous. Shakespeare's complete works are a fixed, known-size corpus (5.4MB, Project Gutenberg, public domain) that will never change, never need re-downloading, and never go stale. That "always useful" property means this test is reusable as a reference point for other structure comparisons later, not a one-off. 💰 A bit on the cost of setting up The ICM layer cost almost nothing to build. It's a mechanical script — split on ACT/SCENE headers, extract speaker names by regex, write files. No model calls. 1,579 files, and the token footprint came out at 1.01x the raw file's size. Structure that's this close to free is easy to underrate.