What does it mean that track what triggered the update?

Record what new evidence or experience caused you to revise your schema. Every schema update has a trigger — a specific observation, conversation, failure, or piece of evidence that shifted your model. If you do not capture that trigger at the moment of change, you lose the provenance of your own thinking. Lost provenance means you cannot reconstruct why you believe what you now believe, cannot evaluate whether the change was warranted, and cannot detect patterns in what kinds of evidence actually move you.

Example: A product manager believes that users want more features. Over three months, three things happen: a usability test shows users struggling with the existing interface, a competitor wins a deal with a simpler product, and a customer churns citing complexity. Six months later, the product manager now believes simplicity matters more than feature count — but cannot remember which of these three events actually changed their mind. Was it the usability test? The lost deal? The churn? Without a record, they cannot tell whether the belief update was driven by rigorous evidence or by the emotional impact of losing a customer. They cannot reconstruct the reasoning, share it with colleagues, or evaluate whether the same kind of evidence should trigger future updates. The schema changed. The provenance was lost.

Try this: Start a trigger log today. Choose a schema you have recently updated — or one you suspect is currently shifting. Write a dated entry with four fields: (1) The schema before the update (what you previously believed), (2) The trigger (the specific evidence, experience, or observation that initiated the change), (3) The schema after the update (what you now believe or are moving toward), and (4) Your confidence assessment (how strongly the trigger warrants this change, on a scale of low/medium/high). Do this for at least three schema changes over the next week. At the end of the week, review your log and look for patterns: What types of triggers actually move you? Direct experience? Data? Conversations? Emotional events? The pattern itself is a meta-schema worth tracking.