What is small updates strategy?

Small updates strategy is a concept in personal epistemology: Incremental schema revision is less disruptive and more accurate than complete overhauls. Small, frequent updates preserve continuity with what already works while correcting what does not. Large, rare overhauls destroy functional structure alongside dysfunctional structure, overwhelm working memory, and introduce more errors than they fix.

Example: Two managers each discover that their leadership style is not producing the team engagement they want. Manager A spends a weekend at a retreat, reads three books, and returns Monday with a completely new management philosophy — different meeting formats, different feedback methods, different decision-making processes, all at once. The team is confused. Half the changes conflict with each other. Within a month, everyone has reverted to old patterns because nobody could track what changed or why. Manager B identifies one specific behavior — she interrupts people in meetings — and commits to changing that single habit for two weeks. She notices the effect, adjusts, then targets the next behavior. After six months, Manager B has transformed her leadership style through twelve discrete, trackable changes. Manager A is still talking about that retreat.

This concept is part of Phase 16 (Schema Evolution) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for schema evolution.