What it is: treat a body of knowledge as a system with declared dependencies rather than a document — so that changing one part tells you every other part it touches.
When to reach for it
When a change to one piece of a curriculum, a process or a product quietly breaks three others and nobody finds out for six months. Reach for it when the thing is written down but not modelled.
The steps
- Name the elements. Techniques, drills, prerequisites, assessments — each an element with an id.
- Declare the dependencies. What must be true before this element can be taught?
- Declare the verification. How do you know a student has it? An assessment is a requirement, not an opinion.
- Change one thing and trace the graph. His own words: "the same way that you would introduce a change to a car — where are the parts that it touches? What needs to be done? Then we need to verify it."
- Make it queryable. "Why isn't my curriculum agentic in the sense that everyone can consult it, can talk with it, can view it?"
Worked example
- Not yet applied. Register idea
284-01, taggedNAME ON IT→ the ideas register. - ⚠️ This is a build, and the build slot is occupied by Do Not Die On The Mat → ACTIVE. The cheap experiment that is NOT a build: take one belt level, model it as a system with dependencies, then ask one instructor a question the document should be able to answer. An evening. If it takes a month, it is a project and it needs the slot deliberately.
Where it fails
- ⚠️ The taxonomy trap, and it is the central risk here. "Everybody wrote martial arts down; nobody wrote it down the same way." Same named kick, three schools — one thrusts, one pulls, one snaps, all three correct. A model that cannot represent legitimate variation is one lineage asserting itself as ground truth. Build variance into the schema or do not build it. See Embodied AI.
- Modelling cost is real. MBSE pays off on systems that change often and break expensively. A syllabus that changes twice a year may not clear that bar.
- A model nobody queries is a document with extra steps. Step 5 is the point; steps 1–4 without it are overhead.
Where I learned it
Aerospace. It is how you change one requirement on a vehicle without discovering in integration that you broke four others.
Reading rule. Anything marked unverified or on-air is a claim made on the podcast and has not been checked against a primary source yet. It stays marked until it has. Sourced numbers link to where they came from.