The First 90 Days as a Metis Mission

When you start a new role, it often feels like stepping into a foreign country. You have the skills and experience that got you the job, but suddenly you’re the outsider trying to make sense of new terrain. Leadership coach Michael Watkins famously likens joining a new company to being an organ transplant – and you are the new organ.

If you’re not thoughtful in adapting to the new situation, you could end up being attacked by the organizational immune system and rejected

–Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days

In other words, even a highly qualified newcomer can “fail to take” if they don’t integrate with the host environment. Success in your first 90 days isn’t about showing up with all the right answers; it’s about asking the right questions and absorbing the right knowledge.

In this post, I’ll explore Watkins’ framework for successful onboarding and reframe it through two old-yet-new concepts: techne and metis. These terms (borrowed from Greek) were highlighted in an SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) article, Seeing Like an SRE, to distinguish between abstract, general knowledge and hard-won, local know-how. We’ll see that your early days in a new job – especially in technical or leadership contexts – are largely about gathering metis, the on-the-ground wisdom, before you can effectively apply your techne, the best practices and expertise you bring.

By the end, we’ll land on some practical takeaways for anyone starting a new role, emphasizing how to approach your first 90 days as a humble learning mission that sets you and your team up for outcome-focused success.

Watkins’ Four Pillars of Onboarding Success

Michael Watkins’ book The First 90 Days is (IMO!) required reading for new leaders. It’s a playbook on how to accelerate your transition into a new role so that you build momentum towards success. Watkins’ core message is that the moves you make (or don’t make) in your first few months have an outsized impact on how well you integrate. “Transitions are times when momentum builds or it doesn’t, when opinions about new leaders begin to crystallize.” Early virtuous cycles or vicious cycles are self-reinforcing. In short: first impressions matter, and a few early mistakes can feed a downward spiral. So, what should a savvy newcomer focus on? Watkins offers a framework of four pillars for effective onboarding:

• Business Orientation: Zoom out and learn what the organization actually does and how it measures success. This is about understanding the business or mission as a whole, not just your slice of it. You might be tempted to dive into your specific department’s tasks, but Watkins advises “learn about your company but don’t focus on its specific parts. Treat it as a whole.” In practice, this means studying the products, services, market, strategy, and core metrics of the company. If you just stay heads-down in your own technical domain, you risk missing the bigger picture of why your role exists in the first place. A business orientation helps you see how your work connects to the broader outcomes that matter.
• Stakeholder Connection: Success in any organization hinges on people. Early on, identify your key stakeholders – your manager, your direct reports, peers in other teams, customers, mentors, even that IT person who knows where all the bodies are buried. Start building relationships and trust with them as soon as possible. Watkins uses a vivid metaphor here: “you don’t want to be meeting your neighbors for the first time in the middle of the night when your house is burning down.”  In other words, don’t wait for a crisis to get to know the people whose cooperation you’ll eventually need. Set up one-on-ones, ask questions, listen to their concerns and goals. By investing time in people early, you create a support network and avoid the lonely outsider vibe. Remember, as a newcomer you lack situational context and are often perceived as [a] stranger who doesn’t know the culture, so human connections are your lifeline to understanding that context.
• Expectations Alignment: Clarify and align on what success looks like in your new role. There’s often a gap between the rosy picture painted during recruiting and the reality on the ground (we’ve all been there). Watkins suggests that “recruiting is like romance, and employment – like marriage” meaning that the interview loop is full of optimism, but day-to-day work can be a different story. Have discussions with your boss about priorities, deliverables, and how your performance will be measured. Talk to your team about what they expect from a leader or colleague. Misaligned expectations are a silent killer of onboarding success; you might charge full speed ahead toward goals that your higher-ups don’t actually care about, or step on landmines you didn’t know existed. By syncing up expectations, you work on the right things and avoid unpleasant surprises at your first performance review. It also shows humility – you’re not assuming your own definition of the job is correct without validation.
• Cultural Adaptation: Every organization has a unique culture, how we do things around here. This includes everything from communication styles and decision-making norms to values, rituals, and jargon. Watkins describes culture as a three-layered pyramid : at the surface are symbols and language (like the company-specific acronyms that people toss around); in the middle are the norms and accepted behaviors (the unwritten rules about how people collaborate, how leaders lead, how conflict is handled). At the base are the underlying values and assumptions that truly define the place: is it competitive or collaborative? Is power centralized or distributed? How much risk-taking is acceptable? As a newcomer, you start at zero on cultural understanding. It’s on you to observe and ask questions to decode these layers. What behaviors get praised or frowned upon? How do meetings typically run? Is after-hours email response expected? Adapt thoughtfully to the culture so that you fit in before trying to drive changes. This means finding ways to operate that respect the existing ways of the organization. Remember that the “organizational immune system” will push you out if you’re seen as a bad fit or someone who arrogantly ignores norms. In the first 90 days become accepted as part of the organism by learning how things are done and maybe adopting some of the local lingo and habits. Once you’ve built credibility as one of the team, your bigger ideas for chance get a fair hearing.

These pillars – understanding the business, connecting with stakeholders, aligning expectations, and adapting to culture – form your onboarding roadmap. Underlying all of them is a common theme: be a learner first. Watkins suggests new leaders undertake an “accelerated learning” program, formulating a learning agenda to climb the curve faster . That includes questions about the past (What has worked and not worked here, and why?), the present (What is the vision and who really has influence here?), and the future (What are the big challenges and opportunities coming up?).

This leads us to the heart of our discussion: the kinds of knowledge you need to gather in those early days, and how they differ from the knowledge you may already have coming in. Here’s where the concepts of techne and metis provide a useful lens.

Techne and Metis: The Map vs. The Terrain

What are techne and metis? These terms were highlighted in an article about SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) by Laura Nolan, playing off James C. Scott’s ideas in Seeing Like a State (which I am finally reading these days after coming across for years now!). The simplest way to put it is: techne is universal, abstract knowledge – the kind you can write down in a book or apply broadly – and metis is specific, practical know-how that you can only gain through experience.

In the SRE context, Nolan explains that “Techne is universal knowledge: things like the boiling point of water, Pythagoras’ theorem, [or] the rule that all RPCs should have deadlines”. Techne is the kind of knowledge that makes things legible and standardized. In software and operations, our techne is all the best practices and design patterns and checklists that generally hold true. Because techne is explicit and teachable, we can embed a lot of it in tools and processes – for example, Kubernetes health checks or a CI/CD pipeline encode industry best practices so that everyone can benefit from that wisdom automatically. Techne gives you the “maps” and rules of thumb: it’s valuable because it lets you hit the ground running with known methods, and it’s portable knowledge you carry from one job to the next.

Metis, on the other hand, is “local, specific, and practical” knowledge. It’s the understanding you can only win through hands-on experience in a particular context. Nolan says it “can’t be codified in the same way that techne can”. To illustrate, she references Scott’s comparison between navigation and piloting. Deepwater navigation on the open sea is a general skill (techne) – you learn how to use maps, compass, GPS, follow standard procedures. But piloting a ship into a specific harbor? That’s metis. A seasoned harbor pilot knows the quirks of that local port: the hidden sandbars, the shifting tides and currents, the typical wind patterns, where the tricky narrow passages are. You can’t swap in any expert navigator and expect them to glide right in; a pilot’s know-how is tied to that port.

In short, techne makes things legible, but metis lets you pilot the ship when the map doesn’t match the waters.

Bringing this back to our work lives: your general expertise (technical skills, leadership techniques, domain knowledge) is your techne. It’s what got you hired – your proven playbook. But each new company or team you join has its own reality: their systems, their history, their weird acronyms (so many!), their political landmines. All of that is metis, the on-the-ground truth you need to discover. No matter how experienced you are, you do not start a new job with the metis for that environment – you have to earn it by getting your hands dirty, asking questions, and living in it for a while. This is why, as Nolan notes, “there is a learning curve when we start working on a new system, and why we don’t put our new teammates on call right away”. Even a star engineer from another company isn’t put in charge of critical outages on Day 2, because they lack the local knowledge of how that system fails and recovers. In the SRE article, Nolan cautions against over-reliance on generic checklists and standardized solutions in lieu of actual familiarity. She observes that attempts to “substitute techne for metis … just doesn’t work.”  When SRE is done with a heavy “high-modernist” hand – all metrics and SLOs and cookie-cutter processes – it risks being “all techne and no metis,” which seasoned ops engineers rightly push back on.

The lesson here isn’t that techne is bad; rather, techne needs to be balanced with metis. Your maps and checklists will help you, but you’d better also listen to the locals who know the shoals beneath the water. In an onboarding scenario, this means while you have your general management 101 or coding best practices in mind, you need to temper that with a big dose of: How do things actually work here?. Only then can you apply your expertise effectively.

To put it in concrete terms: Having a great People Management playbook is techne; figuring out how trust is earned on this team and what motivates each person is metis. The early phase of a new role is almost entirely an exercise in gathering metis to complement your techne. It’s about closing the gap between the map you came in with and the terrain you find yourself in. Let’s explore that through the stages of a typical first 90 days, tying back to Watkins’ advice along the way.

The First 90 Days as a Metis Mission: Five Key Stages

So you’ve started a new position – congrats! Think of your onboarding as a crash course in acquiring metis, so you can eventually put your techne to good use. Here’s a personal take (influenced by Watkins and the techne/metis mindset) on how to navigate your early journey in roughly five stages:

Stage 1: Learn the Business and Mission

In the first stage, your goal is to understand what the organization actually does and why. This maps to Watkins’ business orientation pillar. Even in a highly technical role, don’t get tunnel vision on the tech stack yet – first, grasp the mission, products, customers, and strategy. In my own experience, I’ve found this stage to be both fascinating and humbling. Whenever I’ve thought that I knew an industry well, I end up spending weeks learning that the business model has unique twists and that our moat lay in some non-obvious areas.

Practically, you might spend this time reading up on internal wikis, public news, analyst reports, or just asking veterans in the company to explain “in plain English” what the business does. If it’s a startup, what problem are they solving and for whom? If it’s a big enterprise, what are the main revenue streams and products? The idea is to build a mental map of the business landscape. Watkins advises new leaders to “learn about your company but don’t focus on its specific parts. Treat it as a whole.” This broad understanding will later help you connect your work to higher-level outcomes (a hallmark of outcome-oriented teams). It also earns you credibility; people appreciate when a newcomer takes the time to appreciate the bigger picture rather than bragging about what they know. At this stage, cultivate curiosity. Ask dumb questions – you have a free pass, you’re new! – and soak up the answers. Showing genuine interest in the business signals to others that you’re here to contribute to outcomes, not just pad your resume.

One technique from Watkins is to structure your learning with questions about the past, present, and future:

• ask about the history: How did we get here? What were some big wins or failures in the past? This often unearths tribal knowledge (metis) about why things are the way they are.
• ask about the present: What’s our vision? Who are our biggest customers? Who, internally, holds a lot of influence or knowledge?
• ask about the future: What big challenges or opportunities do we see on the horizon? The answers will give you context that no generic business book (no matter how full of techne) could provide, because they’re specific to this organization.

Stage 2: Understand the Processes and Culture

Every company has its own way of doing things. Stage 2 is about decoding how work gets done here, both in terms of formal processes and informal norms, the blend of the technical/process metis and the cultural metis. By now, you’ve kinda figured out what the company does. Now you need to learn how it does it. This involves learning the internal processes (e.g. development workflows, approval processes, communication tools, decision-making frameworks) and the cultural nuances (e.g. is this a meeting-heavy culture or more async? Do people openly debate ideas or aim for consensus? Is it okay to work 9–5, or are late evenings the norm?).

Watkins’ advice on cultural adaptation is useful: observe the symbols and language (do people say “customer” or “client”? Do they talk in sports metaphors or gaming metaphors?), the norms and behaviors (how do they address the CEO, is there a culture of CC-ing lots of people on emails or keeping things one-on-one?), and the underlying values (is this place more about moving fast or being perfect? more collaborative or competitive?).

Humility in this is extra important. You might see some practices that strike you as inefficient or archaic. It’s tempting to think, “Ugh, in my last company we automated this in a day”. But hold your fire. There may be reasons things are done a certain way that you don’t yet understand. Perhaps that outdated process survives because it prevents a failure they experienced three years ago (a story you haven’t heard yet). As Nolan pointed out, specific system knowledge isn’t going away – there’s craft and context that matter. So before you suggest changes, seek to understand why the current way exists. Ask people, in a non-judgmental way, how the current process evolved. You might learn it’s an area everyone knows needs improvement (in which case, great – you can later help fix it), or you might learn it’s more complex than it appears. Either way, you gain respect by not stomping in like a know-it-all. You may have heard this mindset described as Chesterton’s Fence: “Don’t remove a fence until you understand why it was put up in the first place.”

Stage 3: Map Out the People and Networks

By stage 3, you start feeling a bit more oriented on what the team does and how it operates. Now it’s time to figure out who’s who. This is the deeper dive into Watkins’ stakeholder connection pillar. You likely met a bunch of people in your first week, now you need to understand them in context: who holds what role, who has influence beyond their title, who are the go-to experts, who manages which teams, and how the informal networks flow.

Every organization has a formal org chart (if you’re lucky) and an informal org chart. The informal one is the more interesting: it tells you, for example, that Alice is the unofficial mentor for many junior devs (even though it’s not her job title), or that everything Bob touches is considered high priority because he’s close with the CTO, or that Carmen in accounting knows every contractual detail and can save you if you get in a pinch. These are the relationships and power dynamics you want to learn. Not for office politics’ sake, but so you can navigate and build a coalition of support.

One way to map this out is simply by asking your manager or your peers: “Who should I be talking to in order to understand X?” If you’re inheriting a team, ask your team members: “Which partners or customers are critical for us? Who do you rely on day-to-day to get your job done?” Then go introduce yourself to those people. Show interest in their work and challenges. Remember Watkins’ neighbor-in-a-fire analogy: you want to meet these folks before you’re in a high-stakes situation together .

I once joined a project and ignored the QA team for the first month only to realize later that they knew how all the legacy systems worked. I had unintentionally signaled that I didn’t value their input, whereas I should have been picking their brain from week one. I learned when I was in a jam and needed their help, they were less inclined to jump in because I hadn’t built that relationship. It’s a classic rookie mistake: assuming you can just “get to work” without investing in the people who make the work happen.

In mapping out the human terrain, pay attention not just to individual relationships but also to the team dynamics. Which teams collaborate often? Are there historical rivalries or silos? Knowing this helps you avoid stepping into long-running turf wars unaware. Watkins also emphasizes creating alliances and coalitions as a new leader: identify the key allies you’ll need outside your immediate team and earn their trust. This could be peers in other departments who you’ll work with, or even influential voices in the organization who can advocate for you. The first 90 days will be about people more than anything else.

As you build these connections, again, listening is your best tool. People love a newcomer who asks for their perspective. It’s flattering to be asked for advice (“What do you think I should know as I ramp up?”) and it’s a great way for you to gather metis. In these chats, you’ll pick up nuggets about challenges and successes, and you’ll build goodwill.

One tip: take notes on personal info: if someone mentions they love rock climbing or that they have two dogs, remembering that later and casually bringing it up (“How was your climbing trip?”) helps solidify relationships on a human level.

Stage 4: Identify Key Pain Points and Priorities

By the time you reach this stage, you should have a decent lay of the land: what the company does, how it does it, and who’s doing it. Next, zoom in on what really matters in this environment. Every team and company has a few defining challenges, current projects, or chronic pain points that are top of mind. As a new hire, honing in on these will help you prioritize where you can contribute meaningfully in the short term and demonstrate that you get it. Think of it as finding the pressure points or the areas where your effort can have the most impact.

How do you find these? Your boss will likely have told you, “Project XYZ is on fire.” But others you might infer from all the conversations you’ve had so far. If every person you talk to rolls their eyes about the deployment process, that’s a clue. In Watkins’ terms, this is part of accelerating your learning – figuring out not just how things work, but what’s broken. It’s also related to expectations alignment: confirming with your boss to ensure you’re on the same page.

In this stage, you might start formulating some hypotheses for action. Watkins suggests looking for early wins you can secure – ideally ones that address real pain points and show value quickly. Be careful: make sure the wins you go after are truly aligned with the team’s needs, not just something that looks like a win from the outside. This is where techne-versus-metis can be tricky. Maybe you know a brilliant general solution (techne) for, say, speeding up project management because you’ve done it before. But is that really the burning challenge here? If the biggest challenge everyone is actually worried about is stabilizing the last release, then a shiny new project management tool might be a distraction or even an annoyance.

Use your metis-gathering from stages 1–3 to pinpoint what truly matters. Often, one of the best questions you can ask people (especially your manager and your team) is: “If you had a magic wand, what’s one thing you’d fix?” That tends to surface the pain points quickly. Also ask “What’s something this team is already great at that I should make sure to preserve?” as sometimes the opportunity is to leverage strengths the team has.

By the end of your first 90 days, you should be able to articulate the top 2-3 challenges or priorities of your group in your own words, and check that others agree. If you can do that, you’ve captured a lot of metis.

Stage 5: Bring in Your Techne (Gently) to Add Value

Notice that the first four stages are all about learning and understanding – gathering metis. Only in stage 5 do we focus on doing in the sense of applying your outside knowledge and skills (techne) in a significant way. This is intentional. By this point, you have context and credibility. You’ve earned some trust by listening and by demonstrating you understand the team’s world. Now you can start to leverage your fresh perspective and expertise to make a difference, in a way that will be welcomed rather than resisted.

Bringing in techne next means dipping into that toolkit of general knowledge, best practices, and creative ideas that you likely were hired for. But you’ll use it selectively and adapt it to fit the context. Perhaps in stage 4 you identified a problem you’ve fixed before. Here’s your chance to propose something, bridging your techne with the metis you’ve learned here. You might say, “I noticed our X. In my experience, I’ve fixed it with Y. Do you think something like that could help us here?” Then be prepared to tailor that idea based on feedback (“No, we can’t do X because of regulatory requirement … oh but we could do Z”). This way, you’re contributing your knowledge but in a collaborative, non-know-it-all way. It shows respect for the local context.

The key to stage 5 is choosing the right techne to apply and in the right way(s). If you come in guns blazing with a dozen solutions, people will tune out or get defensive. Nolan’s SRE article gave the example of generic checklists falling flat: a checklist (techne) might be perfectly good in general, but if it doesn’t fit the nuances of this system, it won’t be effective. Don’t be that person in your context. Instead, pick one or two areas where your outsider perspective genuinely adds value to what the team is trying to do, and focus on those.

It’s also worth noting that sometimes the best contribution you can make early on isn’t sweeping change, but facilitating a fresh conversation. Since you’re new, you can ask “why don’t we…?” on things people have gotten blind spots about. You might not even need to provide the answer; just raising the right question can prompt the team to use its own techne and metis to solve something. In that sense, your pathfinding mindset – helping the group navigate to a solution – can be more valuable than any pre-baked solution you carry in.

Throughout this stage, maintain the attitude that you’re still learning. Implementing something is not the end of learning metis; you’ll keep uncovering surprises as you execute. Be ready to iterate. Perhaps you tried a small process change based on your past playbook and it didn’t quite work here – that’s okay, adjust it with the feedback you get. People will appreciate that you’re not dogmatic.

By the end of the first 90 days, ideally you have integrated well (organism not rejecting the organ!), you’ve identified where you can contribute, and you’ve maybe even notched one or two small wins or improvements. More importantly, you’ve built a reputation as someone who is curious, humble, and focused on the right things. That reputation will carry forward and give you a platform to drive bigger contributions in the months and years ahead.

Bringing It All Together

Start with the outcome

I believe that the central outcome of these first 90 days is to build trust. Trust isn’t a vague concept—it’s tangible, measurable, and critical to your success. It’s articulated in The Trust Equation, by Maister, Green, and Galford:

Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Self-orientation

In other words, trust grows when you demonstrate competence (credibility), consistency (reliability), genuine interest in others (intimacy), and a clear group-orientation (low self-orientation). Your early days in a role are an essential period for rapidly building this kind of trust. But how exactly do you accomplish that?

Trust Through Watkins’ Four Pillars

Watkins suggests onboarding effectively through four key pillars:

• Business Orientation: Understand your organization’s mission, products, customers, and market strategy. Learning the “what we do” is fundamental. This builds credibility—when people see you actively investing in grasping their world, they trust your competence and your genuine commitment to group success.
• Stakeholder Connection: Build meaningful relationships with key people. This fosters intimacy and signals your group-orientation, demonstrating your genuine care and curiosity about others. I’ve learned repeatedly that early, proactive connections prevent many later crises.
• Expectation Alignment: Clarify and re-clarify what’s expected of you. This builds reliability—you’re seen as someone who carefully aligns with organizational priorities rather than pursuing personal agendas.
• Cultural Adaptation: Decode and thoughtfully adapt to the organization’s culture. Observing and respecting local norms helps you avoid early missteps, further building credibility and reliability.

Techne and Metis: The Tools and The Terrain

Your techne—general knowledge like coding best practices, project management methodologies, or leadership frameworks—is incredibly valuable. However, as Nolan notes, “Techne makes things legible, but metis lets you pilot the ship when the map doesn’t match the waters.”

Metis is the local, practical knowledge you acquire only by engaging deeply with your specific context. It’s the knowing glance a teammate gives when certain topics arise, the specific way deployments fail on your team, or how decisions actually get made behind the scenes.

Early in my tenure at NerdWallet, I vividly recall relying too heavily on my techne—confidently suggesting solutions that made perfect sense in theory but ignored subtle local realities. Only when I paused and listened closely, accumulating metis, did my proposals start landing effectively.

Your First 90 Days as a Trust-Building Metis Mission

Here’s how I suggest approaching your first three months:

• Weeks 1–2, “What We Do”: Ask broad questions about the business, products, and metrics. People trust you when they see you care enough to learn about the bigger picture first.
• Weeks 3–4, “How We Do It”: Dive into team norms and processes. Resist immediate judgment; instead, demonstrate reliability by learning current ways first.
• Weeks 5–6, “Who Does It”: Identify stakeholders and forge genuine connections. Early one-on-ones build intimacy and relational trust.

• Weeks 7–8, “What Challenges Matter Here”: Uncover the real pain points and priorities. Asking others, “If you had a magic wand, what would you fix?” reveals critical insights, signaling your group-orientation.

• Weeks 9–12, “What Techne to Apply”: Finally, apply your general knowledge strategically and humbly. Integrate your techne carefully with the metis you’ve acquired, ensuring you deliver credible solutions tailored to local realities.

Building Trust

• Stay curious. People trust those who listen deeply.
• Prioritize relationship-building. Don’t wait for a crisis to meet your neighbors.
• Balance your expertise (techne) with humility (for the metis). Apply your skills with sensitivity to context.
• Reflect and align expectations. Trust grows through clear, open communication.

The outcome of your initial days in new role is trust. Trust is your most precious currency, earned through credibility, reliability, intimacy, and genuine group-orientation. Trust becomes the foundation for everything meaningful you aim to accomplish in your new role. As you navigate your first 90 days, ask yourself: “What metis should I be learning to be successful?” Because if you are, you’re at least developing trust by showing humility and respect for the local knowledge. And that’s a great start.