The first semester I taught real estate finance, I inherited a series of slide decks from the previous professor.
There was a syllabus, a set of learning objectives, and a carefully constructed deck for each class. My job, as I understood it, was to deliver the material.
I discovered almost immediately that I could not teach someone else's slides. Not because the content was wrong, but because the framing was not mine. I could present it, but I could not really make it real. The moment a student asked a question that went even slightly off script, I needed something more than the next bullet point.
So I rebuilt everything.
I took each learning objective and asked what it actually meant underneath the academic language. I took each concept and asked how I would explain it to someone sitting across from me at a job site or in a deal meeting. Putting it into my own language forced me to figure out what I actually thought the concept was.
That process took an absurd amount of time. We joked later that, given adjunct pay and the hours I put in, I had basically paid Georgetown for the privilege of teaching the course.
But somewhere in all of that rebuilding, I learned something I did not fully understand until much later.
The Part That Actually Changed the Room
The thing that changed the room was rarely the slide I had rebuilt. It was usually the moment I stopped following it.
It was the war stories. The real projects. The deals that worked, the ones that did not, and the moments where theory met reality and produced something unexpected. When I talked about something I had actually done, the students leaned in differently. The questions got sharper. The concept became easier to hold.
Eventually I realized the war stories were not really supplementing the teaching. They were part of the teaching. The academic structure mattered, but the practitioner experience was what made the idea usable.
One of those moments was cap rates.
The sentence I eventually landed on was simple: a cap rate is a proxy for risk.
It took me far too long to get there, not because cap rates are especially complicated, but because years of industry language had become so familiar that I had stopped seeing what sat underneath it.
Teaching forced me to strip the vocabulary back until I could see the idea again.
And once I noticed that, I started seeing the same move everywhere else.
The Same Move in Different Rooms
In a deal meeting, it might be asking which assumption has quietly become a fact. In an organization, it might be noticing that the stated problem is real, but something underneath it is actually driving the outcome. In an advisory conversation, it is often the question that seems slightly beside the point until it turns out to be the one that matters.
Near Enemies grew out of that same habit of mind.
I used to describe the framework mostly as what happens when strengths cross a line. That still happens. But the more I work with it, the more interested I am in a different question: what has been given authority to decide what?
A strength gets a job it cannot really do. A proxy gets mistaken for the thing it was meant to represent. A metric, assumption, feeling, or protective response starts answering a question that belongs somewhere else.
That is the jurisdiction problem.
The diagnostic move is usually pretty similar: get underneath the vocabulary, figure out what is actually operating, and ask what job it has been given. Then ask whether it should be deciding the question in front of you.
That is what I do through Residy. It is what I teach. And it is what Near Enemies is trying to make visible.
The Through-Line I Missed for a Long Time
For most of the past year, I treated teaching, advisory work, the framework, and the book as separate workstreams. A portfolio of things I was doing that happened to overlap.
They are not really separate.
They are the same move in different rooms.
Find what the apparent problem is obscuring. Name what is actually operating underneath. Give it language precise enough to use.
Once I saw that, a lot of things that had felt fragmented suddenly made much more sense.
It also explained why some kinds of work energize me and others do not. I am at my best when there is something messy, complicated, or slightly misframed and I can help make the actual thing visible.
Apparently I have been doing that for most of my career. I just did not have a name for it.
The question I keep coming back to now is less about what all of my work has in common and more about what other people may be missing in theirs:
What is the move you keep making across different parts of your work that you have not fully named yet?