Pre-Read: Tools for The AI-Fluent Leader

Overview

What Is the Fluent Leader Vault?

A lightweight, plain-text knowledge base you'll build during the workshop — organized around the COACH framework.

The Fluent Leader Vault is a structured folder of markdown files that gives you one organized home to manage context about your team's productivity, strengths, growth areas, and AI fluency needs. It mirrors the COACH model you'll learn in the session — so building it walks you through the framework, and using it reinforces it.

Because everything is plain .md text, the vault works in almost any editor you already have. That said, three tools make it significantly more powerful: Obsidian for organizing and navigating your vault, Granola for capturing 1:1 meeting notes automatically, and Claude for running AI-assisted coaching against your context.

You don't need to master any of these before the workshop. You just need them installed and working. This guide walks you through each one.

The Tool Stack at a Glance

Tool	Role in the Vault	Alternative
Obsidian	Stores, organizes, and cross-links your vault files; makes the structure navigable	VS Code, iA Writer, Typora, or Finder + TextEdit
Granola	Captures 1:1 meeting notes automatically and exports them to your vault	Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, or manual notes in a text file
Claude Sonnet	Reads your vault context and helps you assess, coach, and prepare for 1:1s	Gemini, OpenAI, OpenRouter or your model of choice
Claude Code or Cowork	Agentic harness for running AI prompts directly against your vault — reads, creates, and edits your files	Codex, Cursor, VS Code

Tool 1

Obsidian

A free, desktop-based markdown editor where your vault lives. You own the files, they're private by default, and any AI tool can read them directly.

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What it is

Unlike Notion or Google Docs, everything lives in plain .md files on your computer — private, portable, and AI-readable.

Download

obsidian.md/download — available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Free for personal use

How to use it

1

Create a vault

A "vault" in Obsidian is just a folder. When you open Obsidian for the first time, choose Create new vault, give it a name (Fluent-Leader-Vault works), and pick where to save it. That folder is now your vault.

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That's it — you're done with setup.

You don't need to do anything else in Obsidian before the workshop. During the session, you'll receive a prompt that you'll paste into an agentic AI tool (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or Cursor). That prompt will interview you about your team and then automatically scaffold your entire vault — every folder, every file, pre-populated with your answers. No manual file creation required.

After the workshop, simply open Obsidian, choose Open folder as vault, and point it at the folder the prompt created. Everything will be in place and cross-linked automatically.

Optional: Get familiar with Obsidian

If you'd like to explore before the session, here's a quick tour of the features you'll use most. None of this is required — you'll see it all demonstrated live during the workshop.

2

Navigating your vault

The left sidebar shows your folder structure and all your notes. Click any file to open it. You can create folders inside the vault to mirror the COACH structure you'll build in the workshop.

3

Create a new note

Click the New note icon (top-left) or press Cmd+N (Mac) / Ctrl+N (Windows). Name it, and start writing in markdown. If you're new to markdown, here's all you need:

# Heading 1 → Large header

## Heading 2 → Section header

**bold** → bold text

*italic* → italic text

- item → Bullet list

> text → Blockquote / TODO

For a full reference, see the Markdown Cheat Sheet.

4

Create links between notes

This is Obsidian's most useful feature for the vault. Type [[ anywhere in a note and start typing a file name — Obsidian autocompletes and creates a clickable link. For example, [[Jordan/00_profile]] links directly to a team member's profile. Click it to jump there instantly.

5

Graph view

Open the graph view with Cmd+G (Mac) / Ctrl+G (Windows) to see a visual map of how your notes connect. Makes the vault's structure intuitive at a glance.

Reminder: You don't need to build or configure any of this manually. During the workshop, I'll demonstrate how to automatically generate the full vault structure with a single prompt — you'll leave with everything set up and ready to use.

Alternatives

VS Code

Free, widely used text editor with solid markdown support. No graph view or wikilinks, but reads vault files without issue. code.visualstudio.com

Typora

Clean, distraction-free markdown editor with live preview mode. One-time purchase (~$15). typora.io

Logseq

Free, open-source alternative with the same wikilink syntax and graph view. Also local-first and plain-text. logseq.com

Tool 2

Granola

An AI meeting notes app that captures your 1:1s automatically — no bot joins the call — and produces a clean summary you can drop straight into your vault.

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