Making calls with incomplete information: sunk cost, consensus you will never get, constraints that generate better answers than free choice, and knowing when to stop and start over.
Decision MakingOn January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after liftoff and killed all seven aboard. The night before, Thiokol engineers warned the cold could break the booster seals. Allan McDonald refused to sign the launch recommendation.
Artificial IntelligenceOn September 26, 1983, a Soviet early-warning system reported five American nuclear missiles. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov called it a malfunction, and he was right. Petrov Day marks the night one officer refused to believe the machine.
Decision MakingSome management habits never get anybody fired, and they still burn through good people. A boss who needs 100 percent of the information, a review that dredges up a mistake fixed nine months ago, and a meeting built to pat…
AIClaude only helps as much as you let it. Give it the real details, then run six prompts in order in one conversation, from finding the cause of a problem to picking one move for the next 24 hours.
Book ReviewsGladwell's Blink argues that expert judgment happens in seconds and beats careful analysis, then spends half the book showing how that same fast thinking produces racial bias nobody can see or control. The book knows it's contradicting itself and never…
BiasDaniel Kahneman spent forty years studying how we make decisions, and the short answer is: badly, in predictable ways. This book distills that work into three ideas that matter most for writers: why you underestimate how long projects take, why…
Book ReviewsA book about the butterfly effect tries to show you something you can't normally see: the consequences of your actions spreading forward through time, past your death, to people you'll never meet. This review examines whether the argument works, and…
Book ReviewsFifty historical disasters arranged by motive instead of chronology: a genuinely clever organizing idea buried in a book full of factual errors and missed opportunities. Read it for the leads, not the history.
Decision MakingEvery transformation vendor sells alignment, and alignment is not for sale. I ran a company off paper and onto computers with hundreds of people across every department wanting different things, and no version of that project existed where everyone was…
AIIf your team has been stuck on the same problem for more than a few days, the fastest fix is usually to delete the work and start over, and almost nobody does it. I lost weeks to a bug that…
ConsultingBefore you commission a technical assessment, find out what decision it is going to be used in. Honest engineers doing honest work can still produce a report that exists to strengthen somebody's position in a negotiation, and the outcome will…
AIOne question will tell you whether your AI agent project is going to work, and it takes an afternoon to answer. The question is not what the agent can do. It is what the agent is allowed to do when…
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