Charles Blain

Foxes Update Beliefs

Today's 7-day weather forecast is as accurate as the 3-day forecast was in the 1980s. This is one of the great unsung success stories in science. Hurricane track predictions improved from 200-400 nautical mile error to 50 nautical miles. Forecasts improve about one day per decade. How? Not

HYBRID INTELLIGENCE

Cheap Capability, Expensive Judgment

When everything becomes cheap, something becomes expensive. This is how scarcity migrates. When manufacturing became cheap, design became expensive. When distribution became cheap, attention became expensive. When storage became cheap, curation became expensive. When AI made capability cheap, judgment became expensive. You can now generate analysis, research, code, content, and

STRATEGIC SYSTEMS

Conviction Moments

You have a brilliant strategy. The analysis is solid. The logic is airtight. The deck is polished. Then you present it and nothing happens. Because you assumed stakeholders would align spontaneously. Alignment doesn't happen by accident. It happens in planned conviction moments. Most people think about stakeholder management

HYBRID INTELLIGENCE

Demos Versus Production

The demo looks perfect. AI analyzes the customer data, surfaces insights, generates recommendations. The CEO nods. The team gets excited. Someone says "let's roll this out." Then you ask three questions. What happens when the data is dirty? What happens when it generates something confidently wrong?

HYBRID INTELLIGENCE

Can Versus Should

"AI can do this." You hear it constantly. AI can write your emails. AI can generate your code. AI can create your content. AI can handle customer support. AI can draft your strategy. All true. But "AI can do this" doesn't mean "we

HYBRID INTELLIGENCE

What Stayed Expensive

AI made analysis cheap. You can generate competitive research in minutes. Market analysis before lunch. Customer segmentation by afternoon. Strategic options before dinner. Insight generation costs pennies now. But five things stayed expensive. Knowing which insights actually matter given real constraints. AI generates forty recommendations. Your budget funds three. Your

COGNITIVE LEVERAGE

Find Real Bottlenecks

Everyone's solving surface problems. "We need faster code reviews." "We need better standups." "We need clearer documentation." Then they optimize code review time, restructure standups, rewrite the docs. And velocity doesn't change. Because they solved symptoms, not bottlenecks. The real

COGNITIVE LEVERAGE

Pattern Without Overgeneralization

You see a pattern three times and declare a law. "Remote teams always move slower." "Adding people always creates drag." "Technical founders always struggle with delegation." You're not wrong. You saw the pattern. It happened three times. But pattern recognition without context

COGNITIVE LEVERAGE

Deprioritization Discipline

Everyone talks about focus. Pick your priorities. Say no. Protect your time. Then they list seventeen priorities. The problem isn't that people don't prioritize. It's that they won't deprioritize. Prioritization is additive. You choose what matters. You rank importance. You allocate resources.

STRATEGIC SYSTEMS

Intelligence Isn't Judgment

Good judgment is knowing what matters. It's distinguishing signal from noise. Seeing second-order effects. Understanding when rules apply and when they don't. You can have high intelligence and terrible judgment. You can ace every test and still make catastrophic decisions. Intelligence is processing power. Judgment is

HYBRID INTELLIGENCE

Scarcity Migrated Up

You used to be valuable because you could produce insights. You'd spend a week analyzing data, reviewing research, connecting dots. You'd emerge with three PowerPoint slides that made everyone nod. That work now takes forty minutes. AI can generate forty insights in the time it used

COGNITIVE LEVERAGE

Choosing Beats Thinking

You can now generate forty insights in an hour. Competitive analysis across twelve dimensions. Customer sentiment patterns. Market adjacencies. Operational inefficiencies. Strategic vulnerabilities. All legitimate insights. All theoretically useful. And almost all worthless for what you need to do today. When insight generation was expensive, the bottleneck was production. You&

EMERGENT LOOPS

Don't Fight Data Moats

Understanding how data moats form isn't about mourning losses. It's about identifying which markets still have open windows… and which battles aren't worth fighting. We call it "network effects." But that's wrong. The network isn't the moat. The

EMERGENT LOOPS

Innovation Serves the Invariant

Every few years, someone declares a revolution. Vinyl records became 8-track tapes became cassettes became CDs became MP3 downloads became streaming services. Six complete transformations in music distribution. Six infrastructure overhauls. Each one celebrated as revolutionary. Watch what changed: Physical warehouses became digital servers. Trucks delivering crates became data packets.

STRATEGIC SYSTEMS

Delay Is a Decision

2006. Steve Jobs approached Intel with an opportunity. Make the chips for a new product called the iPhone. Intel turned him down. The phones wouldn't sell enough to justify development costs. The decision you delay costs more than the decision you make. Intel didn't ignore mobile.

EMERGENT LOOPS

You Can't Unlearn Instant

You're not addicted to instant gratification. You've been conditioned by irreversible infrastructure shifts. My mom bought us encyclopedias. Heavy volumes, gold-trimmed pages. When I needed information, I walked to the shelf. Found the right letter. Turned pages. Sometimes the answer wasn't there. Then I

STRATEGIC SYSTEMS

Loops Amplify Direction

2008. MySpace was the world's largest social network. 115 million users. Then Facebook overtook them in April. What happened next wasn't gradual decline. It was a death spiral. We say growth and decline are opposites. Actually, they're the same mechanism running in reverse. MySpace

STRATEGIC SYSTEMS

Iterate Through Failure

Everyone knows SpaceX fails fast. Blow up rockets. Learn. Iterate. What most don't know: How close it came to not working. 2006. Falcon 1 exploded 25 seconds after launch. Fuel leak. 2007. Second launch. Rocket tumbled out of control. Stage separation failure. 2008. Third launch. Collision during stage

STRATEGIC SYSTEMS

Behavior Reveals Purpose

Sears had a vision. One company, unified mission, customer-centric culture. Eddie Lampert had a better idea. 2005. He restructured Sears into 30 separate business units. Each with its own president, board, and P&L. Units would buy and sell services from each other through competitive bidding. Internal competition would

STRATEGIC SYSTEMS

Navigation Beats Maps

That quarterly strategy deck sitting in your shared drive? Beautiful vision. Market analysis. SWOT. Three-year roadmap with milestones. Can't tell you what decision to make Monday morning. We say strategy is the plan. Actually, strategy is the navigation. 1978. Honda and Yamaha went to war in the motorcycle

HYBRID INTELLIGENCE

Use It, Lose It

You've probably felt it when the AI gives an answer and you think: Should I check this? Do I even know how? That hesitation? Your expertise sending up a flare. Every time you use AI, you choose about your own capability. Not consciously. But the choice is there.

HYBRID INTELLIGENCE

Hybrid Work Compounds

You're asking the wrong question. "What can AI handle?" leads to a binary: everything or nothing. Both paths miss the zone. The missing middle: hybrid work that didn't exist until capability asymmetry created it. AI is fast but context-blind. Humans are slow but judgment-rich.

INVERSE WISDOM

Certainty Destroys Authority

The expert says "I don't know" and gains credibility. The fraud pretends to know and loses it. Why does seeming weak strengthen your position? We think authority comes from having answers. So we give them… even when we don't have them… even when we&

HYBRID INTELLIGENCE

The Apprenticeship Problem

You need experience to supervise AI. But AI eliminates the entry-level roles where people gain experience. In 5 years, who becomes senior? We automate the grunt work first. The boring stuff. Data entry. Basic analysis. Junior copywriting. First drafts. Research tasks. Makes sense. That's what AI does best.

HYBRID INTELLIGENCE

Who Thinks First

Every time you use ChatGPT, one decision determines whether you get smarter or dumber: who provides context first. We say we want AI to make us smarter. What we want is AI to do our thinking. We type questions before we think them through. We hit generate before we frame