Charles Blain

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

EMERGENT LOOPS

Constraints Design Behavior

Twitter launched in 2006 with a 140-character limit borrowed from SMS. The constraint was technical, not philosophical. Users invented threading. By 2013, tweetstorms appeared: numbered tweets (1/12, 2/12, 3/12) manually posted in sequence. No native feature existed. People just started doing it. Then screenshots of text. Users

SPEED INFRASTRUCTURE

Move Fast, Break Less

"Move fast and break things" became the rallying cry of Silicon Valley. Then it became a cautionary tale. Now most organizations treat it as a solved problem: obviously you need to slow down to maintain quality. Ship carefully. Add review gates. Deploy quarterly, not daily. Except the data

Momentum Engineering

Voice Without Purpose

Google's core value: "Respect each other." Translated into practice: "Find a way to include and agree with every person's opinion." Good value. Good translation. Good intentions. Result: 15+ approvals required to deploy minor changes. An AppSheet founder who sold his company to

Momentum Engineering

Trust Collapses Faster

One nurse made a medication error. She reported it immediately. Exactly as trained. Ten years of "Just Culture" training said: speak up when you make a mistake, we'll fix the system, not punish you. She spoke up. They fired her eight days later. Then prosecuted her.

Momentum Engineering

Voice Needs Practice

You tried to improve communication. You added more meetings. You installed open-door policies. You encouraged "speak up culture." It didn't work. First, people need safety. Not permission to speak. Safety to speak without cost. Until they have that, adding channels doesn't help. They'

Momentum Engineering

The Military Model

The military has steep hierarchy. Chain of command. Rank matters. Orders are orders. And yet military teams often have the highest trust of any organization type. How does that work? The framework says psychological safety requires leader vulnerability. Requires flattened power dynamics. Requires voice flowing freely. The military has none

Momentum Engineering

The Density Model

Netflix doesn't do psychological safety. Not the way the research describes it. They fire people regularly. They have "keeper tests." Would you fight to keep this person? No? Fire them. They publish this in their culture deck. They're proud of it. And they'

Momentum Engineering

Two Entry Points

Everyone says "build trust first." But what if you can't? WhatsApp didn't start with trust exercises. They started by shipping. The app worked. It kept working. Reliability built credibility. Credibility built trust. Startups don't have time for six-month trust-building protocols. They have

Momentum Engineering

Five to One

Trust takes months to build. One lie kills it instantly. Not symmetrical. Not fair. But that's the math. Gottman studied marriages. Found a pattern. Healthy marriages have a 5:1 ratio. Five positive interactions for every negative one. Below that ratio, divorce becomes likely. Organizations work the same

Momentum Engineering

Friction Forces Choice

We say "you can have speed or quality, pick one." What we mean is "our trust is so low that politics eat all our capacity." We say "moving fast means breaking things." What we mean is "we can't coordinate, so speed

Momentum Engineering

Check Zeros First

Trust has a formula. Not metaphorical. Mathematical. Trust = min(Authenticity, Logic, Empathy) × Competence × Reliability The "min" function matters. It means: take the smallest of those three numbers. If Authenticity is zero, trust is zero. Doesn't matter how high the others are. A brilliant, empathetic, reliable psychopath?

Momentum Engineering

Loop, Not Line

We think trust leads to speed. Or speed leads to trust. Both are true. That's the point. WhatsApp didn't start with perfect trust. They shipped fast. Shipping worked. Success built credibility. Credibility built trust. Trust let them move faster. Faster shipping created more success. The loop

Momentum Engineering

Building the Momentum Engine

The false trade-off between speed and excellence exists because friction exists. Trust removes friction. But trust doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't emerge from hope. It doesn't arrive because you want it. Trust gets engineered. Systematically. Through specific steps in specific order. This is

MEASURING TRUTH

AI Reads First

You can track ChatGPT referrals in your analytics. Standard referral traffic. But something else is happening that you can't see. AI systems read your content before any human arrives. They scan it. Index it. Quote from it. Decide if it's valuable. None of this shows up

TESTING-AI

Knowledge Locked Inside

Your best salesperson knows which leads to prioritize. Ask them how they know. "I just... know. Experience." That's the problem. AI doesn't read minds. It reads patterns. Your top performer has expertise locked in their head. Invisible signals. Gut checks. Pattern matching from years

TESTING-AI

Prompting Is Managing

The best prompters aren't the most technical. They're the best managers. They know what good managers know: specificity beats vague direction. Context shapes output. Feedback loops catch gaps. Not "make this better" but "rewrite this for busy executives who need the decision upfront.