Charles Blain

Leadership

Frozen Lightning

Once you document a process, it's outdated—like trying to photograph lightning. Documentation creates a false sense of control. We think capturing the process means mastering it...  but processes are living systems. They evolve faster than we can describe them because they respond to unpredictable real-world conditions. By

Judgment Bottleneck

AI writes code. No-code builds apps. Templates solve design. The creative spark, that "what if" moment, has never been cheaper to test. But finishing? That's still expensive. The last 20% resists automation because it's where human messiness meets human needs. Edge cases aren'

Leadership

Small Teams Ship, Big Teams Sync

Adding a person to a project increases communication complexity exponentially, not linearly. A team of 4 has 6 communication paths. A team of 8 has 28. We optimize for collaboration without accounting for coordination costs. The math is brutal. More people means more meetings, alignment sessions, and "quick syncs&

Innovation

Why Nothing Ever Gets Simpler

Organizations can only add complexity, never subtract it. Every new process gets layered on top. Every "improvement" becomes permanent baggage. Nobody's job description says "remove things", only "add solutions". This is the hidden law of institutional physics. Complexity is a one-way ratchet.

Marketing

You Can't Control Emergence

There's a marketing campaign running right now that's about to backfire spectacularly... and the team who created it has no idea. Complex systems produce behaviors none of their parts intended.  Your campaigns interact in ways you never designed.  Messages combine, recombine and impact your customers in

The Automation of Honesty

Machines don’t have egos to protect. They just report what they see. No spin. No excuses. This scares us. We want truth that makes us look good. But automated systems show what actually worked, not what we hoped worked. We resist this honesty because it’s uncomfortable. But organizations

Catching Intelligence [Part 5 of 5]

How do we build systems that reward truth over comfort? Most teams say they want the truth... (they really don't). Then they punish those who tell it. I've watched brilliant people learn to stay quiet... not because they lack insights, but because speaking up felt dangerous.

Catching Intelligence [Part 4 of 5]

The Difference Between Being Right and Being Useful Being right feels good. Being useful changes everything. Socrates was considered the wisest man in Athens not because he had the most answers, but because he asked the questions that revealed everyone else's ignorance—including his own. In business, we&

Catching Intelligence [Part 3 of 5]

I used to think the loudest voice was the most confident. (Turns out I had it backwards.) The person talking the most in your meeting probably knows the least about the problem. I've seen this pattern everywhere... more often than not. The real expert sits quietly while someone

Catching Intelligence [Part 2 of 5]

That moment when someone says "I don't understand" in a meeting? That's not confusion. That's your canary in the coal mine. If the smartest person in the room is lost, your customers are too. But we've trained people to nod

Catching Intelligence [Part 1 of 5]

Ever notice how software handles problems better than teams do? When something goes wrong in code, the system doesn't crash. It catches the error, figures out what happened, and keeps running. That error message isn't your code breaking. It's your code speaking. (We'

The Fractal Reading Revolution [Part 4 of 4]

Here's what changed everything. I'm not limited to the edge of any book anymore. I can put two books against each other. Compare what different experts say about the same problem. Find where they agree. See where they disagree. I can find synergies between ideas from

The Fractal Reading Revolution [Part 3 of 4]

Here's where everything changed for me. I started using Google NotebookLM as my reading coach. I upload PDFs. I transcribe YouTube videos. I feed it everything about a topic. Then I ask it to teach me. Not just summaries. Real teaching. It asks me questions. It tests my

The Fractal Reading Revolution [Part 2 of 4]

Remember that "wrong" way I read books? Here's exactly how it works. Step 1: Start with metadata Book summaries. Author interviews. Reviews. Podcasts where they talk about the book. Why? Authors compress their best ideas into 20-minute conversations. Five hours of reading becomes 20 minutes of

The Fractal Reading Revolution [Part 1 of 4]

Reading differently changes everything. My colleague loves to ask about the latest book I've "read." He does air quotes. Always smirks. Because I told him how I actually read. I never read cover to cover. Ever. I start with the table of contents. Jump to what

Marketing

Pain First, Solutions Second

The more comfortable someone is, the less they'll hear you… Not because they're difficult, but because comfort makes your message invisible to their attention system. Evolution wired us this way: ancestors who noticed predators survived, while those distracted by comfort didn't. This creates a

AI

Changing Minds, Not Plans

Everyone is building better systems for an unpredictable world. More frameworks. Tighter processes. But here's the thing, when the game keeps changing, the winning move isn't a better playbook. It's better players. I used to think certainty was the answer to uncertainty. Then AI

Innovation

The Conveyor Illusion

The first problem with automation isn't the technology, it's our impatience. Once we flip that switch, a tiny abnormality can wreck the whole system. (And we won't even know why.) The thing is, we're so afraid of being slow that we skip

Leadership

The Delegation Death Spiral

Managers think they're delegating. They're starting wars. They have a problem they don't want to think through. Without framework, direction or constraints, they hand it to someone else. Just "figure something out that I'll like." Staff think hard and return

Words Become Lenses

Your brain's most powerful function isn't thinking—it's listening to itself talk. I used to believe my thoughts existed first, then I found words for them. I had it backward. Neuroscience now suggests language doesn't just express thoughts—it creates them. Without

S2E5: The Rhythm of Strategy

Our People think strategy is about finding the right position. But, so far... We've discovered that thinking emerges from doing, not the other way around. We've seen how our language creates prisons for strategic thinking. We've learned that the ultimate strategic goal is to

S2E4: The Paradox of Presence

Have you ever noticed how we're drawn to contradictions? I have. In our last episode, we explored Heidegger's insight about strategic invisibility – how the ultimate power move is to disappear into your user's workflow. But here's where it gets interesting (and a

S2E3: The Invisible Game

We obsess over visible strategies. But Martin Heidegger noted that skilled carpenters make hammers vanish. It becomes "ready-to-hand" – where tool and user merge into seamless action. Only when it breaks does it become "present-at-hand" – an object examined. The ultimate strategic goal isn't to be

S2E2: The Language of Strategy

I sat in a boardroom listening to colleagues define strategy. The answers surprised me. The definitions described process—plans, roadmaps, frameworks, documents. Our language has colonized our perception. The words we use to describe strategy have become a prison for strategic thinking itself. This isn't just semantics. When

S2E1: Unlearning Strategy

Look at a child building with blocks. They don't write a strategy first. They don't separate planning from building. They think while they build. They build while they think. Have you noticed how this natural flow disappears in our marketing work? First, we plan. Then, later,