Start Here
Welcome! I'm Charles Blain, and this is where I explore the invisible patterns that govern how organizations, strategies, and systems actually work.
Most advice tells you what to do. I'm more interested in why things work the way they do—the mechanisms underneath the surface that determine whether your strategy succeeds or fails.
The Pillars
These are comprehensive frameworks for understanding why things works the way they do or at least my understanding of them:
Shadow Strategy
The Shadow Strategy — Why execution reveals strategy more honestly than planning ever could. Your budget, calendar, and promotion list don't lie. Everything else might.
Core insight: The gap between what organizations say and what they do isn't hypocrisy—it's architecture. Understanding the four forces (Split, Squeeze, Mirror, Loop) that expose this gap is the key to reading what's really happening.
Momentum Engineering
The Momentum Engine — How organizational velocity is governed by invisible physics. Why adding people makes you slower, and what to do about it.
Core insight: Velocity isn't about working harder. It's governed by four dynamics (Coordination Cost Scaling, Spatial Information Degradation, Temporal Information Degradation, Structural Constraint) that you can't outwork—only architect around.
Attribution Theater
Attribution Theater (Coming Soon) — Marketing attribution is a performance everyone agrees to pretend is real. Multi-touch models don't reveal truth—they distribute fiction more evenly.
Core insight: Last-click steals credit, multi-touch spreads the lie. Incrementality (what actually caused the sale) is unmeasurable at scale. Every channel claims credit for the same conversion. The emperor has no clothes, but the dashboard looks great.
Hybrid Intelligence
The Judgment Bottleneck (Coming Soon) — AI made capability cheap. Judgment stayed expensive. The new bottleneck isn't doing—it's deciding what's worth doing.
Core insight: When execution becomes free, the constraint migrates to judgment. The scarcest resource isn't computing power or content creation—it's knowing what deserves human attention.
Shadow Systems
The Shadow System (Coming Soon) — The workaround becomes the workflow. The unofficial process beats the official one. Why shadow systems always win, and what they reveal about your real operations.
Core insight: The gap between how work is supposed to happen and how it actually happens isn't dysfunction—it's information. Shadow systems are your organization's revealed preferences.
Channel Entropy
Channel Entropy (Coming Soon) — Every marketing channel degrades from arbitrage to commodity. The pattern is predictable: discovery → exploitation → saturation → tax.
Core insight: First movers get arbitrage (cheap attention). Success attracts competition (costs rise). Platform extracts more value (algorithm changes, fee increases). Channel becomes table stakes (you're paying not to lose, not to win). AI is accelerating the cycle.
Measurement Traps
The Measurement Trap (Coming Soon) — When metrics become the mission, you optimize for the wrong thing. How to measure what matters without destroying what you're measuring.
Core insight: What gets measured gets gamed. Goodhart's Law isn't a warning—it's a prediction. The moment a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Daily Notes
I publish daily insights exploring these frameworks and the patterns they reveal.
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How to Navigate
- Start with a pillar if you want the complete framework
- Browse clusters (linked from each pillar) for focused deep-dives on specific mechanisms
- Subscribe to read the daily notes for bite-sized insights and observations
Each piece links upward to its parent framework, so you can always trace an insight back to the bigger picture.
Ready to dive in? Pick a pillar above and start reading.