Playbooks

If a team constantly feels overwhelmed, reactive, or trapped in meetings, it’s rarely because the people are underperforming. It’s because the team is attempting to operate with a context window that exceeds the team’s cognitive design.

The fix is not more process, or more meetings, or more dashboards. It’s a deliberate shrinking and shaping of the... See more

I have been fumbling on what to tell high school and college students about the future of computer science and software engineering. What to focus on? It’s obvious now. I can be so dense.

All I know is everything I needed to know to do everything I’ve ever done. I never once in my life thought about what I wanted to study. I just tried to make... See more

We've been here before. The symptoms repeat across time with eerie consistency. Politics feels paralyzed—parties fight but solve nothing. Leaders are reactive, never visionary. Jobs become transactional hell. Work becomes about survival, not meaning. The news is background static—constant crisis with no resolution. Everything feels heavy and gray... See more

Being invisible doesn’t mean being absent. It means being purposefully light. It means resisting the urge to fill the space or solve the problem. It means shifting from holding the spotlight to holding the space.

Here are five small actions that make a big difference:

Open with contribution, not context.Instead of kicking off with a long intro,... See more

Most 'source of truth' problems in product development aren't really about the source of truth at all. They assume that everyone wants the truth, that they can agree on what truth they're seeking, and that they're willing to put in the work to forge coherence when there are different versions of the truth.

Some questions to ponder:

• What reality is

... See more

Kate Moss is the odd supermodel out in the 90s. By comparison she has low fluency because her features are idiosyncratic and harder to understand. Kate’s eyes are feline, she’s angular and jaunty and so our brain is working harder to understand what is going on, but we become beguiled by the differences rather than the similarities and we find a... See more

Power is no longer about occupying territory; it’s about saturating connection. And victory belongs not to the most just, but to the most contagious.

But the subtext is plain: a world built on networks is not one that can be governed by Enlightenment values. Rationality, equality, deliberation, these are ideals of the linear age. The network obeys different laws.

We do not live in a world of things. We live in a world of links. And links generate hierarchies long before institutions do.

This explains why the Internet, marketed as a peer-to-peer utopia, collapsed into six platforms (Google, Amazon, Facebook/META, Apple, X/Twitter and Microsoft). It explains why a supposedly free market gives us Amazon, not... See more