AI & Emerging Technology
The AI Could Keep Fixing Things. We Had to Decide When to Stop.
A PDF investigation shows how sensible suggestions from an AI agent can add up to unplanned work—and why deciding what is enough takes human attention.
Topic
Systems Thinking
AI & Emerging Technology
The Context Between the Clicks
AI agents use interfaces designed for people who bring context and learn through experience. What happens when they arrive without either?
AI & Emerging Technology
What If We Can't Keep Up?
Chicago's Deep Tunnel offers lessons for investing in AI defense, finding bottlenecks, and adjusting when future demands exceed our plans.
AI & Emerging Technology
What Kind of Fires Does AI Start?
Alex Cannella applies familiar problem-solving methods to active AI incidents, smoldering problems, and conditions that could fuel future failures.
AI & Emerging Technology
Can an AI Stop Before It Guesses—and Keep Working?
A retrospective lab notebook tracing experiments, measurement mistakes, and imperfect results when an AI must pause an unsupported action while continuing useful research.
AI & Emerging Technology
Digital Pair Therapy
Use disagreement with a coding agent to uncover missing context, preserve decisions, and improve how you work together.
AI & Emerging Technology
Feelings, Evidence and Constraints in AI Collaboration
Separate feelings, evidence, constraints, and assumptions when working with AI, while keeping research findings and practical hypotheses distinct.
Systems Thinking
The Discovery That Never Happened
How unspoken questions and missing dissent can prevent ideas from meeting—and what organizations can do to protect discovery.
AI & Emerging Technology
When Your Chatbot Follows Your Lead
How unchecked assumptions, unspoken thoughts, and gaps in shared context can steer an AI conversation—and how to make room for correction.
AI & Emerging Technology
I Approved the Test Before I Learned What Else Would Change
A newsletter access-control test prompted questions about login authority, lasting changes, and what an approval warning does not explain.
AI & Emerging Technology
You Don’t Have to Answer Every Question Your AI Asks
A reasonable question from an AI agent can arrive before we know enough to answer it. Decide when to commit, when a provisional choice is enough, and when to keep learning.
AI & Emerging Technology
Beyond Automating Bottlenecks
Why the next big win is not just faster workflow, but better work selection
Strategy & Innovation
When Innovation Outruns Useful Life
How rapid replacement separates useful life from market value, and what that means for buying, building, and switching technology.
Leadership & Organizations
Learning to Lead While the Rules Are Changing
A military leadership experiment offers a way to think about uncertainty, information provenance, and learning to lead systems that contain AI.
AI & Emerging Technology
A Better Way to Work: Give Your AI a Ticket
After roughly a thousand issues, tickets appear to help humans and AI coding agents preserve constraints, failed approaches, and prior decisions. Shared memory also needs human care to stay useful.
AI & Emerging Technology
Kirk, Raccoons, and the Trouble With Rules
Kirk, raccoons, and AI agents offer a humorous look at how persistent learners discover gaps between intended rules and the possibilities a system actually permits.
AI & Emerging Technology
Ask Your AI About the Tech Debt
A review of duplicated deployment work cut our deployment time by about a third. Periodic technical-debt reviews can reveal costs that have become routine, with humans deciding what to change.
AI & Emerging Technology
Before the Fire: How We Learn to Use AI Safely
Responsible AI use is a learning loop: anticipate what could go wrong, observe what happens, and use what you learn to improve the next decision.
AI & Emerging Technology
Can You Recover Your AI Work?
Backup copies are a starting point. Recovering AI work also means restoring the conversations, instructions, connections, and context that make a project usable.
Systems Thinking
A Recommendation Needs Somewhere to Go
Recommendations need a receiving owner, a reasoned decision, and a way for learning to shape what comes next—even when the answer is no.
Learning & Knowledge
Give Each Other a Break: We Aren’t Losing Our Minds
Shared false memories and real differences between versions can both shape disagreements. Ask whether people were shown the same thing.
AI & Emerging Technology
No, Chatbots Will Not Be Controlling Air Travel
Distinguish AI traffic-planning support from chatbot control, and ask how aviation recommendations are checked and which decisions stay human.
AI & Emerging Technology
How Far Should an AI Claim Be Allowed to Travel?
Identify the last responsible gate where an unverified AI claim must be checked before action becomes hard to reverse.
Trust, Risk & Governance
The Backup Illusion: Are We Actually Recoverable?
How independent recovery paths, retention, and tested restores help a business recover from mistakes, outages, and data loss.
AI & Emerging Technology
When Building Gets Faster Than Learning
Faster implementation changes when we can validate a system against the business it serves, and how we should plan to stay involved.
AI & Emerging Technology
Behavior Patterns for Creating with GenAI
Shared Conceptual Vocabulary for Working with AI
AI & Emerging Technology
AI Is Only Magic When We Close Our Eyes
When AI systems behave in unexpected ways, senior leaders need to examine the objectives, tools, permissions, monitoring, and organizational capacity surrounding the model.
AI & Emerging Technology
The First Tool That Can Speak Before It Knows Why
Generative AI can produce fluent language before purpose, audience, and evidence are fully formed. That changes the thinking loops we need.
AI & Emerging Technology
Why Giving AI More Context Works
Relevant context helps define an AI task through useful constraints, which makes a fitting answer more likely.
AI & Emerging Technology
The Race Condition with Reality
A systems-thinking article explaining why AI adoption feels chaotic when capability, understanding, governance, resilience, human adaptation, and scale all move at different speeds.
AI & Emerging Technology
Second Brains, Post Offices, and the Problem of Finding Things
A plain-language explanation of why AI-powered second brains depend on maps, indexes, and human validation to find the right information.
Systems Thinking
Resilience Debt
A reflection on how convenience, efficiency, and automation can quietly remove the alternate paths an organization needs during disruption.
AI & Emerging Technology
Where Second Brains Break
A practical article on stress-testing AI-powered second brains for retrieval, source authority, calibration, and safe operating boundaries.
AI & Emerging Technology
The Technical Debt That Confuses GenAI
GenAI can expose the kind of technical debt where business meaning and implementation paths have drifted apart.
AI & Emerging Technology
The Interesting Part Is Not the Idea, It Is the Translation Layer
AI collaboration gets interesting when old patterns are carried into a new working context.
AI & Emerging Technology
The System Found the Word…
How Semantic Debt Compounds at Machine Speed
AI & Emerging Technology
Reagan Was Right - Trust, But Verify
A lesson from an AI agent that did not actually turn off.
AI & Emerging Technology
AI Reaches Far Beyond Its Users
Like many technologies before it, AI is spreading into more and more of the systems that shape modern life. History reminds us that technologies often become deeply embedded in society long before we fully understand their long-term consequences.
AI & Emerging Technology
How LLMs Answer Questions They Were Never Taught
A useful answer is not proof that a chatbot knows, remembers, or has checked the answer.
Data & Software
Data Mart Hygiene First Principles
You can catch contradictions without knowing the whole story.
Society, Policy & Culture
What Is In Your Echo Chamber?
Let’s see what you hear when you really listen. And even more importantly—what you don’t.
AI & Emerging Technology
A Shadow Is Enough
How Society Might Emerge from Noise
Data & Software
Just Parse It Later
The Dirty Secret of Free Text Overloading