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What’s the Point of a Post-Mortem? The purpose of a post-mortem is not simply to explain what went wrong. It is to reconstruct what people expected, determine why reality differed, identify the conditions that shaped the outcome, and make specific changes that improve future decisions. Organizations often conduct reviews after failures, outages, missed deadlines, and unsuccessful launches. The resulting documents can contain detailed timelines and accurate descriptions without producing much learning. The problem is that explanation and improvement are different outcomes. A post-mortem becomes useful when it changes how people understand the system and what they do afterward. The Obvious Cause May Not Be the Useful Cause On February 28, 2017, Amazon Web Services experienced a major disruption to its S3 service in Northern Virginia. An authorized employee investigating a billing-system problem entered an incorrect input into an operational command. The command removed far more server ca...

What Happens When Intelligence Changes Faster Than Our Ability to Understand Ourselves? Artificial intelligence can improve the quality and speed of human work without necessarily producing an equivalent improvement in the knowledge, judgment, or independent capability of the person using it. As AI becomes more capable, distinguishing assisted performance from human understanding becomes increasingly important. The benefits of generative AI are easy to observe. Work can be completed faster, drafts can improve quickly, difficult calculations can be automated, and people can produce results that previously demanded much more time or expertise. The less visible question concerns what happens to the human capability behind those results. Improved output does not automatically tell us whether the person gained understanding, developed skill, or would recognize when the system produced a convincing error. AI Can Improve Professional Performance Research has already documented meaningful prod...

Why Do People Try New Things? People try new things because unfamiliar experiences can reveal information about the world, available opportunities, and themselves that familiar routines cannot provide. Familiarity is valuable because it reduces uncertainty. We know how a regular commute works, which meals we enjoy, how an established job operates, and what to expect from people and places we know well. Repeating successful choices saves time and protects us from having to relearn everything each time we act. That advantage has a limit. Familiar choices continue giving us information about familiar options, but they tell us very little about alternatives we have never tested. Exploration becomes valuable when learning about those alternatives matters enough to justify some uncertainty. Curiosity Makes Missing Information Matter Curiosity often begins when we realize something important is missing from our understanding. A completely unfamiliar subject may not attract much attention beca...

How Can You Use Spaced Repetition to Improve Memory? Spaced repetition improves memory by making you retrieve information after increasing periods of time rather than repeatedly exposing yourself to it while it remains familiar. Studying something several times in a short period can create a strong feeling of learning. Each reading becomes easier, the material looks recognizable, and the answer feels increasingly obvious. That experience is useful for initial learning, but it does not tell you whether the information will still be available when you need it later. Spaced repetition introduces time between encounters. Instead of studying something five times today, you might learn it today, test yourself tomorrow, return to it several days later, and then test yourself again after a week or more. Familiarity Is Not the Same as Recall Suppose you are learning the definition of a new term. Reading the definition repeatedly keeps both the term and the answer in front of you, so each additi...

When Does Pain Lead to Growth, and When Is It Just Damage? Pain can be a teacher, but only when it leaves room for recovery, meaning, and choice. Pain does not automatically produce growth. It can sharpen self-awareness, reveal priorities, and strengthen resilience, but it can also overwhelm the mind and body when it is prolonged, unsupported, or meaningless. The difference between pain that leads to growth and pain that causes damage often comes down to agency, recovery, support, and whether the experience can be integrated into a healthier life. Learning to recognize that difference helps us stop romanticizing suffering and start responding to it wisely. Pain Is a Signal, Not a Strategy We often hear that hardship builds character. Sometimes it does. But pain by itself is not a growth plan. Pain is more like a fire alarm. It tells us that something needs attention, but it does not tell us whether to stay, leave, rebuild, rest, or ask for help. Treating pain as inherently valuable is...

How Can You Identify What Your Team Pretends Not to Know? The truth usually leaks before it is spoken. Framing the Question How can you identify what your team pretends not to know? Start by looking for the gap between what people privately adjust to and what they publicly name. Teams rarely hide obvious truths with a formal lie. More often, they build rituals around avoidance: careful wording, recurring exceptions, jokes that contain warnings, dashboards no one wants to interpret, and meetings where the same risk appears under a new label. The Truth Shows Up Before It Speaks You identify what your team pretends not to know by watching three things: what evidence keeps returning, what language gets softened, and what decisions never change. A team’s hidden knowledge usually leaves traces. The support team routes “edge cases” to one senior person because everyone knows the product flow is broken. Sales discounts the same feature gap every quarter while the roadmap calls it “positioning....