Content grid with edge-lit article cards floating in dark space — Amelia S. Gagne's writing on strategy, psychology, AI adoption, and cybersecurity

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Strategy, psychology, engineering, and the patterns that actually compound.

147 articles  • Page 1 of 17

Operations Jul 26, 2026 8 min

What Ant Colonies Teach About Coordination Without Managers

Roughly 15,600 developers from more than 1,400 companies have built the Linux kernel, described by the Linux Foundation as the largest collaborative project in the history of computing, and no manager ever assigned most of that work (Linux Foundation, 2017). The mechanism underneath...

Psychology Jul 24, 2026 8 min

Survivorship Bias Is Distorting Every Best Practice You Copy

Survivorship bias overstates the typical mutual fund's reported returns by roughly 1.6 percentage points a year, according to the University of Chicago's Center for Research in Security Prices: surviving U.S. stock funds averaged 8.8 percent over the decade ending 2003, while counting...

Psychology Jul 22, 2026 7 min

The IKEA Effect: Why You Overvalue What You Built In-House

In a set of experiments published in 2011, people who assembled a plain IKEA storage box valued it 63 percent higher than an identical prebuilt one. The IKEA effect, named by the researchers who ran that study, is the bias that makes you overvalue what you built yourself. It quietly...

AI Getting Started Jul 19, 2026 8 min

The Last Mile Is Where AI Projects Actually Live or Die

An MIT study found 95 percent of AI pilots showed no bottom-line impact. The AI last-mile problem is why: the demo is easy, and the integration into a real workflow is the whole project.

Operations Jul 18, 2026 8 min

Fix Your Bottleneck and It Just Moves Somewhere Else

Every system has one bottleneck governing its output. The theory of constraints explains why improving anything else is wasted motion, and why the constraint always moves the moment you break it.

Psychology Jul 16, 2026 8 min

Why Safer Tools Quietly Invite Riskier Behavior

Give people a felt safety margin and many of them spend it. Risk compensation shows up in ABS brakes, MFA, and backup tools alike. The fix is to build so protection is invisible and cannot be traded away.