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.

178 articles  • Page 8 of 20

Lessons Learned Jun 1, 2026 • 9 min

Two-Way Doors: Make Reversible Decisions Fast and Irreversible Ones Slow

Only 20 percent of executives say their organizations excel at decision making, and most report that much of the time they spend on it is used ineffectively. A large share of that waste comes from treating reversible decisions as if they were permanent. Amazon has a name for the...

Lessons Learned May 28, 2026 • 8 min

Chesterton's Fence: Do Not Remove What You Do Not Understand

Software maintenance accounts for 50 to 80 percent of a system's total lifecycle cost, according to decades of engineering research summarized in the peer-reviewed literature on maintenance economics. A large share of that money is spent touching things nobody currently understands....

AI Getting Started May 27, 2026 • 6 min

Data Governance Is the Real Prerequisite for AI

Gartner found 63% of organizations lack or are unsure they have AI-ready data. Data governance for AI, not the model, is the real prerequisite. Know where your data lives before you pick a tool.

Lessons Learned May 26, 2026 • 8 min

The Bus Factor: What Happens If Your Key Person Disappears

In a study of 133 popular open-source projects, 46 percent had a bus factor of one, meaning a single person held enough of the knowledge that the project would stall if they walked away, and 65 percent had a bus factor of two or fewer (Avelino, Passos, Hora and Valente, 2016). The bus...

Operations May 23, 2026 • 8 min

Entropy: Why Every System Drifts Toward Mess, and Maintenance Is the Answer

Developers spend about 42 percent of their working week, roughly 17 hours, on maintenance and dealing with bad code rather than building new features, according to Stripe's 2018 Developer Coefficient report. That number is entropy at work. Software entropy is the tendency of any...

Psychology May 21, 2026 • 8 min

Loss Aversion Is Setting Your Prices (and Costing You)

Loss aversion, the finding that a loss feels roughly twice as large as an equivalent gain, quietly sets more of your prices than your spreadsheet does. In Tversky and Kahneman's 1992 refinement of prospect theory, the loss aversion coefficient landed near 2.25, meaning the sting of...

Development May 19, 2026 • 8 min

Data Lineage: Knowing Where Your Numbers Actually Come From

Poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million a year, according to Gartner, and most of that damage starts with a number nobody can trace. Data lineage is the practice of following a figure from its point of origin through every ingest, transform, and model until it...