Second-Order Thinking: How to Stop Your Decisions From Creating Bigger Problems

In August 2025, Polish researchers tested something nobody had thought to check: what happens to doctors' skills after they rely on AI assistance? The AI worked perfectly—catching problems during colonoscopies, flagging abnormalities faster than human eyes could. But when researchers pulled the AI away, the doctors' detection rates had dropped. They'd become less skilled at […]

You're frozen. The deadline's approaching. You don't have all the data. Everyone wants certainty. You can't give it. Sound familiar? Maybe it's a hiring decision with three qualified candidates and red flags on each one. Or a product launch where the market research is mixed. Or a career pivot where you can't predict which path […]

Try to go through a day without using an analogy. I guarantee you'll fail within an hour. Your morning coffee tastes like yesterday's batch. Traffic is moving like molasses. Your boss sounds like a broken record. Every comparison you make—every single one—is your brain's way of understanding the world. You can't turn it off.   […]

$37 billion. That's how much gets wasted annually on marketing budgets because of poor attribution and misunderstanding of what actually drives results. Companies' credit campaigns that didn't work. They kill initiatives that were actually succeeding. They double down on coincidences while ignoring what's actually driving outcomes. Three executives lost their jobs this month for making […]

You see a headline: “Study Shows Coffee Drinkers Live Longer.” You share it in 3 seconds flat. But here's what just happened—you confused correlation with causation, inductive observation with deductive proof, and you just became a vector for misinformation. Right now, millions of people are doing the exact same thing, spreading beliefs they think are […]

The Crisis We're Not Talking About We're living through the greatest thinking crisis in human history—and most people don't even realize it's happening. Right now, AI generates your answers before you've finished asking the question. Search engines remember everything so you don't have to. Algorithms curate your reality, telling you what to think before you've […]

Most innovation leaders are performing someone else's version of innovation thinking. I've spent decades in this field. Worked with Fortune 100 companies. And here's what I see happening everywhere. Brilliant leaders following external frameworks. Copying methodologies from people they admire. Shifting their approach based on whatever's trendy. But they never develop their own innovation thinking […]

Michael Dell and his investors spent twenty-five billion dollars to buy back Dell Technologies. But they weren't really buying a company. They were buying freedom from quarterly earnings pressure.   I'm Phil McKinney, former CTO of Hewlett-Packard, and I witnessed how this pressure shaped decisions for years. Today, we are exploring why the WSJ's recent […]

What if I told you that the people who disagree with you are actually your secret weapon for better thinking?  Just last month, my wife and I had a heated argument about studio changes I wanted to make here on the ranch. Her immediate reaction was about cost. Mine was about productivity and creativity. We […]

In 2005, I had a ten-minute conversation at San Jose Airport that generated billions in revenue for HP. But here's what's fascinating: three other HP executives heard the exact same conversation and saw nothing special about it. If you read Monday's Studio Notes, you know this story from the emotional side—what it felt like to […]