How we think, expanded: System 3
I’ve written before about Daniel Kahneman’s two systems of thinking: System 1 that is very fast, requires very little energy, and is often wrong, and then System 2 that is slower, far more energy intensive, and more often right. Given that our entire body is highly optimized for energy use, our brains will default to System 1 wherever they can and this is the realm of cognitive bias.
Paltering: Lying by telling the truth
A few days ago, someone in my LinkedIn feed shared a screenshot of a post from X. My first assumption with any screenshot from social media (rather than a direct link) is that it’s fake, so I went and found the original. It was real, and it had been viewed 7.8 million times. The post said that OpenAI’s internal benchmarks showed GPT-6.1 Sol crushing Opus 5.5, with Anthropic struggling to keep up. The chart below it backed that up nicely: three coloured lines climbing over time, OpenAI’s green line sitting comfortably on top, Anthropic’s in the middle, Grok at the bottom.
The first problem is rarely the problem
Years ago at a client, I recall being asked how they could change the browser timeout to make it longer. They explained that what they were doing was taking too long, the browser was timing out, and users weren’t happy.
Eisenhower Matrix
Sometimes a new piece of work will arrive and it’s not immediately obvious whether we should start it now or if it can wait. A quick triaging technique that I use is called the Eisenhower Matrix1, an approach I first learned from Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
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Former US President Dwight Eisenhower developed the ideas behind this tool, and used them extensively in his work with the military and later in his role as president. ↩
Cognitive Bias
It would be easy to think that all cognitive bias is a bad thing. When we hear people talking about it, it’s often in the context of the collection of biases that make up racism or sexism or other generally negative things. Yet, the truth is that cognitive bias is the way that our brain manages energy use and is overwhelmingly a positive thing for us.
Attribute Substitution: Why Your Brain Secretly Swaps Hard Questions for Easier Ones
Attribute substitution is a situation where, when we are faced with a computationally difficult decision, we will often substitute a more easily calculated decision in it’s place and answer that instead, without even realizing that we did this.
Systems 1 & 2: how your brain actually makes decisions
In his seminal book Thinking Fast and Slow1, Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman talks about two very different kinds of thinking that we do. He refers to them as System 1 (fast, but often wrong) and System 2 (slower, more accurate).
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Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman ↩
Code comments
Research shows that code comments rarely stay in sync with the code they’re describing. Other psychology research shows that incorrect comments are worse than no comments at all. Should we get rid of code comments entirely or are some worth keeping around?
The Perils of Why: Four Reasons to Avoid ‘Why’ Questions in Coaching
In a coaching context, asking “why” questions can be problematic. They can often give results that we did not intend and should be used carefully and sparingly.
Book recommendations for Agile Coaches
I talk a lot about neuroscience, psychology, hypnosis, body language, and other topics as they relate to Agile methods and I’m frequently asked: “What books do you recommend as an introduction?” There is no single best book to start with so I’m giving you a bunch of categories to pick from.