Welcome to The Cognitive Kiln

Every research project leaves ideas behind.

Some don’t belong in a journal article. Others are too early for a book chapter. Many are simply observations that refuse to go away—patterns noticed in conversations, workshops, client work, or late-night notes that keep resurfacing because they explain something important.

For a long time, those ideas lived in notebooks.

This publication gives them a home.

I called it The Cognitive Kiln because the best ideas are rarely born finished. Like clay, they have to be worked, shaped, challenged, and occasionally broken before they become strong enough to hold. Some won’t survive the process. The ones that do become part of the way I think—and, I hope, part of the way others think as well.

Although AI will feature prominently here, this isn’t another newsletter about models, prompts, or product announcements. Those conversations matter, but they move quickly. I’m interested in the questions that will still matter after today’s models have been replaced.

Questions like:

• Where does value actually come from when intelligence becomes abundant?

• What remains uniquely human when AI becomes an everyday collaborator?

• Why do some people and organizations compound with AI while others simply automate?

• How do ideas become our own rather than merely passing through us?

Some editions will introduce new frameworks. Others will explore a single observation that I can’t quite let go of. Occasionally, I’ll publish an equation if I think it captures an idea more clearly than a page of prose.

What you won’t find here are hot takes.

I’d rather publish one idea that still feels useful five years from now than ten posts that disappear by next week.

Many of these essays connect to larger research programs I’m developing on human capability, organizational design, and AI. Others may never become anything more than a standalone thought experiment. That’s part of the point.

If there’s one theme that runs through all of them, it’s this:

Technology changes quickly.

Human capability changes more slowly.

Understanding how those two evolve together may be one of the most important questions of our time.

Welcome to The Cognitive Kiln.