Strength

We’re obsessed with strength. It defines us as individuals. The ways in which we are uniquely capable, our ability to recover from adversity and overcome future challenges. It’s what we look for in ourselves, our partners, our jobs and lifestyles. Strength forms the cornerstone of how we see ourselves.

And yet, allow yourself to be defined by your obsession. Architect your life around that same obsession, surrounding yourself with others who share the same, find a job which allows you to partake of it. Let an obsession become the cornerstone of who you are – you’ll quickly find yourself recoiling from the idea, cognizant of the risks such a fixation bring.

Taking a Stance

Multi-agent systems, in which several distinct and independent entities interact with one another, suffer from a key challenge: the complexity of the interactions within the system grows exponentially as the number of interacting agents increases. This same model maps to organizations and even the lives of individuals.

As leaders attempting to develop and execute effective strategies, we are often faced with the need to predict system behaviour and make decisions based on those predictions. As the number of entities within our strategic model grows, our ability to accurately predict outcomes decreases.

In this post I propose a model for estimating our prediction accuracy, common pitfalls and the impact they have, and a model which enables us to take appropriate actions regardless.

Creating a Task in .NET

Today I found something surprising - a piece of code in C# which awaited a new Task(...) and which achieved its goal, but did the opposite of what I expected. Indeed, instead of the task running to completion, it instead never completed. In this post I'll share some interesting empirical observations about how this works and talk about how this differs from asynchronous execution systems in other languages.