Guessing Game
October 2024
A big part of my job is training people on structured thinking.
We often have great discussions about System 1 vs System 2 thinking as made famous by Daniel Kahneman is his book, Thinking Fast and Slow.
System 1 is automatic, and System 2 is effortful.
I’m interested in the dopamine hit related to gambling a guess to try a fix.
It reinforces, chemically, a behavior that says, “take a guess”, if it works out, that’s good, you used less energy, you need less calories.
I explore this further in my upcoming book, Atrophy Hunter.
Growth and Pain
Sep 2024
I see us running full speed in two opposing directions.
One way is towards ease, painlessness, and pleasure.
The other way, aware of the first, is away from that, knowing we need to exercise our brains and bodies. that too much stimulation is bad for us.
The funny thing is, we are trying to do the second way, in the most easy, and convenient way possible!
We are trying to not be lazy in the laziest ways possible, how interesting.
Small Town Doctor
August 2024
In the town where my mom grew up, they had one doctor.
He would make house calls, deliver babies… everything.
When he died, his family was going through his desk and they found hundreds of uncashed checks. Checks from people he felt could not afford to pay for his care, but needed it anyway.
I wonder, what would happen today if a doctor tried to do that? What would insurance, or the government have to say about it?
I did deeper into this story in my book, Atrophy Hunter, coming out later this year.
Writing Atrophy Hunter
July 2024
When my company gave me the greenlight to start the podcast, The Knowing Edge, I was excited but nervous. I’ve had some incredible experiences, specifically as a consultant, but nobody really knows about them other than my family.
More than that, I had been seeing the same swelling anxiety across every industry surround AI. I was teaching a problem solving class to a client, and they started circumventing the KT process by dropping screen shots of the cases into ChatGPT. I wasn’t mad, I just watched.
Interestingly, it came up with 5 incorrect root causes almost instantly.
That’s the moment I started writing this book.
These people were engineers and scientist, they were just playing around with it, they dont trust it that much yet. the interesting thing is, that day may be coming though.
Even if AI ends up doing everything for us, correctly, we will miss the chance to grow through struggle and failure, we will wither. That’s what the book, Atrophy Hunter, is all about.
Quite Voices and Blank Faces
June 2024
A few years ago, I was working with an IT team, studying their systems and processes in a diagnostic we ran. The company had layers of dashboards, analytics, and escalation procedures .
When the failure hit, dozens of people jumped on a bridge call. Little circles filled with initials, no faces.
I had a disturbing conversation with one of the engineers on that team. He told me that recently, an issue popped up, a major incident. He said the problem was a very specific server issue. He’d seen it before.
He told the team… twice, during the call…
No one listened, or they heard him but were too busy working on the backchannels, chatting with each other, and not bringing findings to the main group.
Roughly 24 hours later, after chasing dozens of false leads, they found the root cause, exactly where he said it was.
He did not think it was malicious, just too hard to focus for the group. He didn’t think they ignored him on purpose. Maybe if they saw his face instead of his initials, the communication would have broken through better.
In Atrophy Hunter, I write about how technology and structure can dull our ability to think. But the truth is, clarity isn’t lost all at once. It erodes in small moments — like the meeting where the person who’s right gets ignored.
Clarity in Chaos: Lessons from the Field
May 2024
When most people picture decision-making, they imagine a conference room with calm voices, slides on a screen, structured debate. But that’s not where the real decisions happen.
The real ones happen in control rooms when an alarm goes off. In production facilities when a line goes down.
That’s where I spend most of my time.
As a consultant with Kepner-Tregoe, I work with organizations that can’t afford guesswork.
What I’ve learned is that chaos doesn’t destroy clarity, it exposes it.
When people are under pressure, their habits of thought show up in plain sight. The best teams I’ve seen don’t think faster, they think clearer. They slow down just enough to separate fact from assumption, cause from coincidence. They stop reacting to noise and start structuring what they know.
That structure doesn’t come from instinct alone. It comes from discipline, a practiced way of thinking that holds up when systems don’t.
The tools we use at Kepner-Tregoe aren’t magic. They’re frameworks for focus. They help people see what’s actually happening.
That process, the ability to bring structure to confusion, is one of the few things that doesn’t automate easily. You can teach it, you can refine it, but you can’t replace it with a dashboard or a data feed. It’s a human skill… for now.
In the coming posts, I’ll explore what this kind of thinking looks like in different environments.
And in a world that prizes speed, slowing down might just be the rarest advantage left.
The Cost of Convenience
April 2024
(Approx. 4 min read)
I’m Joe Vogelpohl. I work as a consultant with Kepner-Tregoe, helping organizations think clearly and make sound decisions when the stakes are high. That can mean anything from a nuclear weapons lab to a semiconductor cleanroom, or a Fortune 500 operations center that can’t afford confusion when something goes wrong.
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time in rooms where the wrong choice costs more than money. In those moments, you see how critical thinking really works, not as a buzzword, but as a skill that keeps people safe and productive.
What I’ve started to notice is a general confusion about how to use AI. Everywhere I go there is a feeling that things are, or should be getting easier and faster. There is a FOMO around AI. People are surrounded by tools that make decisions for them, dashboards that surface the “right” choice, and systems that automate judgment itself.
It sounds efficient and looks like progress.
But I’ve started to wonder what all that ease is doing to us.
We’re living in an age of convenience, one where friction feels like failure. Yet the more we automate, the less we engage the very muscles that make us capable of reasoning, discerning, and deciding.
That’s what I call mental atrophy, the slow fading of our ability to think deeply and creatively.
This site, and my upcoming book Atrophy Hunter: How to Stay Sharp in the Age of Convenience, are part of my attempt to push back against that trend. It’s about reclaiming the discipline of thought, the kind that doesn’t outsource decisions to algorithms or rely on the easiest path forward.
Over the coming months, I’ll share insights from my work, lessons from people who make high-stakes decisions every day, and stories from The Knowing Edge, a new podcast produced with Kepner-Tregoe. The podcast explores the fine line between going with your gut, and following a strict process.
If you’re interested in protecting the parts of yourself that make you human, then this is where the conversation begins.
Subscribe to Sharp Thinking Notes for reflections and updates, and follow along as we explore how to stay sharp in the age of convenience.