Why Your Best People Give You The Worst Information
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Release Date: 07/01/2025
Thinking 101: A Pause, A Reflection, And What Might Come Next
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Twenty-one years. That's how long I've been doing this. Producing content. Showing up. Week after week, with only a handful of exceptions—most of them involving hospitals and cardiac surgeons, but that's another story. After twenty-one years, you learn what lands and what doesn't. You learn not to get too attached because you never know what's going to connect. But this one surprised me. Thinking 101—the response has been different. More comments. More questions. More people saying, "This is exactly what I needed." It's made me reflect on why I started this series. Years ago, I was in a...
info_outline
Mental Models - Your Thinking Toolkit
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, NASA management officially estimated the probability of catastrophic failure at one in one hundred thousand. That's about the same odds as getting struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark. The engineers working on the actual rockets? They estimated the risk at closer to one in one hundred. A thousand times more dangerous than management believed.¹ Both groups had access to the same data. The same flight records. The same engineering reports. So how could their conclusions be off by a factor of a thousand? The answer isn't about...
info_outline
Numerical Thinking: How to Find the Truth When Numbers Lie
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Quick—which is more dangerous: the thing that kills 50,000 Americans every year, or the thing that kills 50? Your brain says the first one, obviously. The data says you're dead wrong. Heart disease kills 700,000 people annually, but you're not terrified of cheeseburgers. Shark attacks kill about 10 people worldwide per year, but millions of people are genuinely afraid of the ocean. Your brain can't do the math, so you worry about the wrong things and ignore the actual threats. And here's the kicker: The people selling you fear, products, and policies? They know your brain works this way....
info_outline
The Clock is Screaming
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
I stepped out of the shower in March and my chest split open. Not a metaphor. The surgical incision from my cardiac device procedure just… opened. Blood and fluid everywhere. Three bath towels to stop it. My wife—a nurse, the exact person I needed—was in Chicago dealing with her parents’ estate. Both had just died. So my daughter drove me to the ER instead. That was surgery number one. By Thanksgiving this year, I’d had five cardiac surgeries. Six hospitalizations. All in twelve months. And somewhere between surgery three and four, everything I thought I knew about gratitude…...
info_outline
Second-Order Thinking: How to Stop Your Decisions From Creating Bigger Problems (Thinking 101 - Ep 6)
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
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 spotting problems on their own. We're all making decisions like this right now. A solution fixes the immediate problem—but creates a second-order consequence that's harder to see and often more damaging than what we...
info_outline
Make Better Decisions When Nothing is Certain
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
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 leads where. You want more information. More time. More certainty. But you're not going to get it. Meanwhile, a small group of professionals—poker players, venture capitalists, military strategists—consistently make better decisions than the rest of us in exactly...
info_outline
You Think In Analogies and You Are Doing It Wrong
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
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. When someone told you ChatGPT is "like having a smart assistant," your brain immediately knew what to expect—and what to worry about. When Netflix called itself "the HBO of streaming," investors understood the strategy instantly. These comparisons aren't just...
info_outline
How To Master Causal Thinking
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
$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 the same mistake. They presented data showing success after their initiatives were launched. Boards approved promotions. Then someone asked the one question nobody thought to ask: "Could something else...
info_outline
How to Improve Logical Reasoning Skills
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
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 facts, making decisions based on patterns that don't exist, all while feeling absolutely certain they're thinking clearly. We live in a world drowning in information—but starving for truth. Every day, you're presented with hundreds of...
info_outline
Why Thinking Skills Matter More Than Ever
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
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 had the chance to think for yourself. We've built the most sophisticated cognitive tools humanity has ever known, and in doing so, we've systematically dismantled our ability to use our own minds. A recent MIT study found that students...
info_outlineThe $25 Million Perfect Presentation
Picture this: You're in a conference room with 23 executives, everyone has perfect PowerPoint presentations, engineering milestones are ahead of schedule, and you're about to sign off on a $25 million bet that feels like a sure thing.
That was the scene at HP when we were developing the Envy 133—the world's first 100% carbon fiber laptop. Everything looked perfect: engineering was ahead of schedule, we projected a $2 billion market opportunity, and the presentations were flawless.
Six weeks after launch, Apple shifted the entire thin-and-light laptop market, and our "sure thing" became a $25 million cautionary tale about decision-making.
The Information Filter Problem
Here's what I discovered: Your people aren't lying to you—they're protecting you. Every layer of management unconsciously filters out inconvenient truths. We had two massive blind spots:
- Competitive intelligence about Apple's roadmap had been sanitized before reaching decision-makers
- Manufacturing complexity of carbon fiber production was presented as routine when it required entirely new processes
Information in organizations goes through more filters than an Instagram photo. Each management layer edits out inconvenient truths—not from malice, but from basic human psychology. People want to be helpful, to be problem-solvers, to avoid being bearers of bad news.
The Three Information Temperature Checks
I started treating information like a scientist treats data, using three temperature checks:
- Emotional Temperature: Real market insights carry emotional weight. If presentations feel sanitized and emotionally flat, you're getting processed information.
- Granularity Temperature: Can people provide specific names, exact dates, and direct customer quotes? "Several customers" should become "Show me the Austin focus group transcript."
- Contradiction Temperature: Market reality is messy. If everything points in one direction, someone edited out the complexity.
Five Battle-Tested Truth-Telling Techniques
Technique 1: Pre-Mortem Confessions
Anonymous submission of biggest fears before major decisions. Read aloud without attribution to remove personal risk and stress-test plans against criticisms.
Technique 2: Messenger Reward System
Formally reward people who bring bad news, not just problem-solvers. Recognition in leadership meetings and promotion consideration. Within six months, intelligence quality improved dramatically.
Technique 3: Devil's Advocate Rotation
Assign someone to formally challenge assumptions in every major presentation. Rotate among team members to institutionalize dissent and make doubt safe to express.
Technique 4: Customer Voice Channel
Spend 25% of time with direct customer contact. This included executive briefings but also weekends in retail stores watching real customer behavior. The gap between what customers wanted and what product teams assumed was staggering.
Technique 5: Failure Story Requirement
Every presentation must include one failure story—not dwelling on failures, but incorporating lessons from setbacks into decision-making.
The Truth-Telling Scorecard
I developed a six-factor scorecard (1-5 scale) to measure information quality:
- Signal Clarity: Specific details vs. high-level summaries
- Emotional Authenticity: Genuine weight vs. sanitized presentations
- Contradiction Comfort: Acknowledging messy reality vs. clean narratives
- Bad News Frequency: How often you get genuinely concerning information
- Messenger Diversity: Multiple organizational levels vs. hierarchical channels only
- Speed of Uncomfortable Truth: How quickly market shifts reach you
Review quarterly—scores below 3 signal information silos are forming.
Five Questions Every Leader Should Ask
- When did someone last challenge my assumptions with specific, verifiable data?
- Are my presentations carrying emotional weight or feeling sanitized?
- What contradictory information am I not seeing?
- Who am I rewarding—problem-solvers or truth-tellers?
- How many management layers are filtering my market intelligence?
Key Takeaway
Building a truth-telling culture isn't about finding better people—it's about creating better systems for handling difficult information. The market will always contain signals that contradict your plans. The question is whether those signals can survive the journey to your desk.
This Week's Challenge: Try one technique—run a pre-mortem confession on your next major decision or assign a devil's advocate to your next presentation. Small changes in how you handle information can prevent million-dollar mistakes.
For the complete Truth-Telling Scorecard and detailed frameworks, visit Phil's Studio Notes on Substack. For the full backstory on the HP Envy 133 project, including all the details, check out the complete article there.
Subscribe to the Killer Innovations Podcast | Watch on YouTube