Idea Surplus Disorder

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The Newsletter

July 20, 2026

Idea Surplus Disorder #140

Welcome to another edition of Idea Surplus Disorder. This week starts with an ask: we need help finding great nonprofits and business partners for our Thinksgiving initiative.

Next up, we'll explore the death of curiosity, how screen-sharing breaks meetings, why we shouldn't abandon the wonderfully human em dash, when to stop apologizing at work, and a simple way to become happier.

Plus, a mix of fun finds, inspiring quotes, and a question about all the things you measure that maybe you shouldn't.

As always, I'm Matt Homann, and I'm glad you're here!

Help Needed! Filament's Thinksgiving

Thinksgiving (site) (video) is my favorite day of the year. It's where nonprofits partner with innovative teams from local companies for a day of creative problem solving centered on a non-financial problem the nonprofit has. This year is November 5th.

And we need your help!

Do you know any amazing nonprofits in the St. Louis region with a challenge they need help thinking differently about? Learn More. Apply.
Do you know a business that could field a team of 4-5 people for a day as a Business Partner? Learn More. Download the One-Pager.

Thank you!

Filament's Thinksgiving

A Few More Things Worth Your Time

We are losing the ability to discover what we didn't know to ask:

Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens.

By shortening the time between asking a question and getting an answer, these tools are actually undermining curiosity — and paradoxically threatening our ability to understand the world.

Is it OK if I share my screen?

The meeting is now broken. Even if you were actually engaging with the attendees before, it’s over. You took a new medium and stuffed an old one into it, changed the dynamic and ruined it.

Zoom is a device that eliminates physical distance and enables a synchronized conversation. Interactions in real time. In particular, groups of three to eight professionals, there to have a discussion.

Throwing your powerpoint into the mix transforms the dynamic. It takes your face off the screen and makes everyone else irrelevant. It forbids interaction. And it prevents you from reacting to the room as it unfolds, since it’s linear. The disrespect comes through, even if you didn’t intend it to.

If you have something to show us, send it before the meeting. If there’s a memo, we can read it in advance, or afterward. In fact, if the memo is really important, simply pause the meeting while we all take two minutes to read it. We know how to read.

Stop Shaming the Em-Dash:

It would be a tragedy if writers stopped using em dashes out of fear of sounding like AI, because em dashes are one of the best tools writers have for not sounding robotic in the first place.

Their very potential to be irritating is a sign of what makes them so beautiful: Of all the forms of punctuation, the em dash is the one that most rewards tact, judgment, and taste. It has the closest relationship to the way we experience thinking—rushing forward, suddenly swerving, forking into different branches that eventually come together again.

If chatbots copy our use of it, they do so for the same reason we need to protect it. It’s the most human punctuation there is.

Stop apologizing for reasonable business decisions:

There’s a difference between apologizing because you did something wrong vs apologizing because you aren’t sure how else to make this person less upset.

This is a bigger deal than you may think because you are unintentionally shifting the power dynamics.

If you apologize when there’s no reason to, you undermine yourself: You let them think they have a moral high ground, when they don’t. They feel justified in being upset, when they shouldn’t.

Want to invest in office amenities that drive team performance?

Only one consistently distinguished high-performing team: a quiet place to do focused work. Members of superteams were 52% more likely than average teams to report having access to a place where they could concentrate without interruption.

Teams need opportunities to discuss ideas, coordinate their efforts, and make decisions. But they need individual members to think critically, solve problems, and execute those decisions. That work requires uninterrupted concentration, and a quiet workspace makes it possible.

The easiest way to be happy is to stop doing things that make you unhappy:

The most underrated move in the entire happiness literature: explicitly stop doing the things that make you unhappy. write down the three things in your week that consistently make you feel worse, and remove two of them. this is the highest-ROI intervention you can run and almost nobody does it because it does not explicitly feel like “working on yourself.” it is more like cleaning up your schedule.

Random Things for Smart People

Get car sick while reading? Check out Vehicle Motion Cues on your phone and Kindle.
NameThat is a visual dictionary for UI patterns you can see but do not know how to describe to an agen
If you used early Macs, this is a fun trip down memory lane.
The earth's deepest holes.
A collection of old-school digital interfaces.

Words of Wisdom

Getting halfway across six oceans isn’t nearly as useful as making it all the way across one river. – Seth Godin

One of the biggest mistakes we make in our stories is confusing our circumstances with our thoughts about those circumstances. – Jim Murphy

Writing is so often about making mistakes and feeling lost. – Anne Lamott

Hypocrisy comes from the fact that none of us stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. – Oscar Wilde

All the water in the world cannot sink a ship unless it gets inside the ship. All the negativity in the world cannot sink a person unless it gets inside the mind. – Mary Pickford

The distance between deciding and doing is the single most reliable predictor of whether your life will be extraordinary or ordinary. Not talent, not circumstances, not even the quality of your decisions – but how quickly you collapse the space between intention and reality. – Derek Sivers

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Featured

Ideas from Matt

March 16, 2026

Dream, Debate, Decide, Do: A Meeting Framework That Changes Everything

Most meetings fail because nobody's clear on what kind of conversation they're having. Filament's Dream, Debate, Decide, Do framework gives leadership teams a simple way to fix that before the meeting ever starts.

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Most meetings fail before they start. Not because of bad agendas or the wrong people in the room, but because nobody's clear on what kind of conversation they're actually having.

Naming the type of meeting you're running before the invites go out is one of the most effective ways to make meetings more productive: it sets expectations, shapes how people participate, and cuts time lost to the wrong kind of thinking.

At Filament, we use a four-part framework called Dream, Debate, Decide, Do. Each word names a distinct mode of conversation. Knowing which one you're in changes everything about how people show up.

Dream: Explore Without Pressure

A Dream meeting is pure possibility. No evaluating, no building plans, no pressure to land somewhere actionable. The goal is unrestricted exploration — giving people room to think out loud without the weight of commitment.

This matters because most teams collapse into judgment too fast. When evaluation sneaks into ideation, ideas get smaller and safer. The assumptions embedded in "that won't work" kill good thinking before it has a chance to develop. Dream meetings protect the space where genuinely new ideas come from. They work best when the facilitator actively holds the door open: every idea welcome, no decisions yet, nothing to defend.

The rule is simple. If someone starts evaluating, redirect. There's a meeting for that. This isn't it.

Debate: Go Deeper

A Debate meeting is where you probe. You're not trying to resolve anything yet — you're trying to understand it better. That means open questions, competing viewpoints, and a willingness to sit with complexity longer than feels comfortable.

Coming prepared matters here. Participants should bring research, sharpen their positions, and be ready to defend and revise their thinking. This isn't conflict for its own sake; it's how a leadership team builds real shared understanding rather than the polite consensus that looks like alignment but isn't.

A well-run Debate meeting surfaces the actual tradeoffs before a decision gets made. That's its value. Skipping it — or cutting it short — usually means those tradeoffs surface after the decision, which is a much worse time to find them.

Decide: Make It Clear

A Decide meeting has one job: to make a decision. That means being explicit upfront about who holds the decision, what factors will guide it, and what process you'll follow to get there.

Without that clarity, Decide meetings drift into more Debate — or worse, they produce false consensus that falls apart during implementation. When everyone thinks they decided together, but means something different by it, execution suffers. Naming the decision-maker before the conversation starts changes the dynamic in the room. People can contribute without fighting for control. And when the decision lands, it's clear.

This is also where decision documentation earns its keep. A brief record of what was decided, who decided it, and why beats a meeting recap that reconstructs nothing useful.

Do: Assign and Activate

A Do meeting is about accountability. Tasks get assigned, owners are named, and timelines are set. The conversation shifts from what we'll do to who will do it and by when.

Short and specific is the goal. A Do meeting that runs long is usually a sign that a Decide meeting should have come first — or that accountability was assigned without the authority to back it up. The best Do meetings feel almost transactional, because they are. The thinking is done. Now you're translating decisions into action.

One useful check: after a Do meeting, everyone should be able to answer two questions without looking at their notes. What am I doing, and by when? If the answer requires searching through notes, the meeting didn't finish its job.

One Framework, Four Modes

The power here isn't complexity — it's clarity. When people know what kind of meeting they're walking into, they show up differently. Dreamers don't get frustrated by premature evaluation. Deciders don't get stuck in endless debate. Everyone's working from the same playbook.

This framework works because it gives teams a shared vocabulary for something they already do poorly by default: agreeing on what they're actually trying to accomplish together in a given hour. That's a small shift with a surprisingly large effect on how meetings actually feel, and what they actually produce.

Try naming the type before your next meeting. It costs nothing and changes more than you'd expect.

Idea Surplus Disorder

Ideas from Matt

Dream, Debate, Decide, Do: A Meeting Framework That Changes Everything

What I'm Reading

What I'm Listening To

Where I'm Going

Idea Surplus Disorder

The Newsletter

Idea Surplus Disorder #140

Help Needed! Filament's Thinksgiving

A Few More Things Worth Your Time

Random Things for Smart People

Words of Wisdom

Ideas from Matt

Dream, Debate, Decide, Do: A Meeting Framework That Changes Everything

What I'm Reading

What I'm Listening To

Where I'm Going

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