Idea Surplus Disorder

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June 15, 2026

Idea Surplus Disorder #137

Welcome to another edition of Idea Surplus Disorder.

In this week's edition, we'll explore how to stop accumulating decision debt, why naming your assumptions before acting on them might be the most important thing your team isn't doing, and what it really means to update a decision without admitting failure.

We'll also look at the five steps for finding and fixing your biggest bottleneck, why RACI and RAPID don't work as well as you think, and the most satisfying problem taxonomy you'll encounter all week.

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!

My Favorite Find:

I read hundreds of blogs and dozens of newsletters every week, and I always find more ideas than I can share. My favorite this week is about how to stop accumulating decision debt:

This starts with naming assumptions before acting on them. Most organizations move directly from problem to solution without ever surfacing the beliefs underneath the solution. Those beliefs are where the mass lives. When you bring them into the open, you create the possibility of questioning them. When they stay implicit, they just accumulate.

The second thing is to treat revisiting decisions as normal practice, not as failure. One of the ways organizations build mass is by treating the need to change course as an admission that the original decision was wrong. So leaders defend the original call instead of updating it. The weight grows. A team that can say "we made this call with what we knew, here's what we know now, here's what we're changing" is a team that can stay light enough to actually turn.

The third is the hardest. It requires senior leaders to be honest about which of their most deeply held beliefs were formed in a context that no longer exists. Experience is not the same as current knowledge. The assumptions that built a career are not the same as the assumptions that will navigate what comes next.

A Few More Things Worth Your Time:

This article is a great overview of the Theory of Constraints and Eli Goldratt's POOGI: the Process of Ongoing Improvement. The process uses the Theory of Constraints for continuous improvement and has five focusing steps:

First, find the bottleneck. What's the one thing slowing everything else down?
Second, get more from it. Before hiring people, buying software or redesigning the process, make sure you're getting the most from the bottleneck you've already got.
Third, stop working against it. Organize the rest of the system around the bottleneck rather than asking it to keep up with everything else.
Fourth, increase its capacity. Only now should you invest additional time, money or resources.
Finally, look for the next bottleneck. Remove one constraint and another will emerge.

What companies get wrong about decision rights and why RACI and RAPID don't always work:

When teams attempt to assign roles before goals have been carefully defined, discussions about decision rights often degenerate into ego-driven turf wars.

Sometimes objectives are far too broad (for instance, “Create a strategic plan for product line X”) and not broken down into concrete steps or subgoals (such as “complete a SWOT analysis” and “survey stakeholders to identify key strategic opportunities”). That makes it impossible to allocate ownership of specific decisions and identify where collaboration is needed.

Other objectives, in contrast, can be too narrow or insignificant (“Who’s making the slide template to use to present our strategic plan?”). Particularly when goals are too broad, conflicts arise among executives over the rights for decisions about them.

Loved this rant by John Gruber about "dickover" website behavior (NSFW):

If you visit a website you should ... see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our f*cking cookies” dickover to someone trying to read an article on the web makes no more sense than sending out an email newsletter that only contains a link to read the newsletter on a webpage. A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this.

What kind of problem are we solving? This article has a great taxonomy for several problems we encounter at work, including:

Shark Laser: A proposed solution is not aiming at a meaningfully important problem, so it doesn’t matter how well you get it to work or how much you enhance it.
Booby Trapped Garden: A problem is really hard to solve for reasons that are not at all apparent from the outside, leading to lots of attempts to solve it, all of them miserable failures.
Sleeping Horror: The problem is not that likely to happen, but if it does, it will be horrible. Nobody bothers to try to solve it because they assume it probably won’t happen, and plus, there are more immediately pressing concerns. The horror wakes up eventually.
Middle Court Shot: A problem could be solved pretty easily, but it falls between multiple people’s responsibilities. Hence nobody takes responsibility for it, assuming someone else will do so.
Sleeping Dog: A potential problem that only actually becomes a problem if you try to solve it.
Moving the Ocean: A significant problem where the cost of solving it is so high that it’s not even worth solving.
Demonic Problem: A problem that seems like it will wreck you if you make it your job to try to solve it, and you are absolutely correct. Yet for some reason you are tempted to try.
Ocean of Pain: A problem so big that you can only hope to solve some tiny part of it, which demotivates people from even trying to do that.
Paper Straw: A problem that is only very slightly important, but it’s socially rewarded to pretend it is much more important than it is. Eventually some people may even forget they are pretending.
Toilet Crusade: A problem that is actually important, but it is so unsexy that almost nobody wants to try to tackle it.
Cursed Treasure: A problem such that whoever solves it will be punished, or suffer severe negative consequences.

This Week's Question:

How are you professionally curious? Not just curious when you have time, or when work requires it, but truly curious:

Curiosity is a muscle. And now the gym has received quite an upgrade with AI. Our muscles can fathom further, faster. But the effort — to choose, to exert — remains ours alone for now.

And speaking of curiosity, this is a great icebreaker question: What's the most interesting topic in the world for you to talk about or discuss?

Random Things for Smart People

Every have to use a microphone on stage? Watch this video now.
Who would you have been in early modern Europe?
Searchable Attenborough
Complete player guide to the World Cup
250 one-minute documentaries about America
How We Paint Dogs
The history of vacuum-formed signs (more interesting than I expected).

Words of Wisdom

If necessity is the mother of all invention, then ambition is its accelerant. – Spencer Wright

The best art divides the audience. If everyone likes it, you probably haven’t gone far enough. – Rick Rubin

So what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong. – Ryan Holiday

The spider spins its web to catch flies. It does this before it knows flies exist. – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. – Albert Ellis

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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

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Idea Surplus Disorder

The Newsletter

Idea Surplus Disorder #137

My Favorite Find:

A Few More Things Worth Your Time:

This Week's Question:

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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