Idea Surplus Disorder #116

I missed hitting "send" last week on this newsletter so today you get a double-issue. I hope you don't mind all the extra ideas!

In this week's edition of Idea Surplus Disorder, we explore how leaders and teams can build real capacity for change, ways to feed your subconscious through noticing, how to build repeatable “action stacks,” and why tackling big projects right away matters.

We'll also look at how cracks in systems reveal paths to progress, why leadership still matters in “flat” organizations, and how working without AI is becoming a form of resistance training.

And as always, you’ll find a mix of fun finds, practical insights, and thought-provoking quotes to help you lead, live, and think more intentionally.

I'm Matt Homann, and I'm glad you're here.

Ideas + Insights

Want to improve your leadership team's capacity to change? Go and See Together:

• Go: Visiting another company that has successfully implemented an innovative way of working offers a chance to observe real-life problem-solving and outcomes, facilitating deeper learning. Major changes can trigger fear of an innovation in many organizations, but that concern usually fades if people are able to observe the source of their fear in action.
• See: The social proof of witnessing an innovation working successfully in another organization validates its feasibility and benefits. Seeing a solution succeed firsthand can reduce resistance to change. As the saying goes, “Seeing is believing.”
• Together: The shared experience of the full leadership team fosters a common understanding. Cohesion and trust develop as team members engage in a shared activity, such as a joint visit. Commitment and a sense of ownership grow as all team members feel involved in the learning process and perceive the new way of working as their own idea rather than one that’s being imposed on them.

Feed your subconcious by noticing more things:

Perhaps this strikes you as blindingly obvious! But it’s starkly different from a widespread focus these days on building tricked-out systems for storing or connecting your notes, getting AI to synthesise new insights from them, or storing material you encounter for digesting later on.

Connections and insights about the material happen spontaneously, or when the work calls for them. But first of all, the subconscious needs feeding – and noticing is how you do that.

I love the idea of Action Stacks:

An action stack is a repeatable project plan. For instance, you could use one for “before I leave the house” or one for “packing my suitcase for flying” or any situation where you’ll likely repeat the activity more than once or twice.

The only real difference between an action stack and a regular checklist is intentionality. A checklist can be a “to do” list, or can be a one-off, where an action stack is built for you to use repeatedly.

Have a big project? Do something right away:

When a major project lands in your lap, perhaps with a deadline weeks or months away, make it your business to take some kind of concrete action on it as soon as you can, even if you won’t get to the majority of the work until later.

The longer such a project sits on your plate without being engaged, the more intimidating or resentment-inducing it’ll grow – and the more mental energy you’ll expend either on fretting about it or trying to avoid thinking about it.

On the other hand, taking action forges an inner relationship with the task that saps it of its power to intimidate, while also allowing your subconscious to get to work on it in other ways.

I hate how we've perverted the costs of search:

Once upon a time, search costs referred to the time spent finding something. The cost of finding was the time spent searching. Now search costs are the consequence of having searched at all. The cost of finding is the time spent being marketed to after the search.

We're building with tools we can't yet understand:

A century ago, our use of electricity ran ahead of our understanding of it. We made motors from magnets and coiled wire without understanding why they worked. Theory lagged behind practice. As with electricity, our employment of intelligence exceeds our understanding of it. We are using LLMs to answer questions or to code software without having a theory of intelligence. A real theory of intelligence is so lacking that we don’t know how our own minds work, let alone the synthetic ones we can now create.

I post this about once a year: Don't use more than one of your formatting tools!

Bold means something is important. Italics means something is emphasized. Color means something is distinct. Something that is bold, italicized, underlined, and brightly colored means you don't know what's important or what message you're trying to get across — it only communications distraction. And it's hard to read.

Recreate your manager in AI and get feedback faster:

Create a Claude project called "[Manager's Name] Feedback." In project knowledge, I add in Google doc comments, Slack suggestions, revision requests. Then, the magic happens BEFORE I send over new work. I upload my draft and ask: "Based on the feedback patterns in this project, what changes would [manager] likely suggest? Draft recommendations so I can improve before sending."

It's like having your manager's brain as a preset filter. A few months from now, they'll either give you the same feedback again, or wonder how you got so good at reading their mind.

Ask your team these two questions every few weeks:

“How well did you and your teammates understand the work you were asked to do?” and “How much productive time did you have to actually do your work?”

Ask both questions using a 10-point scale, where 10 represents the highest levels of understanding and productivity. Low scores don’t tell you why things are off — they signal where to start looking for the problem. The job of finding the “why” is where managers become detectives.

These questions work best when asked regularly — ideally, weekly or every two weeks — and accompanied by real conversations. Do it as a group, not in an app and not behind a dashboard. Ask the questions in person, or at least synchronously.

You can't communicate your way out of a bad culture:

Many leaders treat culture as a communication strategy. They believe it lives in messaging—in the articulation of purpose, the rollout of values, the tone of internal campaign. The challenge is when the experience of work doesn’t match a changed narrative.

Before saying "yes" to a new opportunity, give it this test:

Assume the new opportunity takes twice as long and is half as profitable as you expect it to be. Would you still want to do it? We tend to be overly optimistic when taking on something new. Force a degree of rationality into the decision. If the answer is no, say no. If the answer is yes, take it on.

Another great question from the same article:

Would I buy this thing if I couldn’t show it to anyone or tell anyone about it?

Fun Finds

• Movie posters are becoming less colorful.
• LyTube gives you karaoke-like lyrics on top of any YouTube music video.
• David Bowie's Archive
• Adrift
• Eighty famous guitar intros (all played by one guy, nonstop, back-to-back)
• 25 Greatest Kid's Picture Books of the 2000's
• The original Rorschach Test

Words of Wisdom

You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it. – Paul Coelho

Sometimes the greatest scientific breakthroughs happen because someone ignores the prevailing pessimism. – Nessa Carey

A good rule of thumb for a lot of things is to identify the price and be willing to pay it. – Morgan Housel

True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving. – Mark Manson

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Never trust a thought you have indoors. – Friedrich Nietzsche

No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future. – Ian Wilson

No work of art is ever finished; it can only be abandoned in an interesting place. – Jeff Tweedy

Up Next From Filament

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