Idea Surplus Disorder #117

In this week's edition of Idea Surplus Disorder, how internal "non-competes" help you delegate shared projects with clarity and momentum, why imagining a new CEO for your life can reveal what’s holding you back, and what building hills can teach you about leading change.

Plus: why every organization needs expeditionary teams, reasons to stop chasing the perfect productivity system, and why playing politics at work isn't always a bad thing.

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.

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Ideas + Insights

Are you focused on hill climbing or hill making?

There are two modes of learning, two paths to improvement. One is to relentlessly, deliberately improve what you can do already, by trying to perfect your process. Focus on optimizing what works. The other way is to create new areas that can be exploited and perfected. Explore regions that are suboptimal with a hope you can make them work – and sometimes they will – giving you new territory to work in.

But every now and then an upper-case, disruptive jump occurs, creating a whole new genre, a new territory, or a new way to improve. Instead of incrementally climbing up the gradient, this change is creating a whole new hill to climb. This process is known as hill-making rather than hill climbing.

Hill-making is much harder to do, but far more productive. The difficulty stems from the challenge of finding a territory that is different, yet plausible, inhabitable, coherent, rather than just different and chaotic, untenable, or random nonsense. It is very easy to make drastic change, but most drastic changes do not work. Hill-making entails occupying (or finding*) an area where your work increases the possibilities for more work.

Related: How much does your business invest in Expeditionary Teams?

This is where many organizations find themselves today with AI. Roadmaps are compressing. Categories are shifting before they're even established. The old playbooks are running out. Efficiency won't help you here. What's needed is a capacity to explore — to send small, expeditionary teams out into this new terrain with the mandate to build functional fictions and bring back what they find.

Playing workplace politics might not be all bad:

You can use political skills to manipulate and self-promote, or you can use them to get good ideas implemented and protect your team from bad decisions. Here’s what good politics looks like in practice:

Building relationships before you need them. That random coffee with someone from the data team? Six months later, they’re your biggest advocate for getting engineering resources for your data pipeline project.

Understanding the real incentives. Your VP doesn’t care about your beautiful microservices architecture. They care about shipping features faster. Frame your technical proposals in terms of what they actually care about.

Managing up effectively. Your manager is juggling competing priorities you don’t see. Keep them informed about what matters, flag problems early with potential solutions, and help them make good decisions. When they trust you to handle things, they’ll fight for you when it matters

Creating win-win situations. Instead of fighting for resources, find ways to help other teams while getting what you need. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.

Being visible. If you do great work but nobody knows about it, did it really happen? Share your wins, present at all-hands, write those design docs that everyone will reference later.

The alternative to good politics isn’t no politics. It’s bad politics winning by default. It’s the loud person who’s wrong getting their way because the quiet person who’s right won’t speak up. It’s good projects dying because nobody advocated for them. It’s talented people leaving because they couldn’t navigate the organizational dynamics.

Stop chasing productivity systems:

The problem with systems is that we go hunting them, and never stop hunting.

Just do the hard work and stop spending those hours hunting for the next magical system.

Once you have a system that works, stop worrying about systems and use what you’ve got while remembering you will never be able to get everything done so you need to let some tasks go.

Delegating a project to more than one person? Include a "non-compete" clause that clearly defines everyone's roles:

When I put two talented employees on a joint project, I assign them each clear and separate roles.

One person’s role might be more administrative (e.g. communicating with a thought leader with whom I’d like to partner), whereas the other’s role might be more creative (e.g. constructing research briefs about the project).

With this structure in place, both employees are glad to work harmoniously, because their success is tied to the other’s success. Their respective smarts have something like a non-compete clause.

If you hired a new CEO for your life, what would they do in the next 100 days?

The new CEO isn’t emotional about your life. They don’t feel the pull of sunk costs. They don’t know your history. They don’t care about your excuses.

The new CEO has an outsider's perspective and a bias for action. So, what would their 100-day plan look like?

What mindsets, habits, or people would they cut immediately? What bold moves would they make that you’ve avoided? What routines would they install to drive momentum? What fears would they demand you confront?

Fun Finds

• The myth of the sommelier.
• All the popular behavioral science "findings" that can't be replicated.
• 2025's Audubon contest top 100 photos.
• The miracle of salt.
• FlightAware's Misery Map.
• A short history of the business card.
• Official map of the Star Wars galaxy.

Words of Wisdom

There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way. – Christopher Morley

Human beings behave their way to new thinking more readily than they think their way to new behavior. – Blair Enns

If we want to be liked, we have to like. That's it. Nobody leaves a party saying, 'My favorite person was that cool, aloof one.' It's the person who approaches and shows interest in us. – Glennan Doyle

You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you. – Jesse Tevelow

Most valuable discoveries don’t make sense at first; if they did, somebody would have discovered them already. – Rory Sutherland

Up Next From Filament

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