Idea Surplus Disorder #123

;Thanks to everyone who took last week's survey. I'll leave it open for another week before throwing Idea Surplus Disorder into the garage for a new year's tune-up. Look for a new-and-improved version in 2026!

In This Edition

In this week’s Idea Surplus Disorder: Is facilitation a radical act of care, what can we learn about collaboration from forest firefighters, and should we be bored more?

Also, clear-eyed guidance on when AI supports good thinking, how to use the Minto Pyramid for clearer communication, and when to take a deep dive.

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

Is facilitation a radical act of care? At Filament, we think so:

Modern business is filled with siloes, and work is delivered in decks where different teams own a section. A well facilitated workshop allows people to discover their interconnectedness and identify how they might work together to produce more creative work.

Good facilitation is about tending to the conditions that allow people to show up as their best and most creative selves. Those conditions aren’t technical, they’re human. They’re about safety, belonging, clarity, and trust.

And I love these "rules" from the same article:

• Highlight a desire to hear from everyone; this isn’t a performance for the loudest.
• Ask unexpected questions, and let them breathe.
• You don’t have to hold all the answers, but you do have to hold the space.
• It’s not what you say, it’s how you show up.
• Bring people together in real life to go deeper.

Lessons in handoffs from fighting forest fires:

During a forest fire, the outgoing chief goes through five steps during a conversation with the incoming chief: Here’s what I think we face. Here’s what I think we should do. Here’s why. Here’s what I think we should keep an eye on. Now talk to me (i.e., tell me if you (a) don’t understand, (b) cannot do it, (c) see something that I do not).

Be bored more (via):

Essentially, Dr. Andreasen found that the brain defaults to creativity. When we sit with boredom, when the mind is allowed to float freely, the brain engages in what she termed REST (“random episodic silent thinking”). And during REST, Dr. Andreasen writes, the brain “uses its most human and complex parts...areas known to gather information and link it all together—in potentially novel ways.

Looking for a company guide for when to use AI (LLMs) and when not to? This one from Oxide is quite good.

LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.

If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?

This can be navigated, of course, but it is truly perilous: our writing is an important vessel for building trust — and that trust can be quickly eroded if we are not speaking with our own voice. For us at Oxide, there is a more mechanical reason to be jaundiced about using LLMs to write: because our hiring process very much selects for writers, we know that everyone at Oxide can write — and we have the luxury of demanding of ourselves the kind of writing that we know that we are all capable of.

Will a significant percentage of a company’s employees in less than three years be two types of employees that barely existed a year ago?

These are agentic (AI) employees who will have their own email addresses, own logins and will be managed by newly trained HR and Talent teams.

Another group will be fractionalized (human) employees who have all the benefits of employees including health care but work 3 or 4 days a week as a result of AI replacing some work. This move to fractionalized employees will also be turbo-charged by new marketplaces are allowing people to have a primary form of income and health care augmented by other forms of income.

To communicate more clearly at work, use the Minto Pyramid:

1. Start with the conclusion: Capture your audience's attention early on by first telling them the main takeaway, message, recommendation or simply your conclusion. This may be the opposite to how we've been taught to communicate but it's more efficient, especially in writing and with audiences who have limited time or attention. This principle is also called BLUF – "bottom line up front". It originated in the military but is now widely used in the business world.

2. Provide key points: With the main takeaway already communicated, it's time to support it with key arguments or main points. These should still be fairly short. Write them as summaries of your main points. This part should explain the "why" behind your conclusion or recommendation.

3. Support points with detailed information: You might still need to make your key points credible. Do that by giving more detailed information that support them: facts, evidence, numbers, results. This is the part where you can really go into detail if you want to.

Finally, for true mastery, we must be prepared to take a "deep dive" into something new:

If our goal is to get not just smarter or more knowledgeable, but wiser, we cannot be content to learn in half measures. We must go as deep as we possibly can. We don’t just read a book on a topic. We have to read everything we can find on it. We dn’t just ask a question or find an expert. We have to find do expert we can and ask them every question they’re willing to answer. We don’t just look at what’s there. We have to explore the remotest corners, every facet, from every angle. We have to hear from people we agree with and from people we disagree with. We have to go out and get real experience.

Fun Finds

• Why is everyone running in romcoms?
• Why do we have two nostrils and not just one?
• A periodic table of imaginary elements from movies, television, and books.
• A map of every (and I mean every) building in the world.
• All of human history in just one hour.

Words of Wisdom

You don’t remember the times your dad held your handlebars. You remember the day he let go. – Lenore Skenazy

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, but the one most responsive to change. — Charles Darwin

Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it. – Ronald Dahl

An idiot in motion will always go further than a genius at rest. – Kpaxs

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. — Cormac McCarthy

Show me a company that has fun, and I guarantee that good work comes out of it. – Steve Edge

Up Next From Filament

Every month, Filament delivers an incredible mix of free programming and professional development. You can find links to sign up for all of our upcoming events, including PlayDays, Wavelength, NSFW, and SuperCollider here.