A funny thing happened on the way to 2026...
Good morning and welcome to the first Idea Surplus Disorder of 2026.
Two weeks ago, as I was settling in for some post-Christmas strategy work while the team was enjoying their holiday week off, my right retina detached.
Emergency surgery the next afternoon was followed by about 10 days of rest and recovery.
My recovery has been smooth, and my positioning protocol (if you know, you know) allowed me to sit up vs. keeping my face down at all times.
I'm grateful for the fantastic care, the kind words from so many of you via LinkedIn, and the support of my family.
I can't fly for another six weeks or so, am effectively blind in my right eye until the bubble they put inside it to aid healing dissipates, but am otherwise back to work.
And I'm excited for the year ahead.
Idea Surplus Disorder Version 3.0
While I was cooped up at home, I finally got to some long-overdue maintenance on this newsletter. Email readers won't notice much, but if you head over to the site, you'll see that I've refreshed everything and made more room for some personal writing, musings, etc. – all with a goal of making Idea Surplus Disorder my personal home for writing on the web.
In February, Filament will launch a new monthly newsletter called Think Together Better. It will include a mix of meeting tips, a downloadable version of one of our toolsheets, and the occasional essay on what we've learned in our work. Stay tuned.
And though this week's edition is lighter than usual (because of surgery, etc.), you'll see the brand-new version next week.
Ideas & Insights
As the new year is upon us, time seems to be moving so quickly. But if we truly pay attention, we might be able to slow it down a bit. Try asking yourself a few of these questions that open temporal awareness to notice time better:
- When you describe this situation, what does time feel like? Does it drag, rush, loop, freeze?
- If this moment had a landscape, what would it look like?
- When does time slow down in your life? When does it speed up? What’s happening in those moments?
How can you build a culture of radical candor in your organization? One way is to design phrases that describe hard-to-articulate feelings like "strange math":
One of my favorite phrases that came out of LiT is:“I feel strange math when you do X.”
“Strange math” describes those mixed, hard-to-articulate emotions that come from everyday interactions when something is both appreciated (+1) and frustrating (-1) at the same time.
Critically, the strange math is that they don’t cancel each other out. Both are valid at the same time, and worth bringing up as feedback.
Should your company have values or virtues?
Virtue doesn’t sit on top of a business model; it 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 beneath it.
It asks leaders to recalibrate how they see, how they act, and how they understand success in the world.Virtue shows up in: how tradeoffs are made under pressure, how people are treated when it costs something, what is rewarded, tolerated, or quietly ignored, and whether integrity is structural—or optional.
Values tell us what we 𝘴𝘢𝘺 we care about. Virtue forms who we 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 as leaders and organizations. If you’re an executive or team leader, the real question isn’t: “Do we have the right values?”It’s: “What kind of leaders are our systems forming?”
Seth Godin has some advice for amateur presenters:
This isn’t a performance. Professionals perform. It’s their job. This is you sharing the change you’d like to make with one person sitting a few feet away from you.
Think about the most important interactions you’ve had. The ones with partners, doctors, strangers and friends. None of them were professional speeches. Not one. Instead, a human interacted with you and made a change happen. Not because they had a script and a director, but because they cared.
The challenge isn’t in becoming a sort of pretty good professional presenter. The challenge is becoming you.
Of course, it’s scary. But the response to the fear isn’t to soothe ourselves with memorization and insulation. It’s to simply show up.
Wonder why those work projects keep going, even when it is clear they’ll fail? It’s because they haven’t failed yet.
The reason is that as long as the project is still going, it has not officially failed yet. And as long as the failing project keeps going, the person leading it therefore won’t be a failure.
I love Kevin Kelly's Compassion of Being Kinded:
Kindness is like a breath. It can be squeezed out, or drawn in. You can wait for it, or you can summon it.
To solicit a gift from a stranger takes a certain state of openness. If you are lost or ill, this is easy, but most days you are neither, so embracing extreme generosity takes some preparation.
I learned from hitchhiking to think of this as an exchange. During the moment the stranger offers his or her goodness, the person being aided can reciprocate with degrees of humility, dependency, gratitude, surprise, trust, delight, relief, and amusement to the stranger.
It takes some practice to enable this exchange when you don’t feel desperate. Ironically, you are less inclined to be ready for the gift when you are feeling whole, full, complete, and independent!
Fun Finds
- Mix your own MTV
- Ryan Coogler explains film formats
- This Magic Button makes everything OK
- Compare any two things
Words of Wisdom
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. ― E.B. White
Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been. – David Bowie
Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself that you're smarter than you are. – Shane Parrish
It’s easy to achieve massive improvements in perception at a fraction of the cost of equivalent improvements in reality. – Rory Sutherland