Welcome to another Monday edition of Idea Surplus Disorder. This week: lessons in technology disruption from ATMs and the iPhone, a deceptively simple question that helps you see your own work more clearly, and a reminder to stop scanning for red flags — and start looking for green ones.
Plus, why our systems keep rewarding complexity over simplicity, what twenty-year-old project management lessons still get right, and a single question worth asking yourself the next time you feel stuck in your own work.
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. Today's favorite find is this simple reminder from Seth Godin:
We were taught to look out for red flags. Little signs that something is wrong, that we should be careful or even turn around.
Don’t let that distract you from being on the lookout for green flags.
We might need encouragement to leap forward. If you look for the green flags, you’re more likely to find them.
A Few More Things Worth Your Time:
ATMs didn't reduce the number of bank tellers, but the iPhone did:
The ATM tried to do the teller’s job better, faster, cheaper; it tried to fit capital into a labor-shaped hole; but the iPhone made the teller’s job irrelevant. One automated tasks within an existing paradigm, and the other created a new paradigm in which those tasks simply didn’t need to exist at all.
And it is paradigm replacement, not task automation, that actually displaces workers—and, conversely, unlocks the latent productivity within any technology. That’s because as long as the old paradigm persists, there will be labor-shaped holes in which capital substitution will encounter constant frictions and bottlenecks.
Forget your single conversation with ChatGPT. What would a fully-automated, infinitely-scalable, genius-level firm be able to accomplish?
Even people who expect human-level AI soon are still seriously underestimating how different the world will look when we have it. Most people are anchoring on how smart they expect individual models to be. (i.e. they’re asking themselves “What would the world be like if everyone had a very smart assistant who could work 24/7?”.)
Everyone is sleeping on the collective advantages AIs will have, which have nothing to do with raw IQ but rather with the fact that they are digital—they can be copied, distilled, merged, scaled, and evolved in ways human simply can’t.
What would a fully automated company look like - with all the workers, all the managers as AIs? I claim that such AI firms will grow, coordinate, improve, and be selected-for at unprecedented speed.
The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale measures how much people like empty organizational rhetoric. High scorers thrive in corporate environments but are measurably worse at their jobs than people who keep things to the point:
Results show that corporate bullshit receptivity is distinct from a general affinity for corporate speech, negatively associated with measures of analytic thinking, and positively related with other bullshit-related constructs in theoretically-consistent ways. Importantly, corporate bullshit receptivity is positively associated with several workplace perception variables and is a robust negative predictor of work-related decision-making.
Complexity looks smart. Not because it is, but because our systems are set up to reward it:
Pay attention to what you celebrate publicly. If every shout-out in your team channel is for the big, complex project, that’s what people will optimize for. Start recognizing the engineer who deleted code. The one who said “we don’t need this yet” and was right.
At the end of the day, if we keep rewarding complexity and ignoring simplicity, we shouldn’t be surprised when that’s exactly what we get. But the fix isn’t complicated. Which, I guess, is kind of the point.
Twenty years after writing Making Things Happen, Scott Berkun shares his favorite lessons from the book, including:
- Project management in many organizations is project rescue in disguise.
- All schedules are guesses.
- Stupidity travels down. Fools at the bottom are easy to ignore. Stupidity from the top is hard to escape.
- Odds of success improve the smaller and clearer your goals are.
- Projects in trouble should have smaller teams and simpler ambitions.
- Most project failures were people problems first.
- Avoid blame. If you hide it or shame it you will repeat it.
This Week's Question:
If I were replaced, what would my replacement do?
By temporarily removing ourselves from the singular first-person point of view, which is inextricably informed by our memories, prejudices, hopes, and hurts, we are able to see and think more clearly, unencumbered by our personal experiences and feelings — and our need to look good or defend ourselves.
Random Things for Smart People
- The Happy Map
- Dicing an onion, mathematically.
- Extreme macros of insect wings.
- The First Night Effect is why you don't sleep well your first night in a strange bed.
- An Art Discovery Engine
Words of Wisdom
Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust—it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet. – Daniel Coyle
It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than for being unimaginative. – Rory Sutherland
Bureaucracy filters out noise, but sometimes, what sounds like noise is actually the first signal of something transformative on the way. – David Cleevely
If creativity were really expensive, it would be taken more seriously. – Graham Fink
Resources are likely to come to you in greater abundance when you are generous and inclusive and engage people in your passion for life. – Rosamund Stone Zander