Welcome to another edition of Idea Surplus Disorder.
This week: how leaders teach culture without realizing it, why “teamwork” isn’t a behavior, what useful friction protects us from, whether every company needs an AI Cassandra, and how mathmatical prediction is making everything look the same.
Plus, role charters, AI skills from A Smart Bear, a tool that tells you what your cables can actually do, a two-minute spelling bee, a supersonic trebuchet, and a free encyclopedia of ideas from women philosophers.
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. My favorite this week is Ian Hallett’s The Art of Culture, which explains ways bad "culture" is caused by leaders:
Few leaders set out to create a culture they would be ashamed of, yet many do. Three mechanisms are usually responsible:
The first is that a leader’s reactions are read by the entire organisation. When someone raises an inconvenient truth and the leader responds by defending the decision, or by asking who was responsible before asking what happened, the lesson that challenge is risky propagates well beyond the individual conversation. No formal punishment is required. Visible discomfort, once, in front of the right audience, is sufficient to shape behaviour.
The second is that culture is effectively set one or two layers below the top. A senior leader may be genuinely open, but the more consequential question is whether the manager two levels down is, because that manager’s reactions are what most of the organisation actually experiences.
The third is that measurement overwhelms rhetoric. When an operational review interrogates delivery dates in forensic detail while treating quality in general terms, the organisation infers the real priorities regardless of what is said aloud. People direct their attention towards whatever they expect to be asked about, which is why what leaders attend to communicates more than what they declare.
This Week’s Question
This week’s question comes from Before We Fix It, Let’s Diagnose, which argues that behavior change often shapes attitudes, rather than the other way around:
“Teamwork,” “ownership” and “being proactive” aren’t behaviours. Terms like teamwork, ownership, engagement or being proactive are labels for clusters of actions.
A behaviour is a specific, measurable and observable action.
And even once we have identified the behaviour, we need to be precise about what kind of change we’re looking for. Even then, we need to be clear about the type of change required: introduce or remove a behaviour, increase or decrease frequency, change timing or intensity, or sustain behaviour over time
So before launching your next "change management" initiative, ask these questions:
What exactly is the behaviour we’re trying to change? What’s happening around it? And what would need to change to make the desired behaviour more likely?
A Few More Things Worth Your Time
Emil Kowalski asks, What if friction was a feature?
We treat friction as something bad. It makes us slow, inefficient, messy. Products brag about removing friction. Entire companies exist just to be “frictionless.”
And mostly, that’s right. But friction was quietly doing a second job: it made us think before we built.
So we still need friction. It forces us to use our judgement, and it filters out the ideas that don’t deserve to be built.
Last week, I shared the Wreckoon, a prompt that gives dissent a place in the meeting. Sunil Pai makes a related case that every company needs a Cassandra — and wonders whether AI could take on the role:
Organizations ... say we want disagreement, but every disagreement costs the person making it a little social/political capital. Do it often enough and you become the negative person. people stop evaluating the argument and start evaluating the source. “Oh, that’s just Alice being Alice.” Eventually Alice learns to keep quiet, or stops getting invited to the conversations where everyone wants to move quickly. A lot of times they just leave.
That’s bad, because organizations are terrible at being self-critical without people like Alice around. Consensus feels good, especially when the people agreeing with you are smart people you respect. A group of intelligent people can build a very convincing explanation for why the thing they already want to believe is true. So I’ve been wondering: what if alice was an ai agent?
The Ready suggests using role charter that helps everyone understand who's playing what role – and with what authority:
- Start with purpose. It's the one thing worth getting right first.
- Keep accountabilities to 3-5 broad buckets. Skip the task list.
- Create one charter per role. Playing more than one? Fill out a charter for each.
- Write decision rights for the role, not this week's project. They should outlast whatever you're working on right now.
Lauren Leek explores the math behind why everything is starting to look the same:
Once prediction shapes the choices in front of us, we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want.
We risk mistaking a world shaped by prediction for a world shaped by preference, and the more these systems decide what survives, the more power moves from the people choosing among options to the systems deciding which options get a chance to be chosen.
Random Things for Smart People
- Plug in a cable and WhatCable shows its speed and power capability
- Spell Beeswax is a two minute daily spelling bee where you hear the word before you spell it.
- Someone built a supersonic trebuchet.
- The Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers is a peer-reviewed archive of philosophical concepts originated or advanced by women.
- A collection of hi-res Ansel Adams photographs.
Words of Wisdom
Consider how different your experience of the world might be if you engaged in every activity with the attention you might give to landing a plane. — Rick Rubin
Scientists do not discover in order to know, but rather, they know in order to discover. – Alfred Whitehead
Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant — there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing. — Georgia O’Keeffe
What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. — Ursula K. Le Guin
Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings. – Robert Benchley