Welcome to another edition of Idea Surplus Disorder.
This week: what happens when efficiency squeezes out useful variation, why choosing your customers may make choosing you more valuable, what technology is doing to the social side of work, why fiction might help us understand other people, and what happens when an entire industry starts thinking with the same brain.
Plus, 60 ways to grow a business, the history of the salad bar, art built around time, movie cats, and canyons you can play like records.
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 about what happens when we get too good at figuring out what works: hyperselection.
Hyperselection is making many parts of our world more efficient and optimised while simultaneously making them more predictable, mediocre and sterile.
One consequence is the loss of something called "adaptive variance":
This refers to the variability that comes from allowing different products, behaviours and strategies to coexist, including those that may not be the most efficient.
Modern environments are designed to minimise risks and maximise comfort and convenience. At the same time, experiences of difficulty, uncertainty and failure provide opportunities to develop coping skills and resilience.
By removing the chance to encounter such experiences, particularly during the formative years of childhood, people may become less capable of dealing with them when they inevitably occur.
This Week's Question:
Kristen Berman has an interesting piece about why playing hard to impress beats playing hard to get:
Selective liking works differently. If a person is generally selective or hard to impress, but shows a clear, genuine interest in you specifically, that signal is immensely powerful.
So the lesson is not to play hard to get. It’s closer to: play hard to impress. Be warm and responsive to the person you like while making it clear that this version of you isn’t automatically available to everyone.
Which made me wonder this: If your business chose its customers as carefully as you want them to choose you, who would you stop trying to impress?
A Few More Things Worth Your Time:
Has technology made work more solitary – or is it the "open plan" office design's need for silence? Rory Sutherland thinks so:
While it was adopted to save money on floor space, he says it was sold on false promises of enhanced sociability and collaboration: Now, there’s nowhere you can have a chat without disturbing or annoying someone else.
Twenty years ago, these sorts of workplaces were buzzing – alive with energy and conversation. Now they are more akin to a library. When I do speak out loud, I’m half expecting to hear a ‘shush!’
Work isn’t just joyless, it’s silent. Typing has replaced talking.
The keyboard is an anti-social device... Business should be a multiplayer game. It’s become a single-player game and it’s been rendered so by technology.
Need another reason to pick up a novel? Reading fiction may have benefits that nonfiction doesn't:
The amount of fiction people read seems to be a better predictor of language ability than nonfiction, research finds.
Research has found that fiction is linked to better social cognition — our ability to think about and interact with other people — and an increased understanding of the world as a complex place.
Want some less-obvious ways to grow your business? I promise you'll find some in this collection of 60+ creative growth tactics.
What happens when everyone in an industry starts feeding their thinking through the same AI systems? Welcome to The Era of Bleh:
It’s a funny predicament: all day, humans across the same industry — ostensibly hired for their unique critical thinking and experience — collectively pump every thought, business challenge, idea and solution through the same set of AI tools.
Almost as if all these companies have simultaneously hired the same single employee: Mr. Claude (or one of his contemporaries).
This vision of the future, in which as much work as possible is outsourced to AI, promises the ability to move faster, iterate more quickly and require less human staff. But nothing in life comes free. For companies that indiscriminately push the “AI for everything strategy,” real-world consequences lurk.
Because when every company in an industry leverages essentially the same single brain indiscriminately, competitive differentiation erodes. The value proposition of companies paid for solutions only they can provide collapses. And how and where value is generated shifts in ways that fundamentally change the landscape of human work.
Random Things for Smart People:
- 125 things Apple's new Siri can do.
- The surprisingly interesting history of the salad bar.
- The Museum of Time-Based Art collects creative projects that use time itself as part of the work.
- 50 Years of Tech Devices lets you work your way through decades of gadgets and mark the ones you had or wanted.
- The Encyclopedia of Movie Cats contains more than 1,000 cats from across the silver screen.
- Canyon Groove turns the actual topography of canyons into music.
Words of Wisdom:
The question isn’t whether luck exists. It’s whether you think it does. — Nir Eyal
Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself. – Glennon Doyle
The genuine sceptic is not the person who doubts everything, nor the person who demands proof before believing anything. It is the person who has learned to hold their best views with exactly the right strength of grip: firmly enough to act on them, loosely enough to let go when the evidence turns. — Massimo Pigliucci
There’s no quicker way to destroy someone’s confidence than teaching them that what they’re saying isn’t as important as what you’re saying. — Mike Monteiro
The creative person should have no other biography than his works. — B. Traven
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. — Oscar Wilde
The amazing thing is not that these things occur, it’s that we notice them. — David Spiegelhalter