Welcome to another edition of Idea Surplus Disorder.
I'm sorry for the rather intermittent sending this month, but I've been on the road in Kansas City, Charleston, Miami, and Orlando and am just now coming back up for air.
This week: building a meaningful life, the better question to ask after something goes wrong, a $100 fix for free-event no-shows, the hidden side effects of measurable goals, why management frameworks should be tailored like clothes, and a smarter way to choose which AI model works best for you.
Plus, random lives, fake shopping, ransom-note clip art, French sauces, and a library of children's drawings.
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 from a moving 1990 speech by John W. Gardner on Personal Renewal. Please read the whole thing, and share it with someone who might be trying to find meaning in their life.
Here's my favorite quote (of many) in the piece:
Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.
This Week's Question:
When something goes wrong, maybe ‘why?’ isn’t the most important question:
After something goes wrong, most organizations ask "Why did this happen?" This is a question we're all familiar with answering.
We write up timelines. We reconstruct decisions. We explain dependencies. At the end of it, we hand over a document that contains the specific combination of events that led to the incident. Everyone nods their head, says "that makes sense", and we all move on with our day.
Understanding an issue is not the same as fixing it. A good explanation can make things worse. Once everyone agrees that the behaviour was reasonable, the urgency to change anything disappears.
When an incident is an unfortunate but understandable sequence of events where no-one is at fault nothing changes. Then the same thing happens six months later, and everyone is left wondering how we landed here again.
To drive change in your organization, don't ask "why did this happen?" Instead, ask:
What are we changing so that the same class of failure is less likely next time?
A Few More Things Worth Your Time:
Tired of people ghosting you after they RSVP for a ‘free’ event? Here's a creative solution:
When you register you're charged $100. And if you show up, you get a crisp $100 bill at the door. So you're made whole, it's entirely free. If you don't show, you forfeit your $100. It costs you money not to be there. A little incentive.
And the results?
55 people paid $100 to attend. 50 of those people showed up. That's a 90% show-rate, which is exceptionally high for a free event. We will donate the $500 from no-shows.
The last event we threw didn't have the $100 price of admission. 84 people said they'd attend that free event, but only 38 actually showed up. That's only a 45% show-rate.
Do your goals have side effects?
Measurability is a powerful active ingredient. It makes a goal more effective and more susceptible to side effects.
In a research article with the cheeky title "Goals Gone Wild," the authors warn that mismanaged goals can lead to "a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation."
Traditional leadership advice treats these side effects as fine print. Most leaders ignore them because, like many aspects of human psychology, they're counterintuitive.
Before implementing a new management framework like OKRs or EOS, try it on like clothes:
Not using a framework is like sewing a shirt from scratch. You don’t know how to make a shirt, so it’s going to be a mess. In fact, right now it’s a mess; that’s why you were looking for a framework.
A framework is like buying a shirt off the rack: it’s shirt-shaped, and at least it fits some people well. Maybe 15% of the time it fits perfectly and you’re done. Good! You win. (That’s also what happened with the well-known successes that the framework experts cite.)
The rest of the time the shirt fits OK, but it’s wrong in three places. That’s the normal case, and why wouldn’t it be? So the answer is to tailor it: to ask what you liked and didn’t like, and make adjustments. Maybe it cannot be made to work—sometimes the fit is so wrong it cannot be iterated into the perfect fit—in which case you’ve accumulated new experiences that will help you select a different framework with more fidelity.
Frameworks, like people and products, must match the culture, the people, the other processes, and the collective desires of the organization. Even the creators and proponents of the framework typically don’t know the conditions under which it will succeed.
If you stand in front of the whole company and announce: “We’re switching to OKRs,” you create instant detractors, and the rollout will probably just fail.
Instead: “One team is going to try this for a quarter and find out what we like and what we don’t.” That’s an experiment.
This isn’t just a communication trick to get naysayers to at least try it. It’s how you actually try it on, make alterations, or put it back and try something else.
Wondering which AI will work best for you? Create your own benchmark with this prompt:
- Help me figure out if I should switch to a new AI model by testing it on my real work. Based on what you know about me, suggest a few tasks that represent something I do often, and where I can easily evaluate the outcome. If you don’t know enough, ask me a few questions first. Once I pick a representative task, give me:
- A self-contained test prompt that gets the model to perform that task.
- A set of simple criteria I can use to evaluate and compare the result.
- Check with me that both feel right.
Random Things for Smart People:
- Any Human Ever lets you live the life (and death) of any random person in history. Highly recommended.
- Kids Trends is a directory of more than 100 million children’s drawings and paintings that you can search by any keyword.
- Shop at Dopamine Shop and you get to search for products, compare reviews, add items to your cart, enter a shipping address, place an order, and even track your delivery. Then … nothing happens.
- ClipArt Studio lets you clip images and text from old magazines – just in case you'd like to make a ransom note.
- Family tree of French sauces
Words of Wisdom:
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory. – Friedrich Engels
If I need a forty-page contract before I can work with you, the cost is already too high. – Shane Parrish
Obsession is the gravity of making. It moves things, it binds them together, and gives them structure. Passion (the good side of obsession) can create great things (like ideas), but if it becomes too singular a fixation (the bad side of obsession), it can be a destructive force. – Adam Savage
The first product of self-knowledge is humility. – Flannery O’Connor
My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had. – Edwin Land
In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different. — Coco Chanel
A book should serve as an ax for the frozen sea within us. – Franz Kafka