Welcome to another edition of Idea Surplus Disorder.
This week: how technology is quietly deskilling our bodies, why we should spend more time on the hardest part of a problem, what happens when teams consider a decision twice, how to make organizational change easier, and a clever prompt for better AI designs.
Plus, a three-condiment dilemma, a six-degree challenger to Kevin Bacon, 120,000 archival film clips, Wikipedia within walking distance, and train rides around the world.
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 find this week is titled Deskilling Our Bodies:
We have fallen into habits that are steadily deskilling the human body, eroding capacities honed by evolution to support our wellbeing as we move through the world.
Some of these capacities are weakening through disuse: we have come to rely on our phones, for example, and now, increasingly, on AI, to rapidly do work that would once have required something more physical – like looking around, or asking someone, or going to find and consult a book....
In surrendering to a quick technological fix, we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending.
Other capacities are being retrained by machines and algorithms to work against us: for instance, smartphones and chatbots can train us to keep reaching for them even when we no longer enjoy using them, turning a conscious choice into an automatic habit and a colossal waste of time. The body that results is less able to assess its own condition, improvise and regulate itself.
The crucial distinction is between technologies that strengthen our capacities and those that repeatedly substitute for the actions through which those capacities are formed.
This Week's Question:
This week's question is inspired by Paul Graham's 2021 essay on hard work:
Many problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you'll only be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling.
Every manager should ask this when their team feels stuck: What's the hard core at the center of this problem and why aren't we spending more time working there?
A Few More Things Worth Your Time:
In The Surprising Science of Meetings, Steven Rogelberg suggests that breaking a meeting into parts helps counteract a natural tendency in meetings to seek premature consensus and results in higher-quality outcomes:
Let me share some information from a classic study in social psychology that touches on this. The researcher had attendees in a meeting make a decision collectively to address the task at hand. They then told participants to make the decision again—clearly an odd request. The researcher left it open for the team to decide what they wanted to do with the second decision and no preliminary feedback on the first solution was provided. Here is the fascinating part. The second solution typically was more integrative and creative than the first solution and attendees recognized the improvement.
Another fun icebreaker from Rob Walker:
If you could only use three condiments for the rest of your life, what would they be?
Roger Martin says we should stop talking about change:
I spend a lot less time kind of talking about change. “Oh, Michael, you're gonna have to change, and we're gonna change.” I just say, “Here's the task.” If you give people a job that is a stretch, but doable, and is something they are excited about, they will forget about change, and “How much am I changing?” That's what I call choice chartering. And I think that is most significant in bringing about real change. I gave you a real job, a tough job, a demanding job. And people like tough, demanding jobs. They don't like stupid jobs.
More on communicating change from Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table:
People who aren't alerted in advance about a decision that will affect them may become angry and hurt. They're confused, out of the loop; they feel as though they've been knocked off their lily pads.
When team members complain about poor communication, they're essentially saying, "You did not give me advance warning or input about that decision you made. By the time I learned about it, the decision had already happened to me, and I was unprepared."
Team members will generally go with the flow and be willing to hop over the ripples, so long as they know in advance that you are going to toss the rock, when you'll be tossing it, how big it is, and — mostly — why you're choosing to toss it in the first place. The key is to anticipate the ripple effects of any decision before you implement it, gauging whom it will affect, and to what degree.
Poor communication is generally not a matter of miscommunication. More often, it involves taking away people's feeling of control. Change works only when people believe it is happening for them, not to them. And there's not much in between.
Tired of all your AI designs looking the same? Try this prompt:
I want to design [what you’re making], and I need you to help me find a look I like: 1. Show me 10 quick mockups with the same content but in wildly different visual styles and layouts. 2. Ask me which ones I love and which I hate. 3. Based on my choices, describe my taste in plain words and ask if I agree. 4. If I confirm, show me 5 brand-new mockups building on my taste. 5. Repeat steps 2-4 until I pick the final design, then build that design.
Random Things for Smart People:
- Samuel L. Jackson is the real Kevin Bacon
- How It Evolved shows the evolution of the world’s major religions, with audio chapters you can listen to in depth or a timeline chart showing one or all of them stacked up in parallel.
- The Moving Image Archive is a collection of over 120,000 clips from almost 2300 archival films drawn from public domain collections.
- Real news headlines about celebrity doppelgangers.
- Local Wikipedia is Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you.
- On Railpass, you can look out the window of real train journeys from around the world.
Words of Wisdom:
Spite makes you work harder. Curiosity makes you work longer. Discipline is what you need when you have neither. – Shane Parrish
When ambitions call, they do not whisper. They lead you forward on the path they set, and other dreams must wait until later. – Adii Pienaar
A system is never the sum of its parts—it’s the product of their interaction. – Russell Ackoff
Unshared knowledge is like potential energy. It's nice to have, but it only moves things when you transform it into something else. Your contribution is what you share, not what you know. – James Clear
Bottlenecks migrate. If you remove the bottleneck in one area of the system, it will migrate to another part of the system. – William Donaldson