Welcome to another edition of Idea Surplus Disorder.
This week: why being certain everything is doomed may keep us from making things better, 188 cognitive biases worth recognizing, Ursula K. Le Guin on the work behind creativity, the warning signs of self-defeating organizations, and why smarter AI can make us less careful.
Plus, a ten-minute art experiment, the things you learned in school that turned out to be wrong, cocktails from whatever's in your cabinet, and dinner for 1,500.
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 Mike Sowden's A Short Guide to the Future, about why being certain everything is doomed might be the very thing keeping us from making things better.
He begins with Rebecca Solnit on why uncertainty gives us room to act:
"It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”
And then Sowden on why embracing uncertainty can be liberating:
Uncertainty is the heavy cloth of existence, and if you can learn to wear it without your knees buckling, it’s oddly liberating.
This is especially true when it comes to trying something radically new and foolish that might (against all the odds!) just work (which it probably won’t, but hey, what if it did?).
If you lean into this way of thinking, it’ll soon teach you that the certainty of despair isn’t a comfort, but a straitjacket, stopping you from discovering what’s actually within reach.
This Week's Question:
This week's question is inspired by this interactive map of 188 cognitive biases (the shortcuts our brain takes that usually help, but sometimes mislead us). Pick one, and then ask this question:
Where might this bias be shaping a decision we're making right now, and what would help us catch it?
A Few More Things Worth Your Time:
Ursula K. Le Guin on why creative work looks like magic until you've learned the craft:
If you haven’t learned how to do something, the people who have may seem to be magicians, possessors of mysterious secrets. In any complex art, such as house-keeping, piano-playing, clothes-making, or story-writing, there are so many techniques, skills, choices of method, so many variables, that you can learn them only by methodical, repeated, long-continued practice—in other words, by work.
Nothing I know about how I learned to do the things I am good at doing leads me to believe that there are ‘secrets’ to the piano or the sewing machine or any other art I’m no good at.
Is your organization suffering from Self Defeating Disease? The four symptoms are:
- Incestuous thinking: A smaller and smaller group of decision makers with similar backgrounds and long tenure in the same place.
- Cult replacing Culture: A cult either around a leader, a “way”, or a fashionable financial market meme (“everything as a service”, “data driven everything”, “streaming is the only way”, “We are AI!”)
- Fear: Fear of speaking up, fear of change, or fear of opposing the leader or “the way”!
- Overreach: Letting recent success make one lose perspective that most success is driven by luck and trends that can turn.
One way to fight it: assign someone to argue the opposite:
Building a case for the opposite: Whenever a key decision needs to be made, a team or individual should be charged with building a case for the exact opposite of what a leader or board are considering. This provides two benefits: First it allows one to make sure that group think does not disconnect us from reality since there is a reminder that we may be wrong. Second it helps us correct gaps in the thinking of our original recommendation. It is like stress testing our proposition.
Having trouble deciding what deserves your time? Try Must Do, Might Do, Won't Do from the book Busy Idiot:
Write down your tasks for the week ahead, create three categories — must do, might do, won't do — and consider the amount of time you'll need to allocate for each task.
If you're doing this right, you shouldn't have more than one or two items in your 'must do' list, three to four in your 'might do' list and lots in your 'won't do' list. Remember, when you prioritise everything, you prioritise nothing.
Creating this list also helps you manage expectations with your team and boss. It helps you break free from the busy hustle. Your 'might do's' are exactly that — you might or might not get them done. Your 'won't do' list will be a variety of tasks that can wait until next week or be delegated, or things you've consciously decided not to do.
The B2B Bento Box is an online swipe-file of interesting bits of data around multiple marketing topics. For example, here are a few nuggets about in-person events:
- In-person events were chosen by four out of five survey respondents as the most trustworthy source of information.
- Only 1% of event attendees most preferred to hear from celebrity speakers, compared with 39% who wanted to hear about innovation and 34% who wanted industry leaders and experts.
- Seventy per cent of people felt more knowledgeable after exposure to a brand at a live event, and 63% felt more connected to fellow employees and their industry overall.
How much of your AI use is now on autopilot?
The more reliable an automated system becomes, the more likely humans are to let it pass unchecked. When a system is usually right, your attention starts treating it as if it will keep being right.
Random Things for Smart People:
- The Retro Codex tells you the things you were taught in high school that are no longer true.
- Delphi is a simple collection of free browser-based tools that is worth a bookmark.
- Look at one piece of art intentionally, for ten minutes.
- Add the alcohol and mixers you have in your home bar and Kooler will tell you what cocktails you can make, and how to make them.
- How to have 1,500 people for dinner.
- Are you a logomachist? Logomachist (noun) means a person who argues about words, especially someone who gets caught up in disputes over the precise meaning, use, or interpretation of words. It can suggest someone who enjoys verbal disputes, sometimes more than they care about the underlying issue.
Words of Wisdom:
It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us. — Epicurus
If you commit to nothing, everything looks worth doing. — Shane Parrish
If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better. — Ed Catmull
Birds feel something akin to pain (and fear) just before migration. Nothing alleviates this feeling except flight. — Lorine Niedecker
Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible. — Edwin Land
Just found out about recency bias. Maybe the most important bias ever. — Liste