Idea Surplus Disorder #64

Happy Monday-ish! I hope you enjoyed your holiday weekend!

This week, we've got some Thinksgiving and SuperCollider news, along with the usual eclectic mix of big ideas, weird links, and inspirational quotes.

Let's get started!

Thinksgiving News:

The entire Filament team has been working to launch Thinksgiving 2024! It happens on November 7, 2024, and nonprofit applications are open now.

Here's what you need to know:

• Learn about Thinksgiving with this great video.
• Stop by our brand new (and still in beta for another week or so) Thinksgiving website. By next week, you'll be able to find it at ThinksgivingDay.com.
• Know an amazing nonprofit? Tell them applications are open!
• Want to participate as a Business Partner? Let us know.
• Wondering about sponsorship? We can talk about that, too.

SuperCollider2

Our next Supercollider (SuperCollider2, Electric Boogaloo?) is June 7th. We'll have a great mix of learning, thinking, helping, and sharing on tap. Sign up and bring your team – because you can't come alone.

If you're solo (or can't spend the full day with us), check out New Skills For Work from 10:00 - 11:30.

Ideas + Insights

There are only four types of strategy?

The framework categorizes all strategies into the following four groups, from the least creative to the most creative: adapting an existing industry strategy, combining different existing industry strategies, importing strategies from other industries, and creating a brand new strategy from scratch.

Can you use the fairytale framework to build each of them?

1. Once upon a time, there was an unsuspecting hero.
2. Every day, the way things are.
3. But then, one day, change/event that motivates action.
4. And so the of adventure begins.
5. It was almost impossible because of challenges/obstacles.
6. Until finally victory.
7. And forever after, the world is different.

Rumor has it that many meetings suck:

78% of people we surveyed say they’re expected to attend so many meetings, it’s hard to get their work done. 51% have to work overtime at least a few days a week due to meeting overload, and for those at the director level and up, that number rises to 67%.

Meanwhile, 76% agree they feel drained on days when they have a lot of meetings. Nobody is having fun here.

Here's a great tip to help avoid meetings in the first place:

"Let's start over email and see if we need the meeting,” is how Martin often replies to colleagues requesting one-on-one time. She also encourages declining meetings when you don’t think it’s in the company’s interest from a zero-sum perspective, replying in the vein of “I actually have a project that it would be great to have an hour to work on, so I'm going to do that tradeoff.”

I can't wait to build these two questions into an exercise:

• Our entire organization will change the moment we ...
• If I were the main character in a movie of my life, what would the audience be screaming at me to do right now?

We could all be reminded from time to time of Ben Franklin's 13 Virtues. These are three I'd love to focus more on:

• RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
• INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
• TRANQUILLITY. Be not decides to invest at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

Can AI facilitate a room? Short answer: no.

Because that's where human facilitators come in. These are the people who guide others in a way that engages the mind as well as the heart. They can tell stories that resonate, ask questions that provoke reflection, lean on past experience, and create safe spaces for discussion and collaboration. They read the room, adapt to the needs of participants, and create a sense of community and belonging.

I really enjoyed this customer scoring framework from Lenny's Podcast:

The score is based on asking customers, “How disappointed would you be if this product went away?” The answer options are:

1. Very disappointed
2. Somewhat disappointed
3. Not disappointed
4. I no longer use this product

When your team must always be "heroes" to your organization, it means your systems are broken:

Hero culture means something is amiss with your systems or incentives. You wouldn’t need the hero to rescue you if you had built a healthy system - good infrastructure, readable documentation, repeatable processes, and so on.

It’s natural and nice to be grateful when someone saves us, and we should be. But we need to separate that natural feeling from the understanding that we shouldn’t have needed that effort to begin with. The right way to respond to a hero is “thanks, that was really helpful, now let’s all work together to make sure it never happens again.”

My mind was a bit blown by this: use ChatGPT4's new multi-modal capabilities to build a website.

Deck of Brilliance is a fun online resource designed to inspire your next big idea.

Fun Finds

• Useful tools for naming things.
• The Hot Ones sauce pack from Season 24.
• Use your phone's OCR to find any book in your home.
• Atari acquires Intellivision (in 2024!)
• Some really bad Star Wars Lip Reading.
• 15 things you didn't know your iPhone could do.
• Wait, the movie Airplane was a remake?

Words of Wisdom

"Loneliness isn’t the absence of people; it’s the absence of curiosity." – Lawrence Yeo

"The shortest answer is doing the thing." – Ernest Hemingway

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already.” – Tolstoy

"People cannot read your mind, so tell them what is on it." – Sasha Chapin

"If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do." – Bertrand Russell

"It is particularly hard for people to make good decisions when they have trouble translating the choices they face into the experiences they will have." – Cass Sunstein

"Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest." — Maya Angelou

"A weapon held in ignorance only wounds its bearer.” – Will Wight

"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize." – Robert Hughes