Idea Surplus Disorder #69
Welcome to a double-issue of Idea Surplus Disorder. You're getting twice the cool stuff this week because I'm taking a break next week to hang out in Denver with the Avett Brothers and the grandkids.
Speaking of travels, if there are any ISD readers in Raleigh-Durham (July 9-11), Bentonville (July 14-16), or Los Angeles (August 25-27) who might like to grab a coffee or a beer, send me a note.
This week: an ask for Thinksgiving help, advice on writing, a better feedback phrase, attention residue, eating frogs, work containers, fun with physics, typewriter Super Mario Bros., and more.
I'm Matt Homann, and I'm glad you're here!
Thinksgiving Business Partners Wanted
We're in the middle of Thinksgiving Business Partner outreach so you may have already heard from me (or you might be about to), but in case you're not on my list and are thinking of bringing a team to Thinksgiving this year, here are a few reasons why:
Why Participate? Thinksgiving brings together innovative teams from top organizations to creatively solve real challenges faced by local nonprofits. Last year, Thinksgiving helped 70 nonprofits in a single day, and with your help, we can make this year's event more impactful than ever. Beyond the community benefits, Thinksgiving can also help your organization:
- Reward and Develop Your Team: Give emerging leaders a unique opportunity to develop new skills, showcase their talents, and take on leadership roles that might not surface during their typical workday.
- Learn New Approaches: Equip your team with a toolkit of best-in-class meeting facilitation tools and practices that will enhance their ability to innovate long after Thinksgiving.
- Network and Collaborate: Engage with nonprofit professionals and peers from other top companies, expanding your team’s professional network.
New Ways to Participate in 2024. Due to popular demand, we've expanded the ways organizations like yours can participate in Thinksgiving:
- Field a Thinksgiving Team: While first-time participants can enter just one team, Thinksgiving alumni like you can field up to four. The cost for each 5-person team is $5,000.
- Participate With Customers: Strengthen relationships with purpose-driven customers by fielding Thinksgiving teams together.
- Create a Cohort: Field five teams and build Thinksgiving into your leadership training with Filament’s one-day Meeting Mastery training for up to 50 leaders for $40,000. You’ll also secure a priority position in the draft.
- Sponsor the Event: Sponsorship packages and in-kind trades are available. Check out the website for more information.
We'd love to see your organization in the mix for 2024!
Ideas + Insights
What if we thought of work through the lens of the theater instead of the factory?
The work that distinguishes success from failure in today’s economy is knowledge work. We make a mistake when we think the important word here is “work” and look to the factory for insight. Yet this is where most of the thinking I see about the doing of knowledge work starts.
What makes the analogy between knowledge work and theater interesting is that effort and outcome aren’t correlated. No one asks or cares what effort went into delivering an art experience. They judge based on the experience not the effort.
More managers (me included) should add this phrase to their vocabulary:
I would have done this differently, but how you did it works too.
Whoever said solving problems was supposed to be easy?
What problem have you solved, ever, that was worth solving where you knew all the given information in advance? No problem worth solving is like that. In the real world, you have a surplus of information and you have to filter it, or you don't have sufficient information and you have to go find some.
A brief history of the 2x2 matrix:
All scholars who build theory need to create simplified models of what is a very complex reality. Although many factors will affect an outcome, their quest is to identify a few factors that can explain or reliably predict much of what has or will happen. Such simplifications are the essence of all theories or models.
This is an excellent reminder to experts when writing for novices:
For any remotely technical topic, you have to go so much stupidly simpler than you think you do. Not because readers are dumb. But because you have completely forgotten what it is like to not have your own knowledge about the topic.
It is much, much better to leave some detail out and upset the top 1% of people in the field who will think you dumbed it down too much than to give a complicated topic the full treatment and alienate the other 99% of readers. If they want to learn more, they can always do it after.
When you're stuck, it might be time to make some weird bets:
If it’s hard to predict what will help move progress forward, let’s optimize instead for the interesting, the strange, and the weird. Ideas and topics that ignite our curiosity are worthy of our attention, because they might lead to advances and insights that we can’t anticipate.
Writing numbers to persuade? Use digits vs. words.
Should AIs be prompting us instead?
Let’s turn the tables and have ChatGPT prompt us. Tell AI to ask you questions about what you’re writing. Push yourself to express in clear terms what you really want to say.
Make time to clean up the attention residue around you before taking on another task:
Dr. Leroy defines attention residue as, "the persistence of cognitive activity about a Task A even though one stopped working on Task A and currently performs a Task B."
The better you think you are at multitasking, the worse you will perform against your more modest counterparts.
Speaking of productivity, maybe the gurus have it wrong. Stop Eating So Many Frogs:
This is an extra special type of tragedy, a tragedy that unfolds while everyone cheers. Strangling your passions in exchange for an elite life is like being on the Titanic after the iceberg, water up to your chin, with everybody telling you that you’re so lucky to be on the greatest steamship of all time. And the Titanic is indeed so huge and wonderful that you can’t help but agree, but you’re also feeling a bit cold and wet at the moment, and you’re not sure why.
In the same way that recording the present moment diminishes presence, capturing a flow of information diminishes resonance. A person with thousands of notes views information primarily for its utility, and not for how it moved them when they first came across it.
What's your Work Container?
The work container is the total amount of time you want to be available for work in a given week and a given year. The point of deciding on your container is to force you to make decisions. Rather than letting work consume however much time you have available at a given time (and blow past that in a crisis), the point is to create firm boundaries.
There are some gems in this list of "obvious" travel advice:
- Who you go with matters more than where you go.
- There’s not much point in packing light unless everyone is packing light.
- If in doubt, assume people would rather hear less about your trips.
- Though, people may like to hear about your visit to their hometown. And places you’ve both visited are top five on the list of reliable conversation topics. (Number one on said list: pets.)
- A place that looks unappealing but has lots of customers is probably good along some dimension (food, atmosphere, price, location).
- Locals might love a place even though much of the food is mediocre because some is really good and they know what to order.
America's "best decade" will probably be when you were 11 years old.
Fun Finds
- Rebuilding an original 80's-era Mac (the website is amazing)
- Super Mario Bros, but on a typewriter.
- Liquid Layers is fun with physics.
- An interactive wheel of emotions.
- I think I'm an outlier here, but the older you get, the less you like inappropriate humor.
- This is really cool: animate your kids' drawings.
Words of Wisdom
"Everything that is true and beautiful can be seen and experienced on a 10-minute walk if you're paying attention." – Anne Lamott
“It's so simple, yet makes such a difference. Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, 'Make me feel important.'” — Mary Kay Ash
"If you aren’t unproductive on purpose, you’ll be unproductive by accident. And wouldn’t you rather be in control of the timing?" – Alex Morris
"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them." – Mark Twain
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing." - Annie Dillard
"Don’t waste your time chasing butterflies. Mend your garden, and the butterflies will come." – Mario Quintana
What might keep you from doing something great today? Remembering something you didn’t do yesterday." – Jason Womack
"I can tell you about the river. Or we could just get in.” – Bill Calahan
"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." — Eleanor Roosevelt
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." – Marie Curie
“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.” – Alfred North Whitehead
"Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it." – Albert Camus