Idea Surplus Disorder #71

Welcome to Idea Surplus Disorder. In this week's edition: a cool conference session format, believing luck, the toll of meetings, expert advice, long conversations, imagination, creativity, wine prices, movie eggs, and more.

I'm Matt Homann, and I'm glad you're here!

Filamental Thinking: One Minute Wins

Here’s a fun, rapid-fire way to share ideas and expertise from dozens of “experts” that works really well right before happy hour at a conference or retreat:

• Select 20-ish attendees, experts, speakers, vendors, etc., who have something interesting to say, have a success story to share, or have solved a problem in a unique way. 
• Give each of them a minute — and no longer — to introduce their story, talk about the problem they solved, or share their brilliant idea.
• Once their minute is over (being merciless with a bell or a buzzer makes it more fun), tell everyone in the audience that the speaker will be “at table ___” if anyone would like to learn more.
• Introduce the next speaker, and so on, until all have had their one minute in the spotlight.
• Once each speaker is in their designated spot, direct your attendees to spend the rest of the session “hummingbirding” their way from table to table, learning more from the experts most relevant to them.
• At the end of the session, send everyone a list of the speakers (with their pictures, in case people forgot names) and contact information so attendees can connect, follow up and learn more.

Ideas + Insights

Do you believe in luck? Maybe you should:

Several academic studies have found that the question isn’t whether luck exists. It’s whether you think it does. Overall, people who think they are lucky might feel more confident approaching new tasks and challenges because they have higher expectations of a positive outcome.

To change your own ideas, argue with yourself in writing:

Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. This often requires breaking old ideas, which is much easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page. In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that” or rely on the fact that your short-term memory is too limited for you to notice the contradiction between what you are saying now and what you said 12 minutes ago.

Thinking of going back to 100% in-office work? Be prepared for your employee engagement scores to take a hit:

According to internal results seen by Business Insider, this year's employee net promoter score (eNPS), a key measure of the likelihood that employees would recommend Dell as a great place to work, dropped by double digits compared to the previous year.

On average, human-AI collaborations perform worse than either working alone:

First, we found that, on average, human-AI combinations performed significantly worse than the best of humans or AI alone. Second, we found performance losses in tasks that involved making decisions and significantly greater gains in tasks that involved creating content. Finally, when humans outperformed AI alone, we found performance gains in the combination, but when the AI outperformed humans alone we found losses.

White collar work is just meetings now:

Altogether, the meeting-industrial complex has grown to the point that communications has eclipsed creativity as the central skill of modern work. Last year, another Microsoft study found that the typical worker using its software spent 57 percent of their time “communicating”—that is, in meetings, email, and chat—versus 43 percent of their time “creating” documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and the like. Today, knowledge work is, quantitatively speaking, less about creating new things than it is about talking about those things.

A work journal may help you recover from distractions faster:

Writing down my train of thoughts, the things I was doing and what I wanted to do next. And I have been doing that for the past 3-4 months. I feel like I invented something new. It helps me think more clearly, and restore the context so, so much faster when I switch between things. I’m almost looking forward to an interruption to get a chance to marvel again at my genius!

Got an hour?

One hour per day of study in your chosen field is all it takes. One hour per day of study will put you at the top of your field within three years. Within five years you’ll be a national authority. In seven years, you can be one of the best people in the world at what you do.

Imagination and creativity are related but different:

Imagination is an aptitude based on analysis, and is a variety of reasoning forwards from a current state marked by freedom from habituated patterns of seeing. Creativity is an aptitude is based on synthesis, and is a variety of reasoning backwards from desired outcomes marked by closing of realizability gaps.

To some extent, the two behaviors exist on the same continuous spectrum, and in most situations we alternate between forwards and backwards reasoning modes. But in complex situations, there is also a discontinuity between the two modes, which is the same as the general discontinuity and qualitative difference that separates analysis from synthesis.

This is a fun icebreaker:

What’s a sound from your everyday life that you'd miss?

Why doesn't advice work?

Because we don't follow it. History is full of ignored advice that lead to predictably dire consequences. Perhaps the advice is poorly explained, so that the advisee does not understand it. Or they are not in the right frame of mind to receive it, or don't believe it will work. Maybe nothing would have worked: "The reason your advice is needed is the same reason people can’t follow it"

A Long Conversation conference works like this:

Two speakers begin a conversation on stage. After 15 minutes one of the two speakers is replaced by a new speaker and the conversation continues, and every 15 minutes for the next 8 hours a speaker is swapped out. (Each speaker converses for 30 minutes.) The day is engaging, unpredictable, passionate, diverse, informative, and entertaining

Fun Finds

• How do you price your wine list?
• Eggs in movies.
• Every storytelling framework in one (complicated) infographic.
• Diaries of Note shares a full diary entry from famous diarists each day.

Words of Wisdom

"No framework will make a shit idea less shit. Pipes are useless without water." – Steve Bryant

"The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed." – Aldous Huxley

Think before you speak. Read before you think. — Fran Lebowitz

"To get good ideas, you have to have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones. The knack is to recognize the problems you have some chance of solving." — Linus Pauling

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." – Alan Watts

In nearly any competitive endeavor, you have to be damned good before luck can be of any use to you at all." – Garry Kasparov

"Rushing to notice never works. Attention requires a cunning passivity." – Verlyn Klinkenborg

“There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.” – Christopher Morley