Idea Surplus Disorder #76

Welcome to another issue of Idea Surplus Disorder.

I'm writing this one on a super-early flight to Los Angeles, where I'll be facilitating the Film Industry Challenge for the AFCI. My wifi is a bit spotty, so I'm hitting send with my fingers crossed.

In this week's edition: thinking bigger, higher ceilings, questing, consensus, dramadoodles, pretzels, penguins, and more.

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

Ideas + Insights

How do you move from the real to the ideal?

In every company, you have: (A) The formal process and official way things are supposed to work, (B) the reality of how things work, and (C) the effort required to translate B into A.

Companies vastly underestimate the burden of translation ( C ). It can be a full-time job, and very few people talk about it because the whole point is pretending one way exists when multiple ways exist. It is a time suck and a will/motivation sinkhole.

Culture is the non-fiction story of an organization:

There's nothing complicated about company culture. Culture simply happens. It's emergent behavior. There's nothing to do, it just is.

A company's culture is a 50-day moving average. It's what you've been collectively doing as a company over the last 50 days. How do you treat people? Who have you hired (or fired) and why? What do you when people are stressed out? How do you help people? How do you critique each other? How do you share? How do you help people who are stuck? Where's the bar on quality? How do you support customers? How do you close deals? What have you let go on too long? What have you celebrated? What have you let slide? How honest have you been with each other and yourself.

It's all that and a zillion other things. But it's all stuff that actually happened, it's not lists of things you wish had happened, or declared would happen in some ideal setting. Much of it is interpersonal, expressed both inside and outside the organization.

Why 50 days? It's enough time for patterns to emerge, yet malleable enough to be current and honest. One day, or even a couple weeks, isn't enough to stand for culture. A series of moments tied together loosely by near-term time just isn't enough to establish what it's really like somewhere. We can all be on our best behavior for a little while, but the longer while tells the truth.

Consensus is the enemy of greatness:

For a long time, I looked for consensus. I think consensus is really the enemy of scale, and so I used to say, “Whenever we’re making an important decision, there should be winners in the room and losers. We shouldn’t find that negotiated settlement that everyone is happy with. Somebody should be unhappy, three or four people should walk out unhappy, and one should walk out happy, and we’re all going to be good with it.” As you get bigger, the gravity pulls you towards consensus, and I think consensus is the enemy of greatness.

Want to think big? Think in bigger (and taller) rooms:

Specifically, higher ceilings promoted creative problem solving, while lower ceilings promoted logical problem solving.

These results were later confirmed by an experiment that took fMRI scans of participants' brains as they were shown images of high or low ceiling spaces. The parts of their brains that lit up while looking at high ceiling spaces were those used for broad exploration..

Ethan Mollick's Four Essential Rules for Integrating AI into Work and Life:

1. Always invite AI to the table. “You don’t know what AI is good for or bad for inside your job or your industry. Nobody knows. The only way to figure it out is disciplined experimentation. Just use it a lot for everything you possibly can.”
2. Be the human in the loop. “The AI is better than a lot of people in a lot of jobs, but not at their whole job, right? And so, whatever you’re best at, you’re almost certainly better than the AI is.”
3. Treat AI like a human. AI models are “trained on human language, and they’re refined on human language. And it just turns out that they respond best to human speech. Telling it and giving tasks like a person often gets you where you need to go.” … (but tell it what kind of human to be) “AI models often need context to operate. Otherwise, they produce very generic results. So, a persona is an easy way to give context. ‘You are an expert marketing manager in India, focusing on technology ventures that work with the US’ will put it in a different headspace than if you say you’re a marketer or if you don’t give it any instructions at all.”
4. Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use.“We’re early, early days still. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff still being built.”

In your next strategic plan, perhaps you should focus on quests instead of goals:

A quest is an adventure, and you expect it to be one. You expect a quest to take you into a new and unfamiliar landscape. You expect there to be puzzles, surprises, perils, and curious encounters. A bridge you counted on will be out. You’ll meet an interesting stranger on the path. You’ll hear wolves howling at night. This is all part of the fun. The goal mentality frames this stuff as setbacks, problems, pains – stuff in the way of the goal.

Oh, and argue, too...

A company’s cultural norms play a large role in its ability to argue constructively. The authors call out Intel’s “disagree and commit” norm as an exemplar in this regard. Intel managers are expected to challenge and object while a decision is being made. But once it is made, they are expected to support it wholeheartedly.

I promise this isn't about a new dog breed. How to Dramadoodle:

Step 4: Start with your essential question and write it in a prominent frame. In this one, my essential question was “What is a dramadoodle?” I have done them plenty, but I have yet to attempt to define what exactly it was I was doing. So here I am going to work out what it is. The essential question might come in the form of a phrase or a lyric or a single word. Allow the essential question to be the starting point.

Step 5: Fill in the other boxes with words, snippets of thought, images, or whatever comes to mind when you think of your essential question. You may find that these random thoughts are actually related. Maybe you connect them in some way. I sometimes use arrows to show my direction of thought. Leave the largest box empty.

Is ChatGPT linked to procrastination, memory loss, and a decline in academic performance?

Moreover, the study uncovered significant adverse effects of ChatGPT usage on students’ personal and academic outcomes. Increased reliance on ChatGPT was associated with higher levels of procrastination and memory loss, and a negative impact on academic performance, as reflected in students’ grade point averages. These findings suggest that while ChatGPT can be a valuable resource under certain circumstances, its excessive use might lead to detrimental effects on learning behaviors and outcomes.

“One surprising finding was the role of sensitivity to rewards,” Abbas told PsyPost. “Contrary to expectations, students who were more sensitive to rewards were less likely to use generative AI. Another surprising finding was the positive relationship of generative AI usage with procrastination and self-reported memory loss – and negative relationship between generative AI usage and academic performance.”

Fun Finds

• Pretzel Logic
• The Joy Generator
• Stick Reviews
• The Art of the T-Shirt Slogan
• Penguin Book Covers

Words of Wisdom

"Nobody crosses a bridge in advance." – Claude C. Hopkins

"To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow." – Robert Pirsig

“In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.” – Maria Flynn

“Commitment starts when motivation stops.” – Shane Parrish

“Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.” — Joel Arthur Barker Ratcliffe

"The way to greater confidence is not to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it’s to come to peace with our inevitable ridiculousness." — Alain de Botton

"Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you." — Aldous Huxley

"Your life isn't a one-act play." – Bill Gates

"The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life." ― Muhammad Ali

“Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.” – Rumi