Idea Surplus Disorder #80

Welcome to another issue of Idea Surplus Disorder.

In this week's edition: imagination engines, future-proofing your org, advertising tropes, thermometers vs. thermostats, Zimbardo perspectives, productivity hacks, imaginary scars, people as sunsets, facilitation protocols, and more.

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

Supercollider in November

Join us on November 1st for another edition of SuperCollider. This month, we'll work on ways to build a customer-centric strategy:

Need to get a jump-start on your 2025 strategic planning, but not sure how to begin? Join us for an introduction to Filament’s service-centered planning toolkit designed to help you and your team identify the strategies your top customers wish you’d adopt. Then, discover how to leverage AI tools to test your plan before it goes live.

Sign up here.

Ideas + Insights

Is AI an engine for the imagination?

Right now, people totally misunderstand what AI is. They see it as a tiger. A tiger is dangerous. It might eat me. It’s an adversary. And there’s danger in water, too — you can drown in it — but the danger of a flowing river of water is very different to the danger of a tiger.

Water is dangerous, yes, but you can also swim in it, you can make boats, you can dam it and make electricity. Water is dangerous, but it’s also a driver of civilization, and we are better off as humans who know how to live with and work with water.

It’s an opportunity. It has no will, it has no spite, and yes, you can drown in it, but that doesn’t mean we should ban water. And when you discover a new source of water, it’s a really good thing

Speaking of AI, here are some ways to future-proof your work:

 Future proof yourself by focussing on the 6c’s. Individuals and companies should invest in six skills to thrive in the new world. These are cognition (constant learning), curiosity ( looking ahead versus backward which is what machines train on), creativity (connecting dots in new and unexpected ways), collaboration ( learning to work with humans and AI species), convincing ( if everybody has the same knowledge the difference will be in understanding customer needs and creating stories to differentiate) and finally communication ( writing and presenting skills).

Need some marketing/advertising inspiration? This collection of advertising tropes isn't the worst place to start.

In a stressful situation with others? Be a thermostat and not a thermometer:

Once you’re able to start noticing when someone’s amygdala-hijacked, or simply that the vibes are off, you can reframe and use “be the thermostat, not the thermometer” for good. Since humans tend to mirror each other, you can intentionally change the energy in the room, setting the thermostat to a more comfortable temperature.

If you’re noticing a major shift in someone’s demeanor, instead of guessing what’s going on for them (like “you seem upset”) ask an open question about what they need or how they’re feeling. This way you’ll know if you need to get your thermostat hat on.

If you'd like to understand how you think about time (and the future), take the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory. Pro tip: use ChatGPT to analyze your scores, and you'll get some interesting insights.

Don't be a perfectionist:

The perfectionist is never satisfied. The perfectionist never says, ‘This is pretty good. I think I’ll just keep going.’ To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement. The perfectionist calls this humility. In reality, it is egotism. It is pride that makes us want to write a perfect script, paint a perfect painting, perform a perfect audition monologue.

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough—that we should try again. No. We should not.

This list of group facilitation protocols from the NSRF has some gems, including new-to-me Blind Polygon, the Issaquah Protocol, and Warp Speed. There are dozens more, so take a look.

Email's design broke our world:

One of the worst mistakes we ever made was making email instantaneous. We should have built in a two-hour buffer unless you flagged the email as time-sensitive or urgent. Why is that? Because now everybody has to check their email every 10 or 15 minutes on the off chance that someone has sent them a time-sensitive email. So the burden falls on the recipient (which means everybody) rather than the sender (which means one person) to sift the urgent messages from the important but not time-sensitive.

To implement the 3/3/3 Approach for Productivity, do these every day:

• spend three hours on my most important current project, having defined some kind of specific goal for the progress I aim to make on it that day;

• complete three shorter tasks, usually urgent to-dos or "sticky" tasks I've been avoiding, usually just a few minutes each (I count calls and meetings here, too); and

• dedicate time to three 'maintenance activities', things that need my daily attention in order to keep life running smoothly.

What imaginary scar do you believe everyone can see?

In 1980, a Dartmouth psychologist named Dr. Robert Kleck conducted an experiment with a group of undergraduate students in which half the participants were told they would have a large scar painted prominently on their face by a makeup artist prior to engaging in a series of interviews.

In reality, the scar they were shown in the mirror was removed prior to the interviews, but half the participants engaged in the interviews believing that they had a large scar in full view.

In the fascinating results, the participants who believed they had the scar noted that the interviewers had treated them differently. They cited feelings of judgement, helplessness, and powerlessness in the situation. The participants who believed they had appeared normally did not express any such feelings.

Simply believing they had a scar caused them to interact with the world differently and perceive slights that did not exist.

Treat people like sunsets:

One of the most satisfying feelings I know — and also one of the most growth-promoting experiences for the other person — comes from my appreciating this individual in the same way that I appreciate a sunset.  People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can let them be.  

In fact, perhaps the reason we can truly appreciate a sunset is that we cannot control it.  When I look at a sunset as I did the other evening, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a little on the right hand corner, and put a bit more purple along the base, and use a little more pink in the cloud color.’  I don’t do that.  I don’t try to control a sunset.  I watch it with awe as it unfolds.  

I like myself best when I can appreciate my staff member, my son, my daughter, my grandchildren, in this same way.

Fun Finds

• Writing Examples may be my new favorite website.
• Travel may slow aging.
• Google before Google: The Library Call-In Reference Desk
• "Real" Photographs of Napoleon, George Washington, Caesar, and more.
• Create realistic 3D images from simple sketches.

Words of Wisdom

“You are under no obligation to remain the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or even a day ago. You are here to create yourself, continuously.” – Richard Feynman

“Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.” — Glennon Doyle

"Good luck is something you make, and bad luck is something you endure." – Rose Kennedy

"People pay to see others believe in themselves." – Kim Gordon

"Worrying is like worshiping the problem." – Unknown

"Less is more and more is more. It's the middle that's not a good place." – Paula Scher

"Try to make things that can become better in other people's minds than they were in yours." — Brian Eno

"Reputation is like a shadow. Sometimes it's bigger than you, and sometimes it's smaller." – Shane Parish

"The opposite of a good idea can be another good idea." – Rory Sutherland

"If all the facts could be known, idiots could make the decisions." – Tex Thornton

“Tact is not the quality by which you often please, but by which you seldom offend.”— Alice Wellington Rollins