Idea Surplus Disorder #90
In this edition: a searchable quote archive, an AI-powered newsletter GPT, reimagined SuperCollider and New Skills for Work, tips for better meetings, strategy planning, decision-making, digital laughter, robot puppies, and more!

Welcome to the first Idea Surplus Disorder of 2025. Since you haven't received an issue of this newsletter for nearly a month, I will try to make up for it with even more goodness than usual.
Advanced warning: this is going to be a long one. Shall we get started?
Two Holiday Gifts For You
- I've shared nearly 2,000 quotes over the 5+ years I've written this newsletter (and its predecessor, the Monday Morning Meeting). If the 5-10 I share each week aren't enough for you, I've put every single one of them in a sharable spreadsheet for you.
- I know many of you mine old issues for ideas when you've got challenges to solve, so I've also built a public Idea Surplus Disorder GPT just for you that uses AI to query all of last year's issues in response to any question you might ask. It is still a little wonky, and the Issue Number attribution isn't always accurate (always ask it a follow-up question about the issue and check the entire archive link to be sure), but it is still fun to play with. I will keep improving this over the next year to see where it goes – including playing with more AI tools as they continue to emerge.
New Skills For Work + SuperCollider in 2025
I believe New Skills for Work is the most innovative (and free) recurring professional development offering in St. Louis. This year, we’re making it even better with a few exciting changes:
- First, we’ve scheduled all the dates in advance so you can plan ahead and get them on your calendar. Each session takes place during the first 90 minutes of our SuperCollider days (usually the first Friday of the month), giving you and your team the chance to stick around at CIC afterward to apply what you’ve learned and continue to collaborate in a focused environment.
- Second, instead of treating each session as a standalone event, we’re introducing a thoughtfully designed, skill-centered curriculum. While each session offers valuable insights on its own, many themes are intentionally designed to span multiple sessions, with each building on the last. These two-part series will help you go deeper into essential topics, allowing for richer exploration and mastery of critical skills. By attending both sessions in a series, you’ll gain a more comprehensive understanding and walk away with actionable tools that ensure a lasting impact for your team.
- Finally, we're upgrading both the NSFW and SuperCollider websites this week. If you want to register before we do, this link should work.
Here's what's on tap for all of 2025:
- Mastering Your Meetings: You spend so much of your time in meetings, so why do they have to be so bad? In our first New Skills For Work of the New Year, you'll learn a mix of basic and advanced tactics to improve every meeting and walk away with tools you can use right away – including Filament's newest Team Meeting Model. February 7, 2025
- Strategy & Clarity: Find your organization's purpose, articulate its principles, build its promises, and craft its priorities in this two-part series. In the first session, you'll learn to connect purpose to strategy, and in the second, strategy to action. March 7 and April 4, 2025
- Innovation & Creativity: Build transformational innovation into an everyday organizational habit as you unlock ways to reimagine challenges, unlock your team's creative potential, experiment fearlessly, and turn bold ideas into actionable solutions. May 2 and June 6, 2025
- Teamwork & Collaboration: Implement proven rituals to help your team master feedback, enhance communication, clarify roles, track progress, and align efforts that create a culture centered on collective success. July 11 and August 1, 2025
- Decision Making & Accountability: Equip your team with tools to accelerate decision-making, set clear expectations, monitor progress, and assess results to ensure goals are achieved with clarity and consistency. September 5 and October 3, 2025
- Reflection & Resilience: As another new year approaches, discover meaningful ways to celebrate achievements, uncover lessons learned, adapt to change, and gather momentum as you prepare to navigate the year ahead. November 14 and December 5, 2025
Ideas + Insights
My absolute favorite idea in this issue comes from The Friction Project and can help you move on when a difficult coworker leaves:
When a difficult colleague gets fired, even if coworkers feel relief, it’s still jarring. Kursat and Margaret created the “mourning for the recently left” ritual for such occasions. The team gathers and writes notes about everything they won’t miss about their departed colleague. Then they write notes about everything they will miss. Each member claims one of those good things and commits to doing it. Then both lists are destroyed—burned, shredded, or, if generated online, deleted.
Our team has been digging into AI this year, and I found these dozen suggestions on ways to "play" with AI super helpful. Here are my favorites:
- Set a daily “exploratory prompting” practice: Begin each day with an open-ended prompt that pushes you to think big. You might try, “What trends or opportunities am I not seeing in my industry?” or “How might I completely redefine my approach to a key challenge?”
- Frame prompts around “What if” and “How might we” questions: Instead of asking direct questions, prompt with open-ended possibilities. For instance, instead of asking, “How can I improve productivity?” try, “What if I could approach productivity in an unconventional way — what might that look like?”
- Use prompts to explore rather than to solve: Many prompts focus on solutions. Shifting toward exploration allows for deeper insight generation. For example, “Let’s explore the future of leadership if AI had a seat on the board or in the C-Suite — what changes might we see in our work, roles, and in corporate culture?”
- Prompt for perspectives beyond facts: Ask AI to take on different perspectives to broaden the creative capacity for unpredictable results. For instance, “How might an artist, a scientist, and a philosopher each approach the challenge of leading in a tech-driven world?” prompts AI to combine diverse viewpoints, offering a richer pool of ideas, and inspiring you in ways not possible before.
- Ask for impossibilities and involve experiential scenarios: Open new avenues to reimagine the problem itself, uncovering solutions that others might overlook. Prompt AI for ideas that would “completely eliminate the need for [whatever you’re working on],” or “solutions that solve problems we haven’t even imagined yet.” And go further by prompting AI to create “a day-in-the-life scenario where this [solution or effort] becomes indispensable in every moment of [insert person]’s life.”
- Establish a weekly “future-driven prompt” session: Devote one session per week to focus on large-scale, future-oriented prompts, such as “What will my industry look like in 10 years, and how can I stay at the forefront?” or “What radical shifts might cause disruptions or redefine success in my field?”
Build a "future team" to think big:
Among the questions that people were asking that Mohr did not think should be answered immediately were those about job security and digitization. These questions showed deep considerations about the future, and exemplified the way of thinking and taking responsibility for improvements and innovation that the paint shop needs to do well in an ever-changing market. “Our people are so experienced and have so much knowledge,” Mohr says. “They don’t need a paint shop manager telling them what to do and how to do it.”
Instead, Mohr established a “future team” consisting of representatives from across the company to look at these questions that required more time to consider, and has given them 12 months to come up with answers. “As a leadership team, it is our job to secure and save our jobs. And to ensure we have all the relevant input, experience, and know-how to do that, we need everyone to be part of the discussion,” he says.
Open your notebook, write the date at the top of a page, and draw three columns. At the top of each column, write “+” for what worked, “–” for what didn’t go so well, and “→” for what you plan to do next.
If you've not yet done your personal annual review, these seven questions are a great place to start:
- What did I change my mind on this year?
- What created energy this year?
- What drained energy this year?
- What were the boat anchors in my life?
- What did I not do because of fear?
- What were my greatest hits and worst misses?
- What did I learn this year?
The number zero isn't as intuitive as you might believe it to be.
Make sure your projects have a Definition of Done:
Many projects have a tendency to evolve into “zombie projects”. If your definition of done is not strict enough, there is the risk that a project is closed out and moved on from... and then it magically comes back to life to be a distraction for you to deal with while you’re working on other things. This immediately leads to decreased throughput due to hidden work and a corresponding increase in WIP.
Mired in conflict? Inquire and Affirm:
Vijay Pendakur, author of The Alchemy of Talent, shared a four-step strategy for leaders to respond to team members’ criticisms. It starts by taking a breath to calm any heightened nerves from being challenged. Then, start asking questions. Pendakur gave one example of what a leader might say: “‘Michelle, I hear you’re frustrated with the way I led that meeting last week. Can you tell me more about what you think went wrong,’” he shared. “Half of what you’re doing there is giving yourself time to get it together, but also you’re honoring the person stepping into the courage to actually give their team leader feedback.” Finally, affirm the person’s choice to give feedback by saying something like, “I want to thank you for giving me this feedback. This is exactly the kind of behavior I want from my team. I need some time to think about what you’re sharing. Can I come back to you later today or tomorrow morning with a more thoughtful response?’”
What's your organization's Purpose Gap:
But none of these objectives is likely to be achieved if, as happens all too often, leaders delegate the crafting of the company’s purpose statement to public relations or human resources teams. Although these teams may offer important perspectives, placing purpose in their hands raises the risk of creating what we call the great purpose gap—the difference between what sounds good and what the organization really does. Too often, these teams simply benchmark to peers and create statements that build on the theme of “we are here to change the world,” using vague language such as “empowering people,” “building community,” “enriching lives,” “pursuing a passion for…,” and “unlocking the power of....”
An interesting question we never thought to discuss in law school: Who owns your digital twin?
If over the past decade, all my work had been done using an AI agent, which came to work symbiotically with me and made me ever more efficient, if I were to leave would I then be 20-30-40% less efficient and therefore less valuable on the market without my AI support tool? Could I extract myself from my employer’s AI or will they even let me? If I am allowed to extract the data in some meaningful form, will I even be able to import that into the AI at my next employer?
Fun Finds
- Network of Time connects (via photos) nearly any two famous people you can imagine.
- The Evolution of Digital Laughter
- The History of Rated G
- I want one of these Robot Puppies for Filament!
- TimeMap.org presents a world map with a slider bar that starts at 4000 BC and ends at the present day.
- IMG_0001 is a website that streams raw and unedited videos uploaded to YouTube between 2009 and 2012. All these videos were uploaded with default filenames of IMG_XXXX, and there is no identifying information except for the upload date.
- Fight amongst yourselves: Bowls are Better Than Plates
Words of Wisdom
I collected a ton of quotes since my last newsletter. Sorry, not sorry.
“Life completely unhindered by anything manifests as pure activity." – Kosho Uchiyama
"You don’t have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body." — C.S. Lewis
"We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises — which tend to be all that matter." – Morgan Housel
"The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying.” – David Ogilvy
“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.” – Kurt Vonnegut
"When the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.” – Jeff Bezos
“Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm; they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” – T.S. Eliot
"Be humble after but not during the action." – Ernest Hemmingway
"Your biological age is the number of days you've lived. Your psychological age is the number of thoughts you've entertained. Your sociological age is the number of contributions you've made." – James Clear
“You can tell a lot about a person by the way they handle three things: a rainy day, lost luggage and tangled Christmas tree lights.” – Maya Angelou
"We try to make virtues out of the faults we have no wish to correct." – Francois de La Rochefoucauld
"Plates can often feel like a dare, waiting to see if you’ll screw up." – Helena Fitzgerald
"When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness." – Jules Renard
“The most important strategy you need to get good at in any important relationship is repair.” – Will Guidara
“No one ever tells you that bravery feels like fear.” – Mary Kate Teske
“You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago." – Alan Watts