Idea Surplus Disorder #98

This week in Idea Surplus Disorder, we explore the importance of building a situation room for navigating uncertainty, why troubleshooting is harder than we think, and how constraints create more freedom.

We also dig into the hidden downsides of defaulting to video calls, the risks of outsourcing thinking to AI, and the delicate balance of giving senior leaders feedback (hint: it shouldn’t be your first option).

Plus, lessons from a retiring food critic, a fresh way to think about negotiation, and why some ideas arrive before their time — only to become inevitable later.

As always, expect fun finds, thought-provoking wisdom, and creative ideas to sharpen your thinking.

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

Up Next From Filament

We're busy in March and April at Filament with an incredible mix of free programming and professional development.

• March 21 | EmpowerHer SOLD OUT
• March 28 | The Uncertainty Summit SOLD OUT (but another coming soon)
• April 4 | NSFW + SuperCollider: On April 4th, learn how to connect your organization's purpose to strategy and work the rest of the day (solo or with your team) at Filament and CIC. 
• April 18 | PlayDays: Unlike traditional workshops, PlayDays aren’t about expertise — they’re about exploring, experimenting, and learning together. In our first PlayDay, we'll demystify essential AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

You can find all of Filament's upcoming events here.

Ideas + Insights

In these chaotic times, everyone needs a situation room:

I don’t mean a “Situation Room” in terms of an actual physical location (unless you’ve got lots of empty office space that you’d love to turn into something out of “The West Wing”). I mean a standing intelligence and advisory capacity within your firm. Call it a Global Analysis Unit, or a Market Disruption and Response Team, if you prefer something less melodramatic on the org chart.

The name isn’t as important as what this capacity is and what its constituent members do. It’s a carefully assembled, deeply informed, and continuously vigilant team of professionals with strategic, predictive, and advisory expertise, whose job is to identify what’s coming, figure out what it means for the firm and its clients, and advise the firm’s leadership immediately.

Troubleshooting is an under-appreciated skill. Here's how to think about it differently:

The belief that I understand the system is often a barrier to troubleshooting. Even if I “know the system inside out”, I’m unlikely to fully understand it. Even systems I built are composed of systems I didn’t; and even seemingly simple systems are infinitely complex.

Stop with the default to videoconferencing!

Most of your video calls could be (probably ought to be) phone calls. No AI listening in but also you don’t have to be still, or at your desk, or forced into the 2D space that video calls demand of you. You can talk to people in other places and still be a body.

Too much of our technology tries to get us to forget that we are bodies. I'm convinced that that forgetting does real damage to our spirits and intellects. We have to claw back spaces where we can be whole.

What happens when we don't need to write anymore?

The best way to get people to see why education matters is to educate them; you can’t really grasp that value from the outside. There are always students who are willing but who feel an automatic resistance to any effort to help them learn. They need, to some degree, to be dragged along. But in the process of completing the assigned coursework, some of them start to feel it. They begin to grasp that thinking well, and in an informed manner, really is different from thinking poorly and from a position of ignorance.

That moment, when you start to understand the power of clear thinking, is crucial. The trouble with generative AI is that it short-circuits that process entirely. One begins to suspect that a great many students wanted this all along: to make it through college unaltered, unscathed. To be precisely the same person at graduation, and after, as they were on the first day they arrived on campus. As if the whole experience had never really happened at all.

Speaking of writing: Why write children's books?

Children have not yet built wide hinterlands: to them, the world is still opaque and full of necessary bewilderment. Those who write for children have the chance to point them towards beauty that they do not yet know exists: towards versions of joy that they have not yet imagined possible.

Bushnell's Law (by Atari's Founder) is true of so many things:

All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth.

Here are some great questions you can use in almost every negotiation:

• What about this is important to you?
• How can I help to make this better for us?
• How would you like me to proceed?
• What is it that brought us into this situation?
• How can we solve this problem?
• What's the objective? / What are we trying to
  accomplish here?
• How am I supposed to do that?

Some ideas arrive too soon:

They show up before the tools exist to make them real, before the materials can support them, before anyone takes them seriously. They’re born as fiction, dismissed as fantasy, and left to linger in the margins of speculative thought. But time has a way of reshaping the impossible. What once seemed preposterous eventually becomes possible, and what’s possible—given enough time, ambition, and technological drift—often becomes probable. Even real.

Giving a senior leader feedback shouldn’t always be your first option:

Your first option is to ask yourself, “What can I do that’s within my control to improve this situation?” Your second option is, “Can I live with this? How much does this bother me? Is it worth giving them feedback and what are my chances of success doing it?” Your third, fourth, and fifth option: Thinking more about the above. Your final option: “I think I want to give this senior leader some feedback.”

In other words, make sure YOU aren’t the problem. Make sure you are managing up, asking clarifying questions, acting like an owner, etc to get what you need. It’s easy to blame a leader, but before you do that, try reflecting on how you could behave differently to improve outcomes for both of you. It’s low-agency to assume other people should change.

In praise of constraints:

Freedom comes not from keeping options open, but from making a choice and knowing you can choose again.

Not choosing and not limiting leads to overwhelm. Much like the founder trying to appeal to everyone—a strategy that puts you on the path of vague or overwrought marketing that has to hit every possible permutation of the human experience—trying to leave all options open prevents clear action.

I agree with all of these musings about food from a retiring food critic, but especially these:

• Fat is where the flavour is, and salt is the difference between eating in black and white and eating in Technicolor, even if your cardiologist would disagree.
• Most dishes can be improved with the addition of bacon.
• The kitchen knives in holiday rentals are always terrible; take your own.
• Gravy stains down your shirt are not a source of embarrassment; they are a badge of honour.
• All new restaurants should employ someone over 50 to check whether the print on the menu is big enough to be read, the lighting bright enough for it to be read by and the seats comfortable enough for a lengthy meal.
• Waiters should always write down orders.
• Eating alone in a restaurant is dinner with someone you love and a delicious opportunity for people watching.
• And food should always, always, be served on plates. Not on slates. Not on garden trowels. Not on planks. On plates.

Fun Finds

• A camera the size of a photo and another one that generates poetry instead of pictures.
• The history of the bulldozer.
• A unified theory of the handbag.
• Stairway to Gilligan's Island.
• Owls in towels.

Words of Wisdom

When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see. – Baltasar Gracián

A hug is always the right size. – Winnie the Pooh

Artistry is elusive, unquantifiable. And society hates this, but loves what is produced. – Bob Lefsetz

The amount a person uses their imagination is inversely proportional to the amount of punishment they will receive for using it. – Roger von Oech

Your personal growth is proportional to the number of risks you take plus the number of relationships you build. – Jesse Tevelow

The most powerful productivity tool ever invented is simply the word "no." – Shane Parish

Creating art is a universal way to send messages between each other and through time. – Rick Rubin

You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not. – Jodi Piccoult

Every time you’re tempted to slack off or do or be a little less than you could, remember that you are a person of integrity who lives by the simple creed: do what you said you would do, when you said you would do it, the way you said you would do it. – Larry Winget

A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd. – Islwyn Jeneins