Idea Surplus Disorder #99.5

Sorry for missing last week's Idea Surplus Disorder. I was leading a 300-person leadership retreat in Scottsdale for four days, and I'll be heading to Mexico tomorrow to facilitate a global innovation district summit. So I've been busy, but in the best possible way.

I really want to do something special for newsletter #100, so I've cheated and made this edition number 99.5. I'll take another week off from the newsletter next Monday and then give you a super-deluxe look back at the first 100-ish of these on April 21st.

In this week's edition: you'll get a new Filament exercise to help your team embed key leadership traits into your culture.

You'll learn how to avoid the Peter Principle in innovation work, rethink the true meaning of high agency, and unpack why strategy fatigue can quietly erode confidence across teams.

Plus, you’ll find insights on using office hours instead of meetings, preserving essential cognitive skills in an AI-saturated world, and the underrated value of mapping, making, and meshing.

As always, you’ll find curiosity-sparking ideas, creative prompts, and wisdom to help you get the most out of this week at work.

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

Up Next From Filament

Every month, Filament delivers an incredible mix of free programming and professional development. You can find links to sign up for all of our upcoming events including PlayDays, EmpowerHer, NSFW, and SuperCollider here.

Show It, Know It, Grow It & Sow It

At a recent leadership retreat, I introduced a new Filament exercise designed to help leaders identify and cultivate essential leadership traits within their organization.

The exercise guided participants through a structured process to ensure these traits are not only recognized but also actively integrated into the company culture by asking how to:

• Show It: Define actionable behaviors and practices that exemplify the trait in daily leadership activities.
• Know It: Establish indicators and feedback mechanisms to assess when team members perceive effective leadership aligned with the trait.
• Grow It: Develop programs and opportunities to nurture and enhance this trait among emerging leaders.
• Sow It: Implement strategies to weave the trait into the organizational fabric, ensuring it permeates policies, procedures, and the overall culture.

Give it a try with your leadership team and let me know how it goes!

Ideas + Insights

If you don't like weekly status meetings or formal 1:1s, at least do weekly office hours for your team.

This list of One Hundred Ways to Live Better includes these gems:

• Tell a bad joke or a pun as soon as you think of it, even if it’s just to your exasperated spouse or coworker. It takes 20 bad jokes to think of a single good one, and you only start making good jokes once you remove the unconscious filter stifling your generative brain
• Unless one of them is your friend or boss, you should spend 100x less time thinking and talking about billionaires than you currently do. 
• If you think you’re running 10 minutes late, text to say you’ll be 15 minutes late. That way the other person gets one disappointment and one pleasant surprise. Most people do the opposite: they say they’re 5 minutes late when it’s 10 and end up annoying the other and looking like total fools.

Bookmark this collection of laws and principles. Here's just one:

Gall's Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

The Peter Principle can kill innovation efforts. Here are some ways to avoid it:

1. Separate Technical and Management Tracks: Create dual career paths that allow technical experts to advance in status, compensation, and influence without necessarily taking on management responsibilities.
2. Promote Based on Management Potential, Not Technical Prowess:
   Develop assessment tools that specifically evaluate management aptitude rather than just rewarding technical performance with management roles.
3. Consider Counterintuitive Approaches: Some research suggests surprisingly effective alternatives, such as promoting randomly or selecting from both top and bottom performers, which could improve organizational efficiency.
4. Implement “Up or Out” with Compassion: Some organizations use systems where employees who don’t advance are periodically reassigned or exited. A more nuanced version might create fluid hierarchies where people can move both up and down based on performance in specific roles.
5. Invest in Transition Training: Specialized development programs can help technically-minded managers develop the specific competencies needed for leadership roles.
6. Rethink Innovation Management Altogether: Consider whether your innovation initiatives need traditional management structures at all.

Does your team have High Agency?

High agency can be a confusing idea to understand because it’s not just one idea. It’s a combination of three distinct skills rarely found together: Clear thinking, bias to action, and disagreeability.

High agency is like a tricycle. If you remove one of the wheels, it stops working

What cognitive skills are too precious to give up?

But taking the time to wrestle with challenging ideas on your own “can give you surprising insights or perspectives that wouldn’t have been otherwise available to you,” said Fisher. For example, Soares told me that putting pen to paper, while a kind of analog offloading itself, “exponentially increases my ability to think by creating a change in the world — the writing on the page in front of me.”

The connections we make between seemingly unrelated concepts often come when we’re showering or taking a walk, alone with our wandering thoughts. This can’t happen when the information lives elsewhere. Soares cautioned that we should be mindful about allowing tech to “steal something away from us that we would not have otherwise” — like mind wandering.

When used with intention and discernment, you can reap the benefits of AI without compromising your cognitive integrity. It’s similar to today’s food environment: In theory, we have unprecedented access to healthy options, but only if you’re informed, deliberate, and in many cases, wealthy. But the food environment, like the digital tool environment, is built to push you toward options that are highly palatable and cheap to produce — often, not what’s actually good for you.

Strategy fatigue is not the same as change fatigue:

Change fatigue is triggered by frequent alterations to workplace processes. It results from the sheer volume of changes in how people work. Strategy fatigue, in contrast, is caused by frequent and capricious shifts in an organization’s strategic direction.

When leaders continually flipflop on priorities, employees struggle to understand the company’s purpose and objectives. This gives the impression that leaders don’t know what they’re doing. A lack of coherent progress leads to uncertainty and becomes confidence sapping.

Strategy fatigue doesn’t discriminate—it can plague scrappy startups, corporate giants, and even public institutions.

Mapping, making and meshing:

Mapping is planning and strategizing, outlining stories. Making is the shipping aspect, the actual production. Meshing is the rest of life, the living that helps us bring all our creative strands together, developing your skillset, understanding what you do, finding your voice and all the things that are less measurable. 

What would it take for your organization to ship a feature every week?

Fun Finds

• A Fabulous Collecton of the Corners of the Internet
• Addicted to ChatGPT?
• Guide to Digital Hygiene
• The Pitfalls of Time Travel
• One Minute Parks (recommended!)

Words of Wisdom

If you never change your mind, why have one? – Edward de Bono

'I don’t have enough time' is not a useful phrase when it comes to anything related to your dream. It’s okay to actively choose to do something or not, but don’t blame time. – Alexi Papas

There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. — Paul Graham

Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to situations that are unlikely to happen again. They are collective punishment for the misdeeds of an individual. – Aaron Dignan

Remain playful as your responsibilities increase. It's easy to become serious when people and results depend on you, but nearly everyone's performance improves when they proceed lightly through the world. – James Clear

You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you. – Joshua Fields Millburn

One author pilfers the best of another and calls it tradition. – Bacchylides

Commitment is an act, not a word. – Jean-Paul Sartre