Coming up

1. OK Leader! - How Do You Decide?

2. OK Systems! - The Circle of Competence

3. OK Brain! - The Executive Control Edition

   …and a bunch of quick links

OK Leader! - How Do You Decide?

➔ Leadership in practice

I want to tell you a story about a decision I made in 2012.

After fifteen years at the BBC, it was time for a change. I’d joined in 1996, when the first BBC websites were being built, and spent the next decade and a half working on digital innovation for the radio networks. I was so lucky. My dream job was creative, public service–driven, and full of room to experiment without commercial pressure. But it was time to learn something new.

Digital was transforming every corner of media, and I wanted to understand what was coming next in film and television. So when the brilliant Pulse Films invited me to work on Shut Up and Play the Hits, their self-distributed documentary about LCD Soundsystem, it felt like the perfect move. Thomas, the founder, liked my “different thinking” and believed it was what they needed for this project. He promised space to experiment and learn.

But what I learned most was how hard it is to innovate in the industry. The desire from Pulse was there, but film distribution wasn’t built for the rate of change I’d grown used to within the BBC - a huge distribution machine with a remit to experiment. I felt lost and frustrated.

Personally, the shift was tough. I’d gone from one of the world’s largest public institutions to a brilliant but small independent company. The pace, process, even and culture were all different. My confidence took a beating, and I felt I’d let Thomas down.

Looking back, my mistake wasn’t the decision to take the role - it was how I made the decision. My only question was: Will I learn a lot? I didn’t think about trade-offs, timing, or support. I relied on enthusiasm and instinct. With a framework, I could have anticipated the challenges and handled setbacks better.

Not long after leaving Pulse Films, Matt invited me to run Storythings with him. Over 13 years, I’ve made tougher and more complex decisions leading creative teams. But I’ve done so using frameworks, which has helped me make decisions with clarity and confidence.  

The thread running through today’s newsletter is about leaders’ need for tools to make better decisions.

Enjoy,

Hugh

Go deeper:

• How a simple 2X2 matrix saved Apple

• Lenny Rachitsky’s templates and guides to help you make better decisions with less drama

• Brené Brown’s 5 Cs of decision-making and delegation

• A few examples of the experimenting I did at the BBC

Notes:

#1 The average adult makes approximately 35,000 decisions each day.

#2 President Obama famously wore only grey or blue suits. He told Vanity Fair: "I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make."

#3 Bounded Rationality is when we seek a decision that is good enough rather than the best possible option. Herbert A. Simon, who introduced the theory, attributed it to three factors: our limited ability to consider all the choices available, incomplete knowledge of potential outcomes of our behaviour, and our inability to perfectly estimate the value we’ll place on future outcomes.

OK Systems! - Circle of Competence

➔ Systems and frameworks for thinking

In 2016, David Chang, founder of Momofuku, one of the most influential restaurant groups in the world, opened Momofuku Nishi in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighbourhood.

Chang had already redefined modern Asian dining. His ramen shops and inventive takes on Korean and Japanese flavours were cultural phenomena. But with Nishi, he wanted to take a bigger leap and try something new - Korean-Italian fusion.

It seemed inevitable that it would work. After all, this was David Chang. But when Nishi opened, the response was brutal. In his one-star New York Times review, critic Pete Wells said, “In his early days, Mr. Chang served the kind of food chefs like to eat: intense, animalistic, O.K. with messiness, indifferent to prettiness. Nishi serves the kind of food chefs cook to impress one another.”

Chang later admitted, “It was the first time we got roundly panned, and they were all right.”

When failures like this happen, there are many contributing factors. Reading Wells’ review, the suggestion is that Chang stepped out of Warren Buffett calls his Circle of Competence. It’s the idea that you don’t need to know everything - just where your strengths lie, and to stay inside that circle. As Buffett puts it, “What counts is not how big your circle is, but how well you define its boundaries.”

For creative leaders, that can be a real challenge. Saying yes to shiny new things feels like growth. I chased far too many in my early years running Storythings, all in the name of growth. What I’ve learned is that often, it’s distraction. Growth came when I learned how to differentiate between a stretch and a leap.

Go deeper:

• Mastering Success: Navigating Within Your Circle of Competence

• Daniel Kahneman on his framework for when you should or shouldn’t trust your intuition

• Pete Wells’ one-star review of Nishi

Notes:

#1 The average lifespan of a restaurant in the U.S. is about 4.5 years.

#2 85% of CEOs say they rely on gut instinct when making major decisions.

#3 Productive failure is essential. Teams that analyse their flops grow 52% faster than those who hide mistakes.

OK Brain! - The Executive Control Edition

➔ Lifting the lid on what’s happening inside our brains when we do creative work

Stand in front of Picasso’s Guernica, and what strikes you is its brutal clarity. Every element screams. Nothing is wasted. The composition is violently focused.

What you don’t see are hundreds of discarded sketches scattered across his studio floor. You don’t see the screaming horse repositioned seventeen times, the bull facing left, then right, then left again. Mothers clutching dead children at different angles. Limbs, faces, fragments. Dozens of versions of each element, most of them brilliant.

Picasso didn’t lack ideas. He was drowning in them. The genius wasn’t just his generation - it was the execution. Knowing what to keep and what to kill - an essential part of the creative process that needs a very specific part of the brain to fire into action.

It’s what neuroscientists call the Executive Control Network - the part of the brain that filters, prioritises, and says this, not that. It’s the counterweight to your imagination network - the Default Control Network - that floods you with possibilities. It activates when you need to make deliberate decisions, solve problems, and stay focused on the creative work in front of you.

Creativity isn’t chaos. It’s a rhythm between freedom and control. Yet in creative work, we often worship the wild side - the brainstorm, the “yes, and” energy, the messy whiteboard. But without your Executive Control Network making ruthless calls, all you have is noise. Interesting fragments. Meetings that go nowhere.

As a creative leader, your job isn’t just opening up possibilities - it’s closing them down at the right moment. Saying we’re pursuing this route, not those five. Killing the good idea so the great one can breathe. Holding your team to a clear vision when they want to chase every tangent.

Team members might resent you for it. But that ruthless clarity - knowing what not to do - is what turns potential into brilliance. Picasso knew it. The floor of his studio was littered with evidence.

Go deeper:

• The Soul of Guernica: A Look at Picasso's 42 Sketches

• Your Brain on Creativity - The ‘Big Three’ Networks

• Dynamic switching between brain networks predicts creative ability

• Decision Fatigue explained

Notes:

#1 Picasso’s final artwork is 11.5 feet tall and 25.5 feet wide - one of the largest anti-war paintings ever created.

#2 People with stronger ECN function excel at switching tasks and resisting distractions in noisy environments - an essential skill for creative leaders.

#3 Creative naps - a sleep technique used by Thomas Edison, Salvador Dalí, and Albert Einstein to boost creative thinking - actually seems to work, according to a new study.

➔ Things to read, watch, listen, and buy

The anatomy of a good decision - “The only proven way to raise your odds of making a good decision is to learn to use a good decision-making process—one that can get you the best solution with a minimal loss of time, energy, money, and composure.” (7 min read)

How to break the hidden limits of expertise - Atul Gawande examines the paradox of mastery - the moment when experience turns into a limitation, and progress requires another perspective. He also shares insights on creating systems that help teams perform more effectively together. (8 min watch)

Adam Grant chats to Nathan Myhrvold - An excellent conversation on the art of invention. The pair debates the value of the science of creativity. (26 min listen)

Why a pre-mortem and how to run one - Before you commit to your next project, spend 30 minutes imagining its failure. (7 min read)

The first 10 minutes of sleep can unlock your creative potential - Edison would nap with a heavy object in his hand. As he dozed, the object would fall, awakening him. He would then record his thoughts. (5 min read)

What Jimi Hendrix teaches us about generative AI - Tim Harford on how new technology “merely opens a door, it does not compel one to enter”. However, the curious who decide to step through occasionally find new uses for the tech.

What are you all reading/watching/listening to? Send me your links. I’d love to know what’s stretched your thinking recently.

The Rules - Chuck Jones’ 9 Rules For Drawing Road Runner Cartoons

➔ Rules for work, play, and life

The idea of “art without limits” is a fantasy, since all art depends on constraints of medium, vision, space, and time. Many great artists use limits deliberately to heighten creativity. Chuck Jones’ Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons illustrate this perfectly: by imposing strict rules on his cartoon world, Jones made its humour sharper and more coherent.

His famous list of constraints endures because it shows how imagination flourishes within boundaries, not beyond them.

Bookshelf

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