OK Leader! - Stuckness feels like drifting

➔ Leadership in practice

In August 2020, Brie Larson uploaded a YouTube video about all the roles she didn’t get. Gossip Girl. The Hunger Games. Star Wars. Juno. The Big Bang Theory. Thousands of auditions over twenty years. She was told “No!” ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent of the time.

By her early twenties, Larson was working as a club DJ to pay rent. The rejection felt endless. She was stuck. Adrift in open water. Then she made one small shift. Instead of chasing the big studio roles everyone wanted, she started saying yes to “weird stuff”, tiny independent films under $1 million. In 2013, she starred in Short Term 12. Two years later, Room. Then she won an Oscar.

Stuckness feels like drifting, lost at sea with the destination nowhere to be seen, but it’s often a sign you’re nearer the shore than you think. Once a destination appears on the horizon, momentum builds. Researchers call this the goal-gradient effect: we accelerate as the finish line comes into view. Marathon runners speed up when they glimpse the tape. Sailors drift mid-ocean but quicken near land. People make bold life changes at 29, 39, or 49—when the next decade feels close enough to touch.

The same pattern plays out in organisations. Innovation work often feels discouraging just before an important breakthrough. Research on innovation group dynamics finds that frustration, ambiguity, and emotional tension are normal parts of the process, not anomalies, a kind of creative friction innovation teams embrace and work through before they reach something new. When every obvious option has failed, you’ve cleared the noise. You’re standing at the edge of a breakthrough.

Instead of quitting or pushing harder, Larson got unstuck by changing the question. When she did, the breakthrough was within sight. So, for those of you reading LinkedIn posts in the first week of January, wondering why you’re the only one stuck in the old year, don’t panic. Read it as a sign that you’re probably on the edge of a breakthrough.

The thread running through this week’s newsletter is Stuckness.

Enjoy,

Hugh

Go deeper:

• Brie Larson’s YouTube video about a life of auditions 

• 9-enders and why you make big decisions towards the end of a decade

• Stuck in the Middle: The Psychophysics of Goal Pursuit

Notes:

#1 Larson is the youngest student ever admitted to the American Conservatory Theatre’s training program at age six.

#2 As a DJ, Larson refused to play anything digital, insisting on playing vinyl-only sets.

#3 Your brain burns roughly 20% of your body’s energy. When faced with complex decisions, it sometimes defaults to the easiest path — even if it’s the wrong one — to conserve energy. Stuckness is often your brain saying, “I need a shortcut”.

OK Systems! - The Adjacent Possible

➔ Systems and frameworks for thinking

In the late 1990s, a young engineer named Shigetaka Kurita was wrestling with a small but persistent nuisance. Japan’s new mobile internet made it easy to send messages, but impossible to send tone of voice. Sarcasm sounded rude. Warmth looked mechanical. Love, typed in 12-point font, seemed rather unromantic.

Kurita found the solution not in computing but elsewhere. He borrowed the visual shorthand of weather reports, comic books, and street signage, the pictorial grammar of everyday life, and created 176 tiny symbols: a heart, a smile, a snowman. Kurita borrowing became the first widely used emojis.

It wasn’t a grand act of invention. It was a bit of creative trespassing. He stepped next door, found something useful, and brought it home.

The biologist Stuart Kauffman calls this the Adjacent Possible - the space of combinations that become visible only when you look beyond your immediate field. Many of history’s breakthroughs come from such border crossings: the wine press that inspired Gutenberg’s printing press, or the radar technology that helped create the microwave oven.

When teams feel stuck, they often stare harder at the same problem, convinced the answer must live inside it. But progress usually hides at the edges, in another industry’s process, another era’s failure, or another culture’s norm.

Kurita didn’t need to invent a new language when one already existed, just written in symbols instead of words. That’s the quiet secret of getting unstuck, not thinking bigger, but looking sideways.

Go deeper:

• Steven Johnson and the adjacent possible with visuals

• Stuart Kaufman’s TED Talk on the Adjacent Possible and how it explains human innovation

• Emoji Britannica and the evolution of the emoji

• The story of Gutenberg’s printing press

• The story of the invention of microwave ovens

Notes:

#1 The word “emoji” comes from Japanese e (picture) + moji (character) — it has nothing to do with “emotion.”

#2 Emojis didn’t go global until the Unicode Consortium standardised them in 2010 and Apple integrated them into iOS in 2011.

#3 During World War II, Percy Spencer noticed a chocolate bar melted in his pocket while standing near radar equipment. He realised the microwaves could cook food. Applying radar tech to the kitchen created the first microwave oven - a classic next-door innovation.

OK Brain! - Habituation

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

In 1967, Sweden switched the side of the road that drivers used. Chaos, right?

Surprisingly, accidents didn’t spike, they plummeted. For a few weeks, every driver was hyper-aware. Habits had been broken. The brain, no longer able to rely on routine, noticed what it had been ignoring for decades: other cars, pedestrians, the layout of intersections.

This isn’t just about driving. Neuroscience calls it Habituation: the brain dulls its response to repeated stimuli to conserve energy. It filters out what is constant so it can focus on what is new or urgent.

Organisations get stuck in loops of ‘unnoticing’ the same way drivers once did: by following invisible rules they’ve stopped questioning. The routine feels safe, so the brain stops scanning for new possibilities. Neurons suppress familiar information, not because it isn’t important, but because the brain assumes it’s safe to ignore.

The solution? Disrupt the familiar. Change the frame, rotate roles, restructure processes, or introduce deliberate interruptions. In Sweden, a simple rule change reset attention. In organisations, small context shifts can pull neglected issues back into focus. Habituation can be reversed. It’s what scientists call dishabituation.

As leaders, our route out of stuckness is often less about working harder and more about noticing what your brain has tuned out or automated. So, instead of seeing stuckness as failure, think of it as a biological warning. The signals were always there; your neurons just stopped highlighting them.

Go deeper:

• Habituation and how to manipulate it

• The story of how Sweden’s traffic changed sides overnight

• Broadbent’s filter model of attention

Notes:

#1 Office air-conditioning hum? Street noise? Your brain filters them out automatically so you don’t waste energy on irrelevant input.

#2 Leaders who switch meeting formats, rotate voices, or change settings are unconsciously practising dishabituation - a reset for collective attention.

#3 Even pleasure habituates. Psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill. We quickly adapt to good fortune and return to baseline happiness.

➔ Things to read, watch, listen, and buy

3 cognitive scripts that keep smart people stuck in failing patterns - Most of the decisions that shape our work and life don’t feel like decisions at all. They feel instead like automations following a way we are told we behave – cognitive scripts. These scripts include the sequel, the crowdplease and the epic script. Giving names to these behaviours may help you recognise them when you are stuck in a failing pattern. (7 min watch)

Big decision ahead? Just roll the dice - Tim Harford looks at how randomness is often a great strategy for getting unstuck with examples from Freakanomics, TFL and Brian Eno. (5 min read)

Adam Grant on why rethinking our ideas means we are growing - Adam talks to NPR about people’s reluctance to rethink and how people think like preachers, prosecutors and politicians. “When you're in preacher mode, you're defending a view that you already hold. When you're in prosecutor mode, you're attacking somebody else's views. And when you're in politician mode, you only listen to people if they already agree with your views.” (18 min listen)

How to make 2026 a year of curiosity - A great example of how curiosity can be a habit and not a personality trait. (1 min read)

The surprising benefits of giving up - One of the most interesting books I read last year was Quit by Annie Duke. Annie is a poker player, and one thing we know about poker players is that you’ve got to ‘know when to hold them and know when to fold them.’ Here, science publication Nautilus looks at the benefits of ignoring the often given advice to “hang on in there.” (4 min read)

A useful chart about how to do great work - I say useful, but as a flow chart, it is flawed. Having said that, this glanceable chart has been drawn from an excellent but much longer essay by Paul Graham. (4 min read)

Forget willpower. You need to develop situational agency - Angela Duckworth is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of Grit. Her essay for The Times, looks at how changing our situation can help us overcome obstacles and get unstuck. (5 min read)

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 - Pussy Riot’s 10 rules for life

➔ Rules for work, play, and life

Nadya Tolokonnikova is a Russian conceptual artist, activist, and founding member of Pussy Riot, the feminist art collective, known for spotlighting human rights abuses globally using guerrilla-style performances.

She believes in living by your own rules, not someone else’s. Here, Nadya gives WePresent her 10 rules for life.

My favourite is: “Be naive and preserve your sense of wonder.”

Bookshelf

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