OK Leader! - Making it cheap to be wrong

➔ Leadership in practice

Paul McCartney woke up one morning convinced he’d committed plagiarism. The melody and lyrics to Yesterday had arrived fully formed in a dream. He spent weeks asking friends whether he’d heard it somewhere before. Wouldn’t it be delightful if creativity worked like that all the time? Unfortunately, creative work rarely announces itself so politely.

Pixar tells a less romantic story. Pete Docter, the Oscar-winning director of Inside Out, says every Pixar film begins life as a “grey blob.” Not a vision. Not a masterpiece. Just an expensive hunch. The risk Pixar faces with each new movie is the prospect of spending $200 million before that blob has any shape at all.

So Pixar manages risk by exploiting the difference between cheap thinking and costly doing. Before a single pixel is rendered, the team builds what is effectively a “maximum virtual product.” Roughly 2,700 storyboards. Temporary voices. A crude edit. They watch it. And often they hate it. Early versions of Inside Out featured baffling characters like Ennui and Schadenfreude, who slowed the story to a crawl.

Had that discovery come during full production, fixing it would have cost tens of millions. Found early, it costs little more than time and paper. Pixar films are made, and remade, again and again, before the public sees them. The studio doesn’t rely on getting it right. It relies on making it cheap to be wrong.

Ed Catmull, Pixar’s co-founder, learned this the hard way during the burnout-inducing rescue of Toy Story 2, which included a brutal rewrite and production schedule; people worked unsustainable hours, and a near‑catastrophic deletion happened. The greatest risk, he realised, wasn’t a bad product but a broken team. “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away.”

Grey blobs are risky by definition. They haven’t earned certainty yet. The Pixar lesson is simple: make failure part of the early work, when it costs little and teaches a lot.

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

Enjoy,

Hugh

Go deeper:

• Paul McCartney tells the story of Yesterday 

• From storyboard to animation: see how Pixar created Toy Story 2

• Pixar’s Peter Docter on grey, fuzzy blobs

Notes:

#1 McCartney temporarily titled the song “Scrambled Eggs”, a reminder that even rare, near-perfect ideas still need testing, context, and refinement. BTW. If you haven’t yet watched the Beatles documentary Get Back, you must. You’ll get to see McCartney turn a “grey blob” into a classic.

#2 Pete Docter uses “grey blob” deliberately to lower emotional identity attachment early, making ideas easier to reshape or abandon.

#3 The brain processes reversing a decision similarly to losing something you already own. Letting go of an idea activates the same loss-related circuits as giving up money.

OK Systems! - Satisficing

➔ Systems and frameworks for thinking

In the 1990s, overwhelmed emergency rooms faced a classic risk problem.

A patient arrives with chest pain. Doctors have minutes to decide: heart attack or something harmless. Miss it, and someone dies. Overreact, and you overwhelm the ICU. The stakes are unforgiving.

Hospitals responded in a familiar way. They added complexity. Decision protocols expanded to include dozens of inputs: EKG readings, blood tests, patient history, imaging, risk scores. The logic felt sound. More data should mean better decisions.

Gerd Gigerenzer, a decision scientist, questioned that assumption. Drawing on earlier work by Herbert Simon, who coined the term satisficing, Gigerenzer studied how people make decisions under uncertainty and time pressure. What happens when, instead of optimising for perfection, you aim for good enough?

Researchers tested simple “fast and frugal” decision trees that relied on just a few questions, such as whether there was ST elevation on an EKG, a classic signal associated with heart attacks, whether chest pain was the main complaint, and whether major risk factors were present. Once a clear answer appeared, clinicians could act.

Across multiple studies, these simple rules performed comparably to far more complex models in certain diagnostic classification tasks. They were also faster, easier to apply, and more robust when information was missing or delayed.

Fewer variables mean less noise. Every extra data point introduces interpretation and disagreement. Cognitive load itself becomes a source of risk. Complexity, beyond a point, stops helping.

Simon’s original insight was that real humans do not optimise. We satisfice. We search until we find an option that is good enough, then we move on. In uncertain, time-pressured situations, the danger is not too little information but poorly designed decisions.

The lesson from the emergency room is to decide in advance which few signals matter most. Then have the discipline to stop. The riskiest move is often pretending that more thinking will save you.

Go deeper:

• The Decision Lab on Satisficing 

• Fast and Frugal decision trees

• Heuristic decision-making in medicine

Notes:

#1 Nobel laureate Herbert Simon coined satisficing after realising humans can’t always realistically calculate every option. Winning a Nobel for “good enough” sounds like a cheat, but it worked.

#2 Under pressure, our brains choke on too much information. Satisficing protects decision quality by keeping cognitive load manageable.

#3 Organisations pile on processes to protect themselves, not to make better choices. Satisficing focuses on what actually works now.

OK Brain! - The Anterior Cingulate Cortex Edition

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

I called this newsletter OK BRAIN! because it’s about developing the tools to recognise when your brain’s automations are working against you. Once you recognise these moments, you can start a conversation that gets the brain working for you again: “OK BRAIN! I see what you’re doing here. I’m taking back control from this point on.” Let me give you an example.

You’ve been sitting on a decision for weeks. You worry because it might leave you exposed. Say yes, and you own the outcome. Say no, and you own the opportunity cost. So, you do nothing and pretend, for a little while longer, that you’re still thinking. Here’s why you do this.

Long before any calculation, your brain has already convened a meeting. In a region called the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC), a quiet but influential voice begins to pipe up. Think of it as the brain’s internal risk officer. Its job is not to choose the best outcome, but to flag conflict, error, and the possibility of regret.

The ACC is especially sensitive to social risk. Research shows it becomes active when we anticipate mistakes, embarrassment, or social judgment. This circuitry overlaps with the emotional experience of physical pain. To the brain, public failure is not abstract. It feels like a costly punch in the face.

So when leaders face uncertainty, that internal voice starts running scenarios. “What if this goes wrong? How uncomfortable will that be? Who will I have to explain myself to?” The brain is not just evaluating outcomes but rehearsing explanations. This is why delay often feels sensible. More data promises relief by keeping the decision open, even if it does little to reduce uncertainty.

A useful “OK BRAIN!” move is to shift the question. Instead of asking whether the risk feels safe, ask: “If this fails, will I still respect the reasoning behind the decision?” Could you explain it calmly, without rewriting history?

This does not eliminate risk. The internal risk officer will still raise its hand. But the conversation you have with it changes. You’re trading short-term comfort for long-term clarity. Trust, legitimacy, and credibility survive failure when reasoning is clear. For leaders, that is often the difference between avoiding risk and choosing it well.

Go deeper:

• The brain makes no distinction between a broken bone and an aching heart. That’s why social exclusion needs a health warning

• The 'data-driven' mindset feeds our dangerous craving for certainty

• Ego and the stories we tell ourselves

Notes:

#1 Experiments show people experience less stress when given incorrect but confident information than when left in uncertainty. Ambiguity keeps threat systems active.

#2 Leaders systematically underestimate how forgiving others will be. Research on “empathy gaps” shows we overestimate how harshly others will judge our mistakes, especially in professional settings.

#3 More information can increase anxiety rather than reduce it. When data introduces new variables instead of resolving uncertainty, stress responses intensify rather than settle.

➔ Things to read, watch, listen, and buy

Habits of highly successful risk-takers - Statistician Nate Silver explains why the best risk-takers aren’t reckless. They’re strategic, evidence-driven, and comfortable acting without perfect information. (5 min watch)

What we get wrong about dopamine - As mentioned in Episode 1 of this newsletter, Dopamine is misunderstood. This longread from the BBC delves into what the much-discussed neurotransmitter really does to our brains. (12 min read)

Adam Grant on why we should take more risks - “In the long run, the riskiest decision is to never take a risk.”(5 min read)

Engineered Exclusion: How Social Media Triggers Pain the Adolescent Brain Struggles to Repair - “From an evolutionary standpoint, this heightened sensitivity to peer perception had clear advantages. Fitting in meant access to protection, resources, and identity. Exclusion carried real danger. But modern digital systems have altered the nature of that exposure. Adolescents are no longer navigating brief, embodied moments of approval or rejection. They are immersed in continuous flows of social feedback, many of which arrive stripped of tone, context, or closure.” (8 min read)

Dan Pink says stop overplanning and start living - I like Dan Pink, so I’m going to forgive him for his music choice in this video. Dan makes the point that fear of failure is far less dangerous than settling for mediocrity or clinging to the first path you chose. (1 min watch)

5 myths that make us quit before we get good - The problem starts with how we think about mastery itself. We carry a set of deeply ingrained assumptions about how it works - assumptions that feel obvious and true, but that are actually counterproductive. Here are the most damaging ones. (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 - Anthony Burrill’s Sound Advice

➔ Rules for work, play, and life

This week’s manifesto comes in the form of a book. Graphic designer Anthony Burrill’s 2020 book, Work Hard & Be Nice to People, is a life-affirming guide to fresh thinking, creative problem-solving and the art of getting things done. It’s packed with sound life advice and is absolutely beautiful to look at. We’d expect nothing less from such a brilliant designer.

My favourite piece of advice, and the name of the book, comes from his most famous poster Work Hard & Be Nice to People.

Bookshelf

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