➔ Leadership in practice

In the summer of 1974, the 27-year-old Steven Spielberg was trying to make a monster movie. He’d grown up on films like Godzilla, and that was the blueprint for his new film, Jaws. Give them something big, unmistakable, and impossible to ignore. The shark in Jaws was supposed to do exactly that.

But out on the water, it refused to play nice. The mechanical shark had worked perfectly in freshwater tanks back in California, but the salty Atlantic had other ideas. The shark was constantly breaking. Instead of bursting out of the ocean, the it sank to the bottom or comically emerged tail-first. Speilberg described the time on the boat as “…a lot of waiting. People played cards. A lot of people vomited.”

The pressure on the young director to get the film made intensified as the original 55-day shoot ballooned to over 150 days, whilst the budget doubled to $9 million. But the script, as written, was no longer filmable.

Then, one morning, sitting on a stationary boat with a shark that wouldn't perform, something shifted. During yet another break in filming, Spielberg used the moment to look at the problem from a different angle.

If the audience couldn't see the shark, they'd have to imagine it. And imagination, Spielberg understood, is far more frightening than anything mechanical - a fin cutting through water or yellow barrels dragged under the surface, the camera lingering just long enough for the mind to fill in the rest, with John Williams' now legendary score doing the heavy lifting.

The film that emerged as a result of that enforced pause was not the one he set out to make, but it became the one that shaped his career. Widely regarded as the first summer blockbuster, it was closer to Hitchcock than Godzilla and is still enthralling audiences 50 years on. 

"The shark not working," Spielberg said, "was a godsend."

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

Go deeper:

Notes:

#1 "You're gonna need a bigger boat" wasn't in the script. Roy Scheider ad-libbed the line unintentionally.

#2 The mechanical shark had a nickname. It was called Bruce after Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce Ramer. The crew had another name for it too: The Great White Turd.

#3 Jaws changed shark populations in the real world. The film inspired legions of fishermen who killed thousands of sharks in fishing tournaments. Spielberg later expressed regret about the impact his work had on shark populations.

➔ Systems and frameworks for thinking

In the 1930s, Alfred Korzybski was trying to understand a pattern he couldn't ignore. During World War I, he’d served as an intelligence officer. His job was to make sense of reports from the front. Each one, a fragment of information sent up from soldiers in the trenches, a simplified version of a much messier reality. By the time those fragments reached the commanders making strategic decisions, they’d been filtered, summarised and reinterpreted so many times that the map bore little resemblance to the ground.

The experience never left him. After the war, he became fascinated by how easily the symbols we use to navigate the world drift away from the reality they're meant to describe.

In a now-famous university demonstration years later, mid-lecture, he reached into his bag, pulled out some biscuits from a plain white package and shared them with the audience. People ate them casually and seemed to enjoy them. Then he paused. He held up the original packaging. The biscuits, he explained, were dog biscuits.

The reaction was immediate. Faces changed, and a few people recoiled. Some felt sick. Nothing physical had changed. The biscuits were identical. The only difference was the label.

Korzybski coined a phrase for this - "the map is not the territory." The maps we use, words, labels, reports, and metrics help us navigate complexity. They simplify and make decisions possible. But they also leave things out. And somewhere along the way, we stop noticing the gap between the map and what's actually there.

The pause is where that gap becomes visible and allows us to update our mental model. It doesn’t have to be a long pause. Just enough to ask a question or two before you react: What am I actually seeing here, and what have I added to it?

Notes:

#1 Korzybski was wounded three times in WWI. He sustained a hip injury when his horse was shot out from under him, as well as surviving a leg wound and internal injuries.

#2 Korzybski inspired an entire genre of science fiction. During the 1940s, 50s and 60s, general semantics entered the idiom of science fiction. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, and Dune were all indebted to his ideas.

#3 William Burroughs was one of his students. The beat writer attended a Korzybski workshop in 1939. The idea that language traps us inside a version of reality — rather than reality itself — runs through everything Burroughs wrote.

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

In my later years at the BBC, I came across a book that I eventually bought for everyone who joined my team. James Webb Young's A Technique for Producing Ideas is 48 pages long, was written in 1939, and has never been out of print. It gave me a framework for developing ideas that I still use today.

Young, an advertising executive, had spent decades watching creative people work and identified a pattern nobody talked about. You gathered material. You pushed the problem as hard as it would go. And then, importantly, you stopped. Stepped away. Let it sit.

To most people, that feels like the wrong move. If the answer isn't coming, the instinct is to try harder. But what Young was describing, decades before we had the neuroscience to explain it, is a genuine and measurable shift in how the brain operates.

When you're concentrating hard, a system called the Executive Control Network (ECN) is running the show. It's deliberate, analytical, and focused. The problem is it’s narrow. It filters out anything that doesn't seem immediately relevant, which means it also filters out the unexpected connections that creative ideas need.

When you pause, that grip loosens and a second system takes over. The Default Mode Network (DMN) is associated with memory, imagination, and internal reflection. It's active when you're daydreaming, walking, or staring out of a window. It thinks more associatively, allowing distant and seemingly unrelated ideas to find each other.

In Steal Like An Artist, Austin Kleon said: “You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life.” During the pause, the DFM is hard at work finding and connecting all those books, films, albums, painting etc., trying to make novel connections.

So the next time you see a colleague staring out of a window, don't mistake stillness for idleness. Their ECN has stood down. Their DMN has taken over. Something is happening in there.

Go deeper:

Notes:

#1 As an advertising man, Young shares credit for the development of the testimonial, the money-back guarantee, and the coupon.

#2 The DMN was only discovered in 2001. Neuroscientist Marcus Raichle identified it almost by accident. He noticed that certain brain regions became more active when people were doing nothing.

#3 Highly creative people have a more connected DMN. Research has found that the most creative individuals don't just use the DMN more — they show greater connectivity between the DMN and the executive control network even at rest.

🔗 Quick links to more stories 📖

Dan Pink and David Epstein on why you need to build slack into your work - "Slack allows us to pay attention to weak signals - problems that don’t have names. (15 min watch)

Why you’re not stuck but scared of what comes next - What if the real reason for your feeling of stuckness was fear? Being stuck implies powerlessness. Being scared implies possibility. One suggests there’s no way forward. The other suggests there is something meaningful on the other side. (5 min read)

The Curiosity Show: A new podcast with Adam Grant and Brené Brown - I’m looking forward to this new series. In the first episode, Brené and Adam discuss how a public disagreement about authenticity almost ended their relationship before it began. (6 min read)

How to get mentors onto your team - This is great advice from Bill Gurley whose book Runnin Down a Dream is next on my list. He gives a nice example of where to start when you want to attract out-of-reach mentors. (1 min watch)

Stefan Sagmeister: The Power of Time Off - In 2011, after watching this video, I decided it was time to leave my role at the BBC and take a sabbatical. It paid off instantly. ⬇️⬇️⬇️

If you like this sort of stuff ⬆ you’ll love these ⬇