➔ Leadership in practice

For years, there was a "correct" way to take a penalty. Everyone knew you should aim for the corner and strike the ball as hard as possible. Force the goalkeeper to dive as far as possible. The game had settled into inherited thinking. Logical, right?

Then along came Antonín Panenka. In the UEFA Euro 1976 Final, Czechoslovakia had taken world champions West Germany into extra time and eventually penalties. After West Germany's Uli Hoeness blasted his penalty over the bar, Panenka was offered a shot at glory. Score and Czechoslovakia become champions, and he’d become the hero. Miss and he would always be remembered as the guy who blew it.

Everyone knew what he should do. But Panenka didn’t think like everyone else. Whereas almost every other player in his position would be wondering whether to shoot to the left or right of the goalkeeper, he had a different question. "What if I hit the ball down the middle?" A third option. It was high risk because if the goalkeeper doesn’t dive, the ball drops straight into his arms without any effort. It would be a humiliating way to lose the biggest game of his career.

Panenka placed the ball, took a long and fast run-up, then gently chipped the ball down the middle. As Sepp Maier dived to his left, all he could do was watch helplessly as the ball entered the net via the space he’d just vacated. Czechoslovakia were the winners, and the name Panenka was given to a whole new way of taking a penalty.

Inherited thinking has its place, after all, we don’t have the cognitive space to rethink every decision we make. But finding the right place to avoid inherited thinking can be the difference between good creative leadership and great creative leadership. Netflix ignored the video store. Apple ignored the phone keyboard. Sara Blakely ignored every rule about hosiery and built Spanx into a billion-dollar company.

The space everyone else overlooks is often the most interesting place to be. The inherited thinking that says “this is just how it's done” is rarely as solid as it feels. It's mostly just history, dressed up as logic.

The thread running through this week’s newsletter is Inherited Thinking.

Go deeper:

Notes:

#1 Research found goalkeepers would actually save more penalties if they stayed in the middle more often, but they dive anyway because missing while standing still looks worse than missing while “trying”.

#2 Psychologists Samuelson and Zeckhauser showed that when you give people the same choice set but label one option “current policy”, they flock to it, even when it’s objectively worse.

#3 An analysis of 536 elite penalties found that players often choose shots that look safer (easier to explain if they miss) rather than the shots that statistically give them the best chance of scoring, prioritising reputation over pure outcomes.

➔ Systems and frameworks for thinking

Every autumn, around 5 billion birds migrate, mostly travelling in flocks. Take a close look at data from tracking studies, and you'll notice something odd. Some individuals drift from the main group. They veer off or take slightly different paths while the rest push on.

On the surface, it looks like distraction, a few birds apparently unable to hold formation, wasting energy while the flock does the serious work of getting somewhere. But those birds aren't distracted. They're exploring.

As they break off from the flock, they test slightly different routes, altitudes, and stopover sites. And when conditions shift, such as a drought drying up a familiar feeding ground or a new predator on a known path, the flock reap the benefits of what those wanderers have quietly learned. The apparent inefficiency is how the group stays adaptive.

In 1991, the organisational theorist James G March described the same tension in human organisations. He called it the balance between Exploration and Exploitation. Exploitation is refinement, or in other words, getting better at what already works. Exploration is experimentation - testing routes you don't yet know are worth flying.

March's unsettling observation was that exploitation rewards you faster. It feels efficient and productive. And so organisations drift towards it. They do so rationally, sensibly, and without noticing. That is, until conditions change and they realise they've stopped exploring altogether. He called the result a competency trap. The better you get at something, the more efficient it becomes to do it, and the harder it becomes to imagine doing it differently.

March's insight wasn't that you should explore more. It was that organisations need both, in the right proportion, running simultaneously. The flock flies the known route and sends out wanderers. Not one or the other. Not sequentially. Both, by design.

As a creative leader, try making a habit of asking, “Who are the exploiters in the team?” These are the ones refining, delivering, and executing brilliantly? Then you should ask, “Who are the explorers?” If you can't name one, you probably don't have one. That's worth fixing before conditions change and you need them.

Notes:

#1 Migration isn’t just “hard‑wired GPS”: experience matters. A review on first‑time migrants argues that young birds start with a rough built‑in direction, but refine their routes and stopover choices by learning from each journey.

#2 Studies on homing pigeons show that pairing an experienced bird with a naïve one leads the pair to try new shortcuts, and those improved routes can persist even after the naïve bird has gone. Fresh birds literally pull the flock into exploration.

#3 Behavioural writers talk about how we over‑index on exploitation: we stick with the same route to work, the same news sources, the same colleagues in meetings, not because they’re optimal, but because the cost of exploring alternatives is immediate and visible.

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

Psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer once ran a simple experiment. They gave two groups the same set of questions but with one slight difference. The first group’s questions were clearly printed. The second saw the same questions in a faint, slightly awkward font that made. The logic would suggest that the easier to read would be easier to answer but that wasn’t the case. The second group made fewer mistakes.

The questions stayed the same. The only difference was how easy they were to process. That small amount of friction forced people to slow down. It interrupted something deeper than attention. It disrupted a system in the brain that is designed to conserve effort.

Most of the time, your brain is not trying to think. It is trying to recognise. At the centre of this is the Basal Ganglia, a set of structures buried deep in the brain that help automate repeated behaviours. It allows you to drive a familiar route without thinking, finish common phrases before they are spoken, and rely on patterns you have seen before.

Over time, the basal ganglia compress experience into shortcuts. These shortcuts are often useful and necessary. Without them, every decision would feel like starting from scratch. But the trade-off is that what has been repeated begins to feel self-evident. It feels correct because it’s familiar. The brain tags it as efficient and safe to reuse.

This is what Daniel Kahneman described as cognitive ease, the sensation that something is true simply because it is easy to process. Inherited thinking thrives in this environment. The playbook you step into. The strategy everyone accepts. The way things have always been done. These are not just ideas you have inherited and absorbed, but patterns your brain has encoded. The Basal Ganglia has seen them enough times that it stops questioning them.

The same system that helps you move quickly through the world is possibly the one keeping you locked into it.

Go deeper:

Notes:

#1 Rhyming phrases (“Woes unite foes”) are judged as more accurate than non‑rhyming versions (“Woes unite enemies”), simply because they’re easier to process.

#2 Kahneman points out that repeating a statement, even without evidence, makes people more likely to rate it as true later — this is the “illusory truth” effect and it’s one reason advertising and political slogans are so simple and repetitive.

#3 The same joke in a familiar typeface gets more laughs than in a hard‑to‑read one, because the brain mistakes “this is easy to digest” for “this is good.”

🔗 Quick links to more stories 📖

The illusion of clarity - You may use a toilet every day, but could you explain how it works? Maybe. But can you explain how it works in detail? Probably not, unless you’re a plumber. The act of trying to explain things people assume they know well reveals how little people actually know. This is the illusion of clarity, and we all suffer from it. Here’s how you can confront and fix the problem courtesy of Ness Labs. (4 min read)

New study finds link between receptivity to “corporate bullshit” and weaker leadership skills - “The way executives often spoke probably sounded impressive (at least to them) but made actual communication much more difficult for everyone else.” (5 min read)

A bravery deficit is holding back today’s leaders - “You have to practice that bravery muscle every single day. I put myself out there all the time, and if I do get rejected from something, I will print out the rejection letter and put it on my refrigerator, because part of what you have to do is immunize yourself from that feeling of being rejected”. (6 min read)

Why motivation is bad for habit forming - Behavioural scientists find that people who maintain lasting habit changes rarely start with motivation. They start with making the new behaviour so small it felt pointless. (4 min read)

A Survey on Creative Strategy - Strategist Alex Morris asked a bunch of creatives about strategy and shared the results. It’s a great read. This bit on feedback ties in to the theme of OK BRAIN! 012 ⬇️⬇️⬇️

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