Rebellious Thoughts #75 - 🤘 Be More Fun

Hey!

I have not been as prolific writing newsletters in 2025 as I was in 2024… don’t know exactly what has changed… kinda not good given that this year I need to finish writing my book and I am not as writing-fit as I should be.

Good news, though, is that I am getting more and more comfortable with the book concept. I’ve been asked to write the book like 7-8 yrs ago and I have not felt worthy of it… its’s like I feel that putting something into the world needs to be properly sharpened… and I think I am getting there. Let’s see.

Last week I spent a week in Austria, Vienna and Salzburg, and pretty wife came with me and it was awesome… a few dot points

• Bread in Austria is epic… there is no average old bread anywhere ever. All bread must be consumed by the end of the day cos it’s always fresh in the morning!!! Even at a petrol station or a hotel buffet, the bread is always sensational.

• Amadeus gave me a slightly skewed picture of Mozart…once I managed to triangulate and corroborate as much as we understand of him I realised what a true rebel he was. If he wrote a weekly newsletter I would have def joined in.

• It’s insane how much wealth moved from European-colonised-countries back to Europe and how beautiful are the buildings this wealth afforded them to build…ha!

Anyway lets go… for the new subscribers this week don’t forget to go and read some of the previous ones I promise they are good :-)

In my keynote, I often share this model I came up with over a decade ago and have been optimising since.

Let me cover the basics just in case you forgot and then let me expand further, which is something I don’t have time to do during the keynotes.

The model provides a perspective and framework to talk about innovation in a business that is simple but profound.

Innovation can be observed as simply fixing problems. You fix really simple ones or really complex ones (BAU all the way to JUMPS - see my other model here). You can fix business problems or customer problems - but all we are doing really is solving something that it’s unsolved or you can solve better and that’s all innovation is.

When we do this, we move from DISORDER to ORDER…at the start we encounter disorder and at the end we have ordered the parts and in the process “innovated” a new solution.

You need both to be able to innovate.

Too much order and you can become irrelevant, too much disorder and nothing ever gets done.

In business you have order people and disorder people - those that are incentivised to keep the order and those that are incentivised to push the boundaries and invent new futures.

Generally speaking, order is preferred, most boards are built with order people, most executive teams are stacked with order people, order is good for short term results, it’s good for certainty, it makes people feel safe and in control…order aligns with Australian corporate law so it keeps you out of jail!

Disorder in the other hand, is uncertain and annoying, its future oriented, results are not seen immediately and therefore all the effort seems like a waste.

Those that thrive in disorder and find this end of business more rewarding hate the way order always stops them from playing and exploring. To us, order people are boring and sooooo predictable and un-fun hahaha!

But see, despite my previous sentence provocation, it’s a mistake we often make to judge each other with measures that are suitable for our domains but incorrect for the opposite domain.

All this does is force us to behave incorrectly.

Let me break it down:

When a disorder person starts exploring a problem that needs solving, and comes up with a number of ideas and prototypes to test, the order people in the business, using order measures, push them to write a business case, to provide return on investment, to set a plan with milestones and provide the certainty order people desperately need.

The disorder person, frustrated, lies and gives the order person (eg: CFO) what he/she needs and the exploration ends forced into a project with a PMO office (more order) trying to control the uncontrollable. Then it fails to deliver on the invented KPIs, order people say “see I told you it was not going to work” and everything starts again.

Order and disorder need to have their own measures of success and we should be careful not to compare them or mix them - know where you are at when and make sure everyone is aware of the different expectations.

This asymmetry, leads to failure being incorrectly judged - if a disorder person fails at the start of the innovation journey, the consequence is not severe, in fact, the disorder person naturally plays the odds and wants lots and lots of failures to take place till you find the right one to pursue.

Failure is seen as learning what doesn’t work.

The Order person cannot afford to fail because failure could mean jail, it’s too close to the customer, so they see failure as a big no no which is fair.

So be observant of this asymmetry and ensure people understand the role they are performing and how they are judging innovation.

Another way of looking at the model is to remember that resources (money, time, people) are important as you approach order, but the disorder end needs to be resourceful.

In fact, resources will likely make the disorder end less effective. You need to stay hungry earlier on to push outside of the box thinking!

When you put naturally ordered people and give them disorder responsibilities, because they don’t like uncertainty and seek control - they will quickly order it for you - this may look like innovation is happening - but all we have done is stopped exploration, thrown resources at uncertainty and created an illusion of success. Don’t believe me? Check how many zombie projects or initiatives you are still financing or supporting that you shouldn’t.

Another view - when you find order, there is an important task of “implementing” whatever the new order is into the business. New habits, new ways of working, new software, new frameworks, etc.

If you want to be able to do this all over again and innovate, it’s important to think of the “explementation” as well. This is the ability to let go, to remove, to stop doing things one way and do them a different way.

I don’t think I need to elaborate this further - removing order creates the space for disorder to thrive and explore possible futures. if order is impossible to remove, if we concrete over it (as I often say in my keynotes) then we are in trouble.

Final thought - we tend to associate order with seriousness and disorder with fun. We tend to think that fun and playful is unimportant (or not as important) and seriousness is boring and important.

Kids playfulness seems unimportant and adult seriousness feels more important doesn’t it?

Science has proven how critical those playful years are and how much damage education causes by progressively killing playfulness. I digress.

Order is important and preferred and you need to take it seriously but it doesn’t have to stop being fun.

Disorder being more playful and seemly fun doesn’t mean is not important.

In business and life, fun should be the default and serious should only be by exemption. But we tend to be serious by default and fun by exemption.

Be more fun,

Love

Gus

If you’re curious about how to actually use AI in real life—not just read about it—check out HumanAI, a newsletter by my good friend Lucas.

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