No #159 | March 9, 2025

by Matthew Boyd

Good morning, welcome to the weekly Lead It Cool newsletter.

I turn 44 years old young this week, and it feels like as good a time as any to thank all of you for tuning in each week for my nonsensical deep thoughts and pop-culture references. 🙏😊

In this week's Lead It Cool newsletter:

• ❓Uncertainty
• ✍Whiteboarding
• ⚾Moneyball
• 😂Spring Forward
• 😎Cool Links

❓Uncertainty

Lately, I’ve been hearing the word "uncertainty" a lot.

Whether it’s politics, the economy, or just life in general, "uncertainty" seems to be the defining theme of 2025 so far.

And that makes sense, uncertainty creates anxiety. We want to know how things will turn out. It’s human nature.

But life doesn’t work that way. The future doesn’t send out an itinerary.

A few weeks ago, I watched Arrival, a film that wrestles with uncertainty in a way few movies do.

The film follows Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist called in to help when Earth is faced with the arrival of several alien spaceships. Her job is to find clarity where none exists, to make sense of something that feels impossible to understand.

She doesn’t have a guidebook. She doesn’t know if she’s making the right choices. She just has to take things one step at a time, trusting that understanding will come. Not all at once, but in pieces.

And along the way, she faces an even deeper question: If we could see the future, if we knew what was ahead, would it change the way we live?

The beauty of Arrival is that it doesn’t offer easy answers. It doesn’t tell us how to eliminate uncertainty, it teaches us how to sit with it. How to move forward even when the path isn’t clear.

This seems like a lesson worth holding onto.

Because uncertainty is unavoidable. No matter what part of your life, there will always be moments when we don’t know how things will turn out.

But maybe that’s okay.

Maybe not knowing is part of what makes life meaningful.

✍Whiteboarding

I saw this last week:

And I 100% agree.

In fact, I've actually written about this exact topic before:

Steven Levy’s book Facebook: The Inside Story provides a captivating behind-the-scenes narrative of the early days of the world-changing social media platform. A consistent trend that emerges throughout the story of Facebook is that every new idea or product concept at Facebook starts with a whiteboard session.

As Facebook learned, whiteboarding is the gateway towards innovation and collaboration.

But why is that? What makes whiteboarding such an effective tool?

Here’s why:

👀Visuals make the content more appealing, and easier to absorb and retain. Pictures are worth a thousand words.

💡The real-time development of content and ideas inspires curiosity, innovation and participation. Whiteboarding makes people feel part of the story.

🤝Whiteboard sessions stimulate people’s attention by asking for their active contribution. Collaborative work is always easier to remember because it is emotionally engaging.

🦺It creates safe environments to test ideas and make mistakes (it’s easy to erase or add content)

So this got me thinking, what is the greatest pop culture whiteboard moment of all time?

The answer: this scene from Jaws (although technically it’s a “chalkboard” moment).

With one simple image on the chalkboard, Captain Quint captures the attention of the entire squabbling room, clearly identifies the risk (big shark!) and unifies them with his solution. The rest is history.

So the next time you have a Great White Shark problem that you just can’t seem to make progress on, set up a whiteboard session and watch the magic happen.

⚾Moneyball

I rewatched Moneyball (again) this week.

I highly encourage everyone to watch this one scene where Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) challenges his team to define the actual problem they're trying to solve.

It's a perfect example of the risks that come with jumping to solutions before properly defining the problem.

😂Spring Forward

Time change today reminder.🎯

😎Cool Links

💪What Sport Has Taught Me About Leadership, Teamwork and Confidence. “In sport, teamwork is not just a concept… it’s a necessity,” Gosselin-Despres reflects. “I remember the first rugby tackle I received, the kind that takes you by surprise. But instead of staying down, you have to get up because I knew my teammates had my back and I knew as I picked myself up, I had some inner strength and power in me to keep going.

😆When Laughing Becomes Labor. These findings seem to paint a straightforward picture: humor, as long as it isn’t mean-spirited or aggressive, is a beneficial strategy leaders can use to improve workplace dynamics. But what if the laughter during your team meeting isn’t genuine but feigned? What if employees are just pretending to laugh? If that’s the case, our latest research published in the Academy of Management Journal, suggests that, sometimes, the boss’s jokes aren’t just falling flat—they’re actively imposing costs on people, especially for employees who adhere to hierarchical management approaches and accept unequal power distribution.

😲My Spreadsheet Doesn't Do That! Here is a commercial from 1992 for Microsoft Excel. It's hard to believe we lived in a time before excel spreadsheets.

🎈The 1986 Ohio Balloon Disaster. "Hey, let's release 1.5 million balloons! What could possibly go wrong???"

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Let’s connect! 💬 You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter