What Leaders/Managers Can Learn from The Extended Mind
Marcus needed to figure out how to restructure his department without losing two key engineers who were already unhappy. He sat at his desk with the org chart open, arms folded, trying to hold every person's workload, personality, and history in his mind at once. He refused to leave his office, worried that walking around would look like he wasn't working on the problem. He also avoided mentioning the draft to his own manager, not wanting to seem unprepared. After an hour of silent staring, he made a call based on gut feeling and sent the new chart out that afternoon. Within a week, one of the two engineers he most wanted to keep resigned, citing a decision that felt rushed and made without input from the people it affected.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Walking the floor instead of staring at the org chart
Leaders often treat serious thinking as something that happens only behind a closed door. But physical movement, including simply walking through the space where the work actually happens, has been linked to generating more flexible thinking than staying still at a desk.
A manager plans a shift-schedule overhaul entirely from a spreadsheet in her office and misses a bottleneck that would have been obvious from five minutes standing on the floor.
Before finalizing any decision that affects your team's daily work, spend ten minutes walking through the actual space where that work happens.
Turning your office into a thinking surface
A leader's office is often arranged for meetings, not for thinking, with nothing on the walls and every document trapped inside a laptop. Spreading a decision's moving parts across a visible surface, a whiteboard, printed org chart, or taped-up timeline, lets you compare options at a glance instead of holding them all in memory.
A director reorganizes three teams from memory during a single meeting and later realizes two people were double-counted because nothing was written where everyone could see it.
For any decision involving more than three variables, sketch it visibly on a whiteboard before you decide, not after.
Borrowing judgment instead of hoarding the decision
Leaders often feel that asking for input signals weakness, so they finalize decisions alone that would benefit from another set of eyes. Talking a plan through with a peer or a trusted report before it is final surfaces problems that solitary authority tends to miss.
A manager finalizes a promotion decision without consulting anyone else on the panel and later learns the choice looked like favoritism to the rest of the team.
Before any high-stakes people decision, run it past one colleague who has no stake in the outcome and ask them to poke holes in it.
Putting the decision on paper before it becomes policy
A leader's private reasoning eventually becomes someone else's instruction, so writing the decision down before announcing it, including the tradeoffs you considered and rejected, forces a level of clarity that snap judgments rarely have. A written draft can be revised quietly; an announced decision cannot, which makes the extra step of drafting worth the time it costs, especially when the decision touches people's roles or pay.
Walking the floor to gather firsthand impressions and sitting down to write a clear decision memo can pull against each other under time pressure, since one favors movement and the other favors stillness. Treat the walk as input gathering and the memo as synthesis, doing the movement first so the writing has real material instead of secondhand assumptions to work from.
Name one thing, honestly
Which recent decision did you make entirely from your desk that might have gone differently if you had walked the floor or asked a colleague first?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Before any high-stakes people decision, run it past one colleague who has no stake in the outcome and ask them to poke holes in it.