Em-dashes are misdemeanours

Why you should think like a bottleneck detective, not the em-dash police

Hello my friend,

Go grab your deerstalker and magnifying glass … it’s time to play bottleneck detective.

Let’s start with something that every good bottleneck detectives know: The cunning bottlenecks don’t just hide. They sit quietly inside your business, strangling it from the inside, while distracting everyone else by framing an innocent party.

That’s how they survive.

Civilians find the easy bottlenecks without a detective, of course. A queue, a backlog, a bit of your process that’s obviously slow. They spot them. They fix them. They move on.

But, every so often - usually when everyone’s busy fixing something and nothing’s actually getting better - someone like you or me needs to put on our detective hat, and carefully study the scene of the crime.

And what we’ll almost always find - when the bottleneck is good at hiding - is that it’s been busy framing an innocent party.

That’s how the sneakiest bottlenecks survive - by getting you to search in the wrong place.

The em-dash police.

Here’s an example that’s happening right now.

Everyone’s hunting em-dashes.

Em-dashes are “AI tells.” HR bans them. Writers strip them out. Teachers flag them. LinkedIn has become a bit of a punctuation courtroom.

(Funny thing: I pay my editors to put them in for me, but I co-write with AI, and I have to tell it to take them out!)

Don’t get me wrong. I do think the em-dash hunters are right to be worried. When people let AI write for them (rather than cowrite), they’re turning off the thinking part of their brain. The em-dashes are (or were) evidence of that.

Real evidence.

But they’re a distraction.

A misdemeanour.

And I think we’re facing much bigger crimes.

Think like a detective

Let’s go back to Bottleneck Bootcamp.

You know that when you speed up one part of your process, you risk creating a new bottleneck, or bottlenecks.

The bits that could previously keep up, suddenly can’t.

That’s what’s happening with AI.

AI makes some things faster. A lot faster.

And that - depending how pedantic you want to be about the wording - either creates new bottlenecks, or moves the bottleneck.

So the question isn’t “is AI bad for writing?”

The question is: where is the new bottleneck going to land?

The new bottleneck …

This is a bit of a logical leap - and the reason I’m writing so much is that I’m trying to simplify the problem until it’s clear.

The new bottleneck is going to be our leaders’ cognitive capacity.

Their thinking time. Their judgement.

Their brains are going to be overwhelmed with hard thinking, and some of them will explode.

🤯

In fact, you and I already know this bottleneck exists - leaders have always had limited judgement capacity, so, to be clear: AI isn’t creating it.

It’s just going to make things far, far worse.

Rubbing salt into the wound, so to speak.

Let me elaborate … with my favourite new analogy.

Tetris? Tetris!

A leader’s job is like playing Tetris. Work falls from the top - some pieces easy, some hard. Easy pieces are routine decisions, standard approvals. Hard pieces are judgement calls, ambiguous trade-offs, gnarly problems.

AI will soon get so good it clears the easy pieces quickly, brilliantly, almost invisibly.

But the hard pieces will keep falling, faster, and faster.

And as you will remember, from the old days when you played Tetris, here’s what kills you: it’s not the speed alone. It’s accumulation. The hard pieces stack up. Each one you can’t clear makes the next one harder to place. The board fills from the bottom while pieces keep falling from the top.

🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

Tetricide

I’ve decided to call this Tetricide.

Like homicide, but it’s death by Tetris.

A neologism!

My new favourite word!

Think about it:

A CFO used to spend two hours a day on routine approvals. AI handles those now - brilliant. But the ambiguous calls still arrive. Only now there’s no recovery buffer. No easy wins to break up the hard thinking. Just one gnarly decision after another, all day. Judgement quietly degrades. Nobody notices because the easy stuff is faster than ever (yay!). And your CFO’s brain just keeps getting tireder and tireder.

It’s doom scrolling, but with dollar signs.

Ironically …

So, my job as a thinker and writer, is to make this stuff easy to understand.

I do that by finding the right metaphor for the problem.

And then I share my thinking … and I see if it makes sense … and if it’s sticky.

And right now, I am so close to the words, I can’t tell if they’re sticky or not.

As much as I hope this makes sense and has been helpful, I also hope I haven’t overwhelmed you with too much thinking all at once.

Can you hit reply, and let me know if this helps or hinders?

Hope you’re well,

Clarke

🕵️⏳🤯