Amber sent me a list of household objects that might explain how humans think. I assumed this was professional curiosity. Stella thinks it was an intervention.
Amber sees a fridge and thinks about the old beliefs we keep long after they have expired. Stella sees our fridge and thinks about the jar of something green I insist is still perfectly good because “best before” is only guidance.
Amber sees a recipe book as the journey from rules to judgement. Stella sees evidence that I can read the same instruction three times, ignore it, improvise wildly and then question the reliability of the oven.
Both, annoyingly, have a point.
The doorbell as a lesson in attention. Labels and boxes as a warning about how quickly we categorise people. An umbrella as the difference between protection and avoidance. Dust as the blind spots we stop noticing because they have been sitting in the same corner for years.
Then there was the washing machine, which apparently represents how we process experience.
Given my recent decision to put my passport through one and then blame Stella, she considers that particular research project complete. Amber calls it processing. Stella calls it Exhibit A.
At first, I wondered whether this was all a bit too clever. LinkedIn is already well supplied with people who can turn a teaspoon into seven lessons on transformational leadership. We do not need another post explaining that a slow cooker proves success takes time, followed by a photograph of a casserole and the words, “Let that sink in.”
But the more I looked at Amber’s ideas, the more I realised there was something important hiding inside the cutlery drawer.
We spend a great deal of time trying to understand ourselves through assessments, books, podcasts, courses and, increasingly, conversations with artificial intelligence. Some of these are genuinely useful. Yet we often overlook the evidence scattered around us. What we avoid. What distracts us. What we refuse to throw away. What we continue doing simply because we have always done it.
A chaotic drawer does not mean you lack emotional maturity, and a beautifully organised spice rack does not make you a better leader. If it did, IKEA would be running most executive development programmes and Stella would have had me performance managed years ago.
Ordinary objects can, however, help us notice our patterns without making the whole thing feel like psychological homework. They offer a way into a bigger question: how much of what we do is a conscious choice, and how much is simply an old response that has become familiar?
The formal word for part of this is metacognition, which means noticing your own thinking. It is a useful idea burdened by a name that sounds either like a medical condition or something you should have revised for.
In practice, it is much simpler. It is noticing that you are becoming defensive before you send the email. Pausing to wonder whether something you believe is still true. Realising that being busy is not the same as being useful, and that an interruption is not automatically an instruction.
“This process cannot change.”
“Customers expect it.”
“That is just how this industry works.”
Nobody can quite remember why these things are true, but they remain safely stored, regularly repeated and well beyond their use by date.
Leaders answer every doorbell and then wonder why they cannot think. Teams label someone as difficult and stop being curious about what they are actually trying to say. We carry psychological umbrellas into perfectly dry meetings because once, a long time ago, it rained.
That is why I am going to spend the next few months examining what ordinary household objects can tell us about how we think, decide, learn and lead. Not because the toaster has achieved consciousness, although ours has been behaving with an unreasonable level of confidence, and not because KOAP is quietly moving into interior design.
It is because complicated ideas become more useful when we can recognise them in real life.
The first clue is in the fridge. Not the green jar, but the beliefs sitting at the back that expired years ago and are still shaping how we work, lead and make decisions.
Most organisations have a shelf full of them.
Apparently, so do I.
We will start there.
Stella says we should start with the jar.
