We’re Tom and Corissa from Crown & Reach.
With over 100 episodes, our podcast is the best bad podcast out there. By which we mean: raw, unfiltered, unedited conversations. We talk about strategy, sense-making, and the blurry edges between work and all the other stuff. Because sometimes feeling your way through the fog – with limbs outstretched – is the only way to move forward.
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We’re Tom and Corissa from Crown & Reach.
With over 100 episodes, our podcast is the best bad podcast out there. By which we mean: raw, unfiltered, unedited conversations. We talk about strategy, sense-making, and the blurry edges between work and all the other stuff. Because sometimes feeling your way through the fog – with limbs outstretched – is the only way to move forward.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hands up, who else loves a spot of brand-flavoured navel-gazing?
Two years ago we picked the company name Trigger Strategy Group in a last-minute scramble for our first client project. The name has, shall we say, one or two issues. (On the upside, it was a perfect example of Hard Test Easy Life: if you can make something work despite its flaws, you know you might be onto something.) But it was about time we gave things some proper thought.
In short, our company is now called Crown & Reach, and our podcast is called Tentacles.
Why? To find out, you'll have to listen...
References:
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In which we sit in the garden, roast gently in the sun, and talk about cognitive biases, Panglossian optimism, Russian roulette, snakes on planes, and why most design is... fine actually. A very one-take kind of episode. Leaf-in-coffee energy throughout.
Links, Ideas, and People Referenced
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You were hired to fix it. You did! Customers are happier. The company made millions. Your reward? They shut it all down.
We sit on a garden bench and talk about those times when you feel like you're being punished for doing your job well.
It turns out you can't mostly change a narrative with data. Your choices are power, influence, or acceptance.
We share real stories, reflect on past mistakes, and explore safer (?) ways to inspire change when truth-telling gets you sidelined. Along the way: multiverse mapping, toddler psychology, and why the best performing landing pages often don't stay live.
Books & Articles:
Frameworks & Tools:
Character References:
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While sipping homegrown bay leaf tea, we explore how road signs, surprises, and deliberate confusion can unlock better thinking.
From missing signs under railway bridges to the tangled journey of Google Glass, we trace how aporia — the ancient art of being productively confused — can help you build faster, align better, and see the hidden struggles that are gonna derail your projects.
Linky goodness:
Innovation Tactics cards we mentioned:
Get your copy of Innovation Tactics: https://pipdecks.com/products/innovation-tactics
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We often talk about things being emergent in business, strategy, and life at large.
The problem is, emergence can be kind of a pain to wrap your head around. And we were wondering: what if the starting point is what's NOT emergent? Does that help clarify what IS emergent?
So we sat down in the garden and chatted it through.
We landed on the discipline of conversion rate optimisation as an example of a business area where an understanding of emergence (and its opposite, if you could call it that) is fundamental to success or failure.
Our conclusion was that it was indeed a helpful conversation, but we want to know – what do you think?
Linky goodness:
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We made it to 100!
Corissa and Tom look back over the year and a bit of podcasting and talk about what they've learned, some anecdotes, and some highlight episodes from along the way. They talk about allowing something to unfold into what it's meant to be, rather than trying to force a specific framework or result.
Expect some of the usual themes: constraints, complexity, experimentation and psychology. And shout outs to Anna Brook, Louis Childs, Paul Tevis and all our lovely listeners.
Linky goodness:
Episodes mentioned:
006: OKRs, moon landings and oil fires: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae9327
018: a blustery annotated reading - A/B testing ain’t for settling your disagreements: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae931b
019: North Star Metrics and Framework - are they “dumb”?: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae931a
032: How Capable Leaders Navigate Uncertainty and Ambiguity - an annotated reading - Part 1: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae930d
039: Bounded Applicability: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae9306
040: Why isn’t [Role] doing what I think they should?: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae9305
043: Do 100 Thing: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/043-do-100-thing
044: The one with the bees: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/044-the-one-with-the-bees
053: Smell the roses: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/053-smell-the-roses
058: Reflections from UX London: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/058-reflections-from-ux-london
060: Chesterton's vestigial doorman: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/060-chestertons-vestigial-doorman
061: Tumbling into the Vision Chasm: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/061-tumbling-into-the-vision-chasm
069: The alignment problem (not the AI alignment problem): https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/069-the-alignment-problem-not-the-ai-alignment-problem
070: Lobster dinner with a toddler: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/070-lobster-dinner-with-a-toddler
081: Alignment alignment alignment: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/081-alignment-alignment-alignment
086: How big things get done (part 1): https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/086-how-big-things-get-done-part-1
090: Should changing your mind mean changing your past work?: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/090-should-changing-your-mind-mean-changing-your-past-work
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We talk about signals. Specifically, how can you settle on success signals when your wider context is always changing?
We talk about a small example: setting Pivot Triggers for our Multiverse Mapping course, while our context is always changing in terms of overall cashflow. When the runway is tight, we wish the course would hurry up and sell more, but how do we avoid over-reacting or putting all our eggs in one basket?
We map that onto what happens in organisations when they need a new value stream to spool up quickly, how they can set unrealistic expectations, and how you can use something like Multiverse Mapping to figure out what's reasonable, and something like Pivot Triggers to help avoid sunk cost bias without having to be "the negative one".
Linky goodness:
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With one exercise, we can't predict whether your startup will succeed, but we can reliably predict if you're going to fail through procrastination.
In this episode, we talk about mental blindspots. Corissa and Tom rib each other about their own mental blindspots. And we discuss how to pronounce the word "satiety".
"It's more comfortable to fail when it's something you yourself have caused than when you fail at the hands of something that's outside your control." – Corissa
“Hmm, I dunno, do you have any solutions that involve me doing everything 100% exactly like I'm doing it right now, and getting better outcomes?” – from Experimental History's So you wanna de-bog yourself.
Can you detect any of these mental blindspots in yourself?
Linky Goodness:
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A lovely, meandering conversation about the nature of success, the binds we often put ourselves in and more.
Along the way, we touch on maverick musicians, maddening constraints, and McDonald's coffee.
Linky Goodness:
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In this one, we answer a question:
"I recently attended your Intro to Multiverse Mapping event and really enjoyed it. I'm also looking into Dave Snowden's Estuarine Mapping and noticed on your website that you facilitate that as well! What's the difference between Multiverse and Estuarine Mapping?"
Linky goodness:
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Corissa and Tom talk through some examples of enshittification and the opportunities hidden within!
Linky Goodness
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We discuss the Honest Prioritisation Matrix
For some reason, the podcast description space here doesn't like images, so you can see it in this article about OKRs: https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/okrs-sound-good-but-they-dont-work
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“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress” – Niels Bohr
In this episode, we answer a question from friend of the pod, Brian: "Have you discussed that bit about being intentionally confused before? I am intrigued."
We talk about why you might want to trigger intentional confusion (aporia) and what the risks can be.
And we talk about how to trigger intentional confusion by zooming in or out – to get more specific or more abstract. And also by collectively making predictions to generate error signals that we can't ignore.
Linky Goodness
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” ― Eliel Saarinen
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Brief notes today. This is kind of a wrap up of 2024 but not like others.
TL;DR: a garden decking disaster becomes a meaningful framing for rearchitecting our business.
What metaphor can you use to reframe your 2024?
Linky Goodness
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A lot of tech companies have bought into the idea of Build > Measure > Learn.
But the "Build" bit always takes longer than anyone's anticipating, so the "Measure" and the "Learn" get squeezed out.
Even though many of the people working in that system aren't happy that they're building crap and would love to be measuring and learning.
In this episode, we talk about using Multiverse Mapping to help you prioritise your work so you benefit from uncertainty instead of being blown up by it.
With real world examples, references to angry Lebanese people, a detour through performance management and another celebrity monster,
We get back to Antifragile Prioritisation at 23:10.
At the beginning of any project, we know the least we'll ever know about this project. So we should assume that we're going to learn important things as we do the project. But you can't just wait until you know the answers, because you'll only learn them through doing the project.
Expirere: you need either experience or experimentation.
In brief: create a model for how you're going to succeed, break that down into a level of granularity where you can identify critical behaviours, identify where you're facing the most uncertainty, then probe there first. Sounds trickier than it is – if you use Multiverse Mapping it's quite simple.
Uncertainty is not the same as risk – uncertainty is generative, so you'll often get new, exciting ideas by running into the uncertainty. AND you'll also reduce your risk.
And then we kinda debate around how much of the process of Multiverse Mapping can be explicit vs implicit. You do need to create a record for accountability, but don't make the mistake of trying to write down everything. Like all processes that support emergence: it's not that everything will just happen by itself, it's that you make something explicit and you get a happy side effect of updating lots of your tacit (shared) understanding.
And we talk about using your Multiverse Map to set Pivot Triggers, which enable you to talk more strategically with stakeholders.
And so you won't be doing Build > Measure > Learn – you'll be doing all three at the same time.
Finally, we talk about using Multiverse Maps at a higher level of granularity to help you decide between different strategies.
Linky Goodness
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If you're someone who puts ideas out into the world, how do you manage the fact that you change your mind over time? What if someone comes across an article or podcast you no longer agree with and takes the wrong idea from it?
Should you maintain a living knowledge base or leave a trail of past articles like breadcrumbs in the forest?
Does the burden of assessing information fall on the author or the reader?
And what if the problem is that your material references someone who now you realise is not great?
We think through all this and come to a tentative conclusion, for the moment at least.
Linky goodness:
Gaiman's Law:
“Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” – Neil Gaiman
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"Every student is looking for a great teacher. What a lot of students don't realise is that every teacher is looking for a great student." – Ron Leslie
We're talking here about a dance workshop Corissa attended. But really this is about how to seek out and handle feedback in all kinds of situations.
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"We often give building a house as an example of something in the complicated sphere. But then we talked in recent episodes about the nightmare build of the Sydney Opera House – that was complex, but people were treating it like it was complicated. What's the difference? What makes one complicated and one complex? Is it a sliding scale from one to the other? How do you know which realm you're in?"
This broad question comes up a lot when people encounter complexity.
Linky Goodness
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More thoughts from How Big Things Get Done while on the way to brunch.
(You'll need to have listened to part 1 for some of the references in here.)
Linky Goodness
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Tom finally read this book about mega projects and was surprised to find how relevant it was to the kind of work we do.
Including:
Linky goodness
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