Trigger Strategy is now Tentacles

The world of digital/tech is going through "a moment" just now at the end of 2024. And we've launched a project to share and explore diverse perspectives from across the tech world, using a particular tool and methodology called SenseMaker. The goal is to showcase the diverse range of perspectives and stories of the moment in a way that's normally impossible. Some topics: Why is Tom so excited abo...

We talk about a question posed in Innovation Tactics Slack - about a stakeholder who’s skeptical that design research can help with genuine innovation, and wants to create speculative use cases instead. Topics we touch on: Are speculative use cases a "thing"? Is it helpful to imagine people doing something that's just not happening today? Like, 500 years ago, nobody got their shoelace trapped...

In the last episode, we introduced Rob Snyder's framing of finding your repeatable case study instead of building your tech product. This time, we step back into the Pain Cave to talk through some of the criticisms that Rob (and we) often face when we suggest the approach we do. We think they're misunderstandings of what we're advocating, but they're also sound points. First, we consider the...

Welcome to listeners who've been referred by Rob Snyder of Path to Product Market Fit! In this episode, we talk about Rob Snyder's core ideas for founders and consider the interplay with our thinking. As ever, you'll hear some stories from our pasts, some methods to try, and some background noises from blustery Bournemouth. Why no, you can't break down your idea into a set of clean hypotheses to "...

Survivorship bias is unavoidable. By default, we see what survives and not what doesn't. This is OK but it creates the risk that we take the wrong lessons from the survivors. In this episode, we talk about how we might mitigate the downsides of survivorship bias. We touch on a bunch of topics: rejecting simplistic Sinekisms theory-informed praxis, rather than copy-pasting patterns across contexts...

We recorded this one on a whim and we didn't have our microphone with a little hat on it, so the wind noise makes a guest appearance. Apologies – return to quality sound soon. Corissa grabbed a snippet from an article: Over at one of my favourite blogs, Common Cog, Cedric Chin writes that there is a style of thinking that is reliably exhibited by successful entrepreneurs. It is called effectual th...

A live thinking through of the next chunk in our series of articles about the Vision Chasm – that gulf between the glorious future people are talking about and the reality of where you are today. In this episode we look at situations where a Vision is unreachable because it's actually deceptive – either deliberate deception to keep everyone looking the other way while people deploy a secret strate...

All credit to friend of the pod Pete Shaw for the "Founder mode sounds like brat summer" observation. Founder Mode triggered a beefstorm on LinkedIn, so we take a little stroll around the topic and share our takes. 3 parts nuance, 2 parts spicy, 1 long run-on sentence where Tom gets lost and forgets what he was trying to say. Topics include alignment, coherence, intuition, taste and more. Referenc...

In this episode, we zoom back in time to a situation when a load of meetings were frustrating people at this one company. Tom used Snowmobiling with a small team to break down the meetings into smaller pieces and then remix those pieces in a new way. We share some of the details and pitfalls along the way. This same decompose/recombine approach can be used in lots of different situations where you...

Today, we start by adding some corrections to terminology we used in episode 70, which will be confusing if you haven't listened to that one. But it doesn't take long, and then we get into our main topic, which is granularity. When you work with too coarse a granularity, you can find yourself stuck or confused about what to do. When you work with too fine a granularity, you can quickly find yourse...

Q. What do these three situations have in common? Taking a friend for a lobster dinner, business strategy workshops, and personal coaching. A. They all feature in this episode as examples of how constraints, constructors and actants play out. The main chunk of this session is us talking through Tom's personal experience being 1:1 coached using Estuarine Mapping. We found this enormously enlighteni...

In which we coin the word "bungus" ... If you've ever complained about misalignment, or rallied people with the cry that "we need to get aligned", then this one's for you. Of course the feeling of alignment is a pleasant one, but what if you're in one of the situations where seeking alignment is actually hurting you? Corissa and Tom unpack the concept of alignment, including some discussion about...

In which Corissa and Tom explore more nuances and wrinkles to do with vision and strategy, with examples, metaphors and practical tips. Trigger Strategy Podcast has evolved into Tentacles – the podcast from Crown & Reach . You can find all our latest episodes here: https://shows.acast.com/tentacles ... and more information about our work and resources at crownandreach.com ... and you can...

Tom had a coaching call with someone who had been on the hook to run a one day workshop. A one day workshop that was expected to both work as a team building exercise AND deliver a complete new concept to go ahead and build. And it was sorta vague what that concept would be. What could go wrong? Sometimes, you can get a clear, crispy brief. But often, you can't. It's more of an "I'll know it when...

This is one of our "thinking about things in real time" episodes. Tom & Corissa talk through the next part of the Vision Chasm blog series. For nearly an hour! We talk about when visions are good actually, as well as when they aren't, and when we could hold many visions lightly instead. And we explore the challenges of doing that. We look at the squickiness of emergent strategy through lots of...

When something that starts small becomes bigger and bigger, we can lose sight of what we were trying to do in the first place. We talk through some examples: from workshops, from designing flyers for dance classes, and from Lego bridges. The trick is subtraction. The knack is knowing what to subtract. "When putting on accessories, take off the last thing you've put on." – Coco Chanel Trigger...

Tom & Corissa talk about how understanding and tackling problems requires more than just a linear approach, like is often inferred through something like the Double Diamond. A bunch of metaphors, real world examples and other fun in this one. We also offer practical tips for engaging with solution-oriented colleagues and suggest some methods and recipes to see and solve more problems different...

We talk about the good and the bad sides of stress. We tend to treat stress as a negative, but sometimes stress is helpful, and sometimes you want to provoke stress deliberately. But be careful. References: Happiness Lab with Dr Laurie Santos The Experience Machine by Andy Clark Estuarine Mapping – find links and resources at triggerstrategy.com That clip from Apollo 13: https://youtu.be/ry55--J4_...

We explore the story of a classic zombie project: where the team had the evidence they needed to know that a project was doomed, but carried on with it for 6 months anyway. These happen all the time , and we spend a few minutes unpacking the dynamics behind the trap. We also share some thoughts for how to ease open the jaws of the trap. We also reference Annie Duke's book Quit And Set Your First P...

Strap in for some high-quality sleep deprived thinking out loud. We talk about the standard approach towards vision and strategy in organisations, and we challenge it. With some stories of past triumphs and pratfalls based on setting vision and suggest of alternative ways to go about Doing Strategy. We refer to some LinkedIn posts during this chat ... here they are! Dr Jabe Bloom's post: https://w...

Today, we talk about the appendix, fences, SaaS for lawyers, putting Shoggoth in a box ... and more. Some links we mentioned: Why aren't smart people happier and how that relates to well-defined problems: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/why-arent-smart-people-happier Explainer on LLMs and why they probably won't take your job: https://cyberneticforests.substack.com/p/a-hallucinogenic-compen...

This one's quite focused on business and building products ... OR IS IT? In this one we respond to a question that Tom's received from several people recently. We'll call one of them Dave. Dave has a friend who has a big product idea they want to build, or big business project they want to do. The plan Dave's friend has landed on is to do the whole thing (how hard can it be anyway?) and then recei...

This is kind of a follow-up to our previous episode that was recorded before the UX London conference. With the whirlwind of travel and baby-care, this was the first chance Tom & Corissa have really had to talk about the conference, and we captured it for the podcast too. In our longest episode yet, we touch on Pitch Provocations, Multiverse Mapping, Zenko Mapping, rewilding, research reposito...

This is one of those where you walk along with Tom and Corissa while we're trying to figure something out. This time, Tom's giving a conference talk next week (which is last week from the podcast's perspective). He knows what he's talking about, but there's TOO MUCH of it! We try to figure out the one point he wants to make and why someone should care. Do we manage to tame this unruly topic or doe...

Tom saw a discussion on LinkedIn about why Cynefin hasn't caught on in some scenes. One take was that it's the "academic, technical" language that puts people off. Corissa has lots of experience of the power of simplifying your language from her background in copywriting, and especially usability testing her copy. On the other hand, weird new words can provoke weird new ways of thinking ... but it...