Trigger Strategy is now Tentacles

We talk about the fallacy of mindset, and the inevitable failure when you focus on trying to change someone’s mindset. We also consider what you can do instead, including the magic pill test, and changing affordances, assemblages and agency (cf. Dave Snowden). This has been relevant for some recent coaching clients and is a common sticking point in change management work. Trigger Strategy Podcast...

What’s in your head is perfectly clear, but then you have to use a string of words to communicate it to others. And the words can trigger different ideas in their heads. It’s kind of amazing that we can communicate at all! Today we dig into some typical confusions, challenge one “fix” that can feel helpful while actually making things worse, and then suggest a few alternative approaches that reall...

Tom compulsively makes Multiverse Maps in Miro during meetings - and it seems to help people clarify things and take action. Why not put an offer out there to see if more people would like it? We talk about what that was like and challenge you: what could you ship in an hour? Here’s the article we talked about: https://open.substack.com/pub/maybeuseful/p/i-want-to-start-a-business-but-i … and here...

“Slow is smooth; smooth is fast” - we talk about this Marine mantra and how it relates to tunnel vision vs. expanded awareness in our personal and work lives. We’ve found this a transformational lens in our strategy and sense-making work — as well as our personal lives — and we hope you will too. Let us know! Trigger Strategy Podcast has evolved into Tentacles – the podcast from Crown & R...

A Hard Test is when you strip away all the accoutrements of what a product or marketing set up “should” look like, so you can distil out the absolute core. How do customers CHOOSE the value you promise, and how do they USE you to get that value? If that core doesn’t fundamentally work, all the fancy visuals and words in the world won’t help. But if the raw, distilled core works, you can be confide...

What if the theory of change we often try to impose on ourselves and our organisations is actually counterproductive? Is actually blocking what needs to happen for change to occur? We talk about a LinkedIn post Tom shared that stopped Corissa in her tracks, including a story about a woman who found herself giving back borrowed books. Here’s the link to the post, including a trail to get to Nora Ba...

There’s a view of leadership that puts the CEO at the helm, steering the ship with their decisions. This view is becoming seen as “zombie leadership”. There’s another view that the CEO should normally be making no ground-level decisions, only connecting people. The dynamic between decisions and no-decisions varies at different scales of org and in different contexts. That’s what we’re talking abou...

Today, we talk about a course that Tom is putting together in collaboration with Dave Grey’s School of the Possible. It’s very much us figuring things out live, explaining the School and then talking through my aims and ideas for the course. If the course sounds interesting to you, we’d love to chat more and help you figure out if it’ll be a good fit. Trigger Strategy Podcast has evolved into Tent...

What’s the biggest risk you need to tackle for an idea you’re working on right now? Today, we walk you through a quick exercise that will reveal the next step you need to take. This is one of the 54 cards in Innovation Tactics: bit.ly/innovation-10 Trigger Strategy Podcast has evolved into Tentacles – the podcast from Crown & Reach . You can find all our latest episodes here: https://show...

Do you should all over yourself? Do you have unconscious rules for what other people should be doing? Today, we look at where “should” turns up in matters personal and business, with a spotlight on Donald Miller’s Story Brand framework, and a side quest into bloviating YouTubers. Trigger Strategy Podcast has evolved into Tentacles – the podcast from Crown & Reach . You can find all our la...

Off the back of an excellent coaching call, we share one thing we’ve found that makes all the difference for UXRs (and product people in general) who need to sift through mountains of observations to find the insights that matter. In our experience, it’s not enough to have documents or a repo etc. - instead you need to build a model. We talk all about what this might mean for you and some of the p...

In today’s walk, we respond to a question about Cedric Chin’s feisty claim that the “North Star Framework is dumb”: (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cedchin_im-thinking-of-writing-a-follow-up-post-activity-7157641902496870400--59g?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios). One of our friends asked, “is it though? I’ve found North Star metrics to be useful in working with complex adaptive systems - to...

Warning: we lost the little foam hat off the microphone, and this makes wind noise much more audible than usual. If you can cope with the audio, you’ll hear Tom read out an article from 2017 that he no longer fully agrees with. We dive into several related topics around the know-ability of future outcomes, the prevalence of Underpants Gnomes, and our past experiences trying to make stuff better wi...

We’re trying something different in this episode. Tom reads out one of his old articles and we discuss our questions and issues as they arise. The article is an early version of his thinking about Signals, Stories, Options, which we talked about in episode 016. Does he still agree with everything? What would we change now? Can we describe a diagram in audio? If you want to read along with us, the...

Corissa interviews Tom about the Signals > Stories > Options framework that appears (as “Anatomy of an Insight”) in his Innovation Tactics card deck. We get into how the concept of telling more stories can free you in both your personal and work lives and Tom shares some of the people who influenced his thinking as he traveled through the wilderness of narrative fallacy. Trigger Strategy Podcast h...

Everyone knows you should stay out of social media beefs, so we’re going against all common sense and wading in. This showdown between two camps has been a long time coming: should research be democratised, or does that only devalue research? Recently one populariser of democratisation has become a bit of a scapegoat. We think the debate on social media lacks nuance (surprising precisely nobody) a...

What’s an emergent property? We take a tour through this sometimes confusing aspect of complexity theory, sharing some practical examples. Ant hills are emergent, but in a different way from human complex adaptive systems because of the 3 “I”s. We talk about how to manage the evolutionary potential of the present, changing conditions to allow emergence to happen, rather than setting explicit targe...

We share small experiences from our careers that fundamentally changed the way we think about the world. Topics include tacit knowledge, retrospective coherence, the pain and pleasure of glimpsing reality, and the Cynefin framework. And we suggest two tiny little exercises you can try today that might just change you. Dare you to try one! Trigger Strategy Podcast has evolved into Tentacles – ...

Psychological safety has been a bit of a buzz term for years, since Google’s internal research. We talk about what it means in different companies, and our own past experiences. We discuss how it’s not something you can simply choose to have, but an emergent property of many aspects of a given context. What does this mean for fostering psychological safety where you are? You’ll have to listen to f...

Stand ups are common in tech companies, but are often inefficient and confused - often little more than “busyness theatre”. Leaders need to know what’s going on somehow, but stand ups and progress updates are mostly bad ways to achieve this. We talk about the worst stand ups we’ve experienced, and suggest a couple of simple tweaks we’ve used to make stand ups and progress updates way more effectiv...

When do you need to follow the rules and when should you break them? When are rules not rules? We share some experiences from our pasts and talk about how to shape your environment for innovation. 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...

We get practical about how to create your pitch provocations fast and how to write them effectively. Then we talk about what’s next - testing the market, and learning what it’ll really take to deliver. 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...

We pick up from where we left off last time, and talk about what you do once you’ve got some signals from your pitch provocation sessions. Also: how do you find people to do those sessions with, what makes pitch provocations hard, how to work around those mistakes, and how do you know who to listen to? Part 3 coming soon x Trigger Strategy Podcast has evolved into Tentacles – the podcast from...

Many founders think “figure out how to build it, then figure out how to market it” but in our experience, it’s much more effective to move the “figure out how to market it” and do that right away. What founders who do this find is that they quickly get much clearer about what to build (and what not to build) too. And one of the fastest ways we’ve found to do this is using Pitch Provocations as par...

Following on from Tom’s Substack pieces about OKRs, we talk about some of the issues with OKRs, when they can work, and what to do if you’re in a situation where they don’t work but you have to use them anyway. 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 inf...