You've been told you must transform your business with AI. But you have no budget for consultants, no runway for experiments, and absolutely no permission to fail.

So... what now?

This is the impossible bind facing many executives right now. And spoiler: trying to brute-force it is exactly how you end up as the expendable experiment in someone else's portfolio.

Drawing lessons from electricity infrastructure booms, a hapless lettuce entrepreneur, Tom Chi's plasticine prototypes, and our own white-knuckle cash crisis earlier this year, we explore what actually works when resources are scarce, pressure is high, and the path forward is genuinely uncertain.

Including-but-not-limited-to:

• Complexity of abundance vs complexity of scarcity: why portfolio strategies collapse when you run out of eggs to put in baskets
• The electricity/steam substrate shift: why you can't just "add AI" to your existing factory layout and expect magic
• Why some execs are being set up as expendable experiments in someone else's portfolio ... and how to spot if you're one of them
• Our own near-death cash flow moment, and why we didn't buy any of the blueprints that promised us a solution
• Watchful waiting: the counterintuitive move that actually worked when all we wanted to do was panic
• Why the lettuce man was right but early, which is functionally the same as being wrong
• Tom Chi and the art of radical cheapness: testing Google Glass with plasticine, wire, and half a day
• The oblique AI productivity hack where you get productivity ... but not by trying to be productive
• How to make experiments so cheap that you can afford to throw most of them away
• Testing your core assumptions vs your peripheral ones—why people protect their existential beliefs
• The dangerous middle ground: trying to get early adopter benefits without an early adopter resource cushion
• Why substrate change happens through billions of individual choices, not top-down mandates
• JP Castlin's bind: when your assumptions don't match reality, you can try to change your assumptions or you can try to change reality. Choose wisely.

"If you're really at the point where you've got no resources left, you have to focus on survival first. You can't do transformation when you're in survival mode."

References:

• East of Eden by John Steinbeck (the lettuce carriage story)
• Shape Up by Ryan Singer / Basecamp (fat marker sketches)
• Dave Snowden - Cynefin framework https://cynefin.io/wiki/Cynefin
• Imre Lakatos - philosopher (research programs: core vs peripheral assumptions)
• JP Castlin https://strategyinpraxis.substack.com
• Tom Chi - Google Glass rapid prototyping https://youtu.be/d5_h1VuwD6g
• Rob Snyder - PULL framework, AI note-taker example https://howtogrow.substack.com/p/nobody-wants-ai
• John Cutler & Tom's article about leading in ambiguity https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-274-how-capable-leaders-navigate
• Uncertainty bubbles / The Double Game (deliberate vs emergent strategy)
• Opportunity Method Format (OMF) https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/052-omf-opportunity-method-format
• Multiverse Mapping https://multiversemapping.com
• 4U framework: Unpack, Undergo, Unfold - https://crownandreach.com/#resources
• Obliquity by John Kay
• The Founder (McDonald's kitchen scene) https://youtu.be/F-7cjdtrQ9Y
• Minority Report (gesture interface scenes)
• Episode on Founder Mode / Brat Summer https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/073-brat-summer-for-billionaires
• Episodes 007-009: Pitch Provocations: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae9326

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