Being strategic sounds like it should be serious business. It turns out the seriousness can be exactly what gets in the way.

Following on from episode 136, Tom and Corissa pick up a listener thread about strategy being a zero-sum status game at the company level — then take a sharp left turn into why most people are stuck in exactly the wrong zone for doing anything useful with uncertainty.

The conversation weaves together Lindy Hop, improv theatre, Pitch Provocations, and a fairly bleak observation about time — into something unexpectedly practical.

• The barbell approach to play: why chronic 6/7 stress is actually the worst place to be for innovation, and what the 0 and 10 extremes have in common
• Why "just be more playful" is almost as useless as "just be more strategic" — and practical stuff you can do instead
• Uncertainty bubbles: how to artificially impose the right kind of pressure so that different things can emerge
• Front-loading the nightmare — and why Pitch Provocations deliberately generates high-signal feedback when everything is still wrong
• The hidden cost of over-investing before you've tested: stress that balloons, sunk costs, and projects that polish the wrong thing
• Why improv, Lindy Hop, and safe-to-fail experiments are the same muscle — and how to build it somewhere low-stakes first
• Strategy as fractal: you don't need "strategy" in your job title to be doing more of it right now

For anyone who suspects the rules they're playing by are made up — and wants somewhere safe to test that hypothesis.

Drop us a line: [email protected]

References and links:

• Episode 136: When they tell you to 'be more strategic' (but not what that actually means) https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/698de53934f221647e8927ea
• Donald Cox – friend of Tentacles who shared the point that there's only a little strategy at any one time at the company level
• Viktor Frankl — Man's Search for Meaning
• Dave Snowden — stress, innovation, and exaptation
• Memento Mori
• Internal locus of control
• Pitch Provocations method (episodes 007–009 for intro)
• Uncertainty bubbles — Crown & Reach concept, find out more when we share at https://reach.crownandreach.com
• Multiverse Mapping — https://multiversemapping.com
• Angie Lina — improv teacher and strategy/sense-making practitioner, former LSE Lindy Hop student

Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com

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