Tentacles - the podcast from Crown & Reach

Why does the same uncertainty make one team lean in and another freeze?

We think it comes down to budget. Every organisation can only absorb so much uncertainty before it stops feeling like opportunity and starts feeling like a threat. And over the past couple of years, a lot of that budget has been gobbled up by stuff that nobody actively chose.

Prompted by an email from Brian, one of our research interviewees, we unpack the idea of uncertainty budgets. Recorded with one eye on the baby monitor and then with the baby on a lap (transfixed by our microphone's big furry hat).

• The tipping point where uncertainty flips from anxiety into curiosity, and why chopping uncertainty into chunks can help
• The uncertainty tax: where your budget has gone these last couple of years, and why copying everyone else’s AI strategy is the corporate version of hiding in the herd
• The experiment that made millions and got the programme shut down – and where the org's uncertainty budget was really going
• Why good management and good innovation are quietly at war in every organisation
• The one thing leaders say about ambiguity that makes everything worse
• How a leader can "take out a loan" on uncertainty, and what they have to put up as collateral

For anyone who’s been told to “get comfortable with ambiguity” and suspected that was missing the point.

Got a better word than “bubble”? Or a story about where your uncertainty budget went? [email protected]

One correction: IBM didn’t make loom kit. Its punch cards came via Herman Hollerith’s census tabulators, which borrowed the idea from the Jacquard loom. It's the same point we were making but one step further back in time.

References

• Brian – research interviewee who prompted the episode
• Pitch Provocations – our method, which we're currently running on ourselves
• Multiverse Mapping – our method that can slice anxiety-inducing uncertainty into budget-friendly chunks
• Uncertainty budget
• Uncertainty tax versus deliberate investment
• Uncertainty Bubble / Uncertainty Membrane
• Risk appetite, risk tolerance and risk capacity
• The distinction between risk and uncertainty
• Cranfield School of Management (where we presented our experiment)
• Clayton Christensen's The Innovator’s Dilemma
• [Unmentioned, but Frank Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit is the classic source for the risk/uncertainty distinction]
• Episode 103, “Competence, control and consequences”, tells the experimentation-shutdown story in full.

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

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Someone in Coffee & Complexity Club asked: isn't this Uncertainty Bubbles "double game" thing basically just lying? You tell the organisation one story about your project and run a completely different one inside it. Where exactly is the ethical line? Shouldn't you be honest about the work and let the chips fall where they may?

It's a fair question, we're no fans of dishonesty here. So we wandered up a hill with a sleeping baby to figure out what we actually meant. We started with a bit of Emily Dickinson and ended up somewhere we didn't expect. The storytelling turns out to be necessary, and exactly as honest as any project update you've ever written. It just isn't the point.

Including:

• Why you can't logic anyone into anything, and what to do instead of trying harder
• The moment Corissa realised there is no unbiased version of any story, ever, and why that just kinda dissolved the ethical problem, rather than excusing it
• Radical honesty with a three-year-old around Santa Claus ... and the risk of being chased out of Bournemouth with pointed sticks
• The two-prong barbell: how to report on your most certain work and your most uncertain work at the same time, and why the mushy middle in between is where projects go to fester
• Why the point of a bubble isn't what you're allowed to get away with inside it, but is to do with the tempo you get to run at inside it
• "If you think it'll take two weeks, give the team two days" ... plus the very important caveat that stops this being the cruel fake deadline
• Two days, zero budget, and no app: how a Google Form, a WhatsApp group and no code at all were the forcing function we needed and enabled way more learning than more sprints of building a "better" app

Mild spoiler warning for anyone listening with small people: we are frank about Santa.

This one's for anyone who's been told to just stick to the plan, but has a sneaking suspicion that the plan is part of the problem.

Send us your uncertainty bubbles, your radical repurposing stories, and your corrections about the Soviet lunar programme: [email protected]

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

References

• Emily Dickinson, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (c. 1868)
• Corissa's poetry — Old Lollipops: micropoems in 140 characters or less https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B077JJWJDR
• 4U + CPT Cheat Sheet — how to communicate progress from inside an uncertainty bubble https://crownandreach.com/#resources
• Uncertainty bubbles and the double game — Ep 145: What Xerox PARC actually got wrong https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/6a158e1e6ee822cbfbf36be0
• Coffee & Complexity Club — our Friday morning sessions, where this question came from https://luma.com/stepscollective
• Unpack, undergo, unfold — Ep 112: Unpacking, unleashing, and unfolding and Ep 113: Unpack unleash unfold part 2 — the unfoldening https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/685ffe34081ac1df5d8cb371 | https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/686d37638d3d6839f4949285
• Cynefin https://cynefin.io/wiki/Cynefin

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Tom's worst ever DJ set was one where he followed the "rules" most carefully.

His best was the one where he stopped trying.

And the difference relates to why many teams can do all the right exploratory work and still discover nothing useful.

In this one we wander through DJing for swing dancers as a sort of live complexity practice, and then we crowbar lessons from rooms full of dancers into the world of work, where people dance around strategic bets.

• The high profile gig that went so wrong because Tom was trying so hard to get it right
• "Find the pocket": how to tune into a room's tempo, and why Herräng's pocket ran twenty BPM faster than Bournemouth's
• What changes when you stop treating your heuristics as a through line and start treating them as a fence
• Exploration that isn't exploratory: doing all the "correct" discovery work but playing it way too safe
• Why you can't rationalise your way into anything interesting, and why so much of business is pretending that's what you did
• Whether a team can have a collective gut, or whether it needs something external to hand it weird options
• Plus: the MAYA principle, survivorship bias, Alfred Nobel, and Britney

Please share your stories of rules well broken: [email protected]

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

References

• Herräng Dance Camp, Sweden https://www.herrang.com
• Angela Andrew — Tom's teacher and mentor, legendary dancer and artist
• Alfred Nobel's Vinterviken dynamite works outside Stockholm, venue for The Snowball event mentioned
• The MAYA principle (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) by Raymond Loewy
• The waggle dance and the ~20% of bees that ignore it, see Episode 044: The one with the bees https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/044-the-one-with-the-bees
• Previous episode on protocols was 134: The Protocol Problem part 1 – Geoff's shadow spreadsheet sprawl https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/696fea603738e9e7d196e2f5
• Multiverse Mapping — https://multiversemapping.com

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We ran our own method on ourselves, and it told us the word we'd built everything on was the wrong one. Four research calls in, the transcripts showed us that "positioning" probably isn't our positioning.

That's exactly what our method is for, and exactly what nobody loves experiencing when it works.

This one is part two of our series where we're dogfooding Pitch Provocations. Another walk, in the rain, with our three-month-old strapped on, plenty of detours and a little bit of chunder.

We talk through what the first four sessions are doing to our assumptions, what we're tearing up before the next round, and why the process works.

• Why the first few research calls are for tuning the instrument
• One finding that came up in every single interview: everyone knows what positioning means, and everyone assumes their colleagues don't
• Why nobody ever asks to be more adaptive – no matter how badly they need to
• What one participant said they actually really wanted, even while admitting it's not possible
• The meeting that repeats, where everybody furiously agrees a decision must be made and no decision ever sticks
• Alignment as a single line to march along, versus two lines with room to move in between (with a nod to JP Castlin)
• The epiphany turns up in the shower three days later, not on your planned schedule

Drop us a note at [email protected] with your thoughts on how you'd sell us if you were us — and yes, if you give us something useful, there's an octopus drawing in it for you. (We know we know, still your beating hearts).

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

References

Brian David Hall — thought partner on shaping the provocations

J P Castlin, friend of Tentacles, and his alignment as a single line versus two boundaries https://strategyinpraxis.substack.com

The 4U process: Unpack, Undergo, Unfold Uncertainty — https://crownandreach.com/#resources

Vision chasm https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/tumbling-into-the-vision-chasm-part

Unpacking Pitch Provocations https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/68e3e847d17b81f346e7b927

Dogfooding Pitch Provocations, part 1 https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/6a914b54ae4f28333652ada4

The backcasting episode https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/6a7ae678616564bf00d5d5a5

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What can a fictional, addicted, borderline-unbearable doctor show us about stalled strategy projects?

When we have a small baby, our TV diet needs to be relatively unchallenging, and we recently rediscovered House. And got talking about how their "differential diagnosis" — that whiteboard full of things the disease might be — is basically our Signals > Stories > Options stuff but with apparent misanthropy and a gammy leg.

In this one we feel our way through what happens when you stop trying to be right and start trying to be interestingly wrong. Featuring split-brain patients, a red herring tomato sauce, and tfw a video camera destroys all your assumptions about how you're dancing.

• Why the first story you settle on almost always blinds you to everything else
• Why "the problem is a lack of X" is smuggling in a pre-determined solution. Dig more ("imagine you have X, now what happens?")
• Performative ideation and how to tell the difference between a real differential and people making noises in a workshop
• Everybody lies, and it's often got nothing to do with active dishonesty
• The illusion of explanatory depth ... go on then, you draw a bicycle from memory and see how you get on
• Knowledge shields and the painful, essential, wondrous experience of watching yourself on video

For anyone who's ever sat in a meeting where everyone's certain and the ideas feel like they're on predetermined rails.

References

• House M.D. (TV series) Dr Gregory House, played by Hugh Laurie; Dr Wilson as the Watson figure
• Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle, cited as House's explicit origin
• Signals > Stories > Options — Crown & Reach method — https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/signals-stories-options
• Gary Klein's Data/Frame model of sensemaking; expert vs. novice pattern recognition
• First-fit pattern matching, attributed to Klein in the episode; more commonly Snowden's framing
• Knowledge shields, a concept from naturalistic decision-making; source is Accelerated Expertise (Hoffman, Feltovich, Klein, Klein, Andrews, Fiore, Moon)
• Adam Mastroianni's Experimental History, nice examples of the illusion of explanatory depth https://www.experimental-history.com/p/underrated-ideas-in-psychology
• The illusion of explanatory depth, including the toilet study (Rozenblit & Keil) and the draw-a-bicycle test (Rebecca Lawson)
• Split-brain research – corpus callosum severance, confabulation across hemispheres (Michael Gazzaniga's work, though not named in the episode)
• Matt Lerner, friend of Tentacles, ran an experiment on AI-generated marketing suggestions for Lindy Hop https://www.systm.co/post/can-chatgpt-replace-customer-interviews
• Marks & Spencer Collection olive oil ice cream — unsponsored, regrettably
• Lindy Hop — our dance practice, video-recording story

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We sell a method for getting teams unstuck on positioning.

We've been stuck on our own positioning for years.

At some point the two must collide.

We've tried to run our method on ourselves before and it was hard. So this time we roped in a dear friend to run the process on us. Properly this time. We recorded the debrief while walking along with our two-month-old strapped to Tom's chest. This is all about workshop number one out of two: this is the "introspection" part, before any of the awkward conversations with strangers have happened.

Including-but-not-limited-to:

• Why our first attempt at this failed, and the frustrating difference between people who find your method interesting and people who have the problem it solves
• An offhand comment from someone we asked for a referral that changed our conception of who the buyer might be
• "Go-to-market hell" ... the phrase a stranger handed us to describe eighteen months of a large company's very expensive work
• Why at leat half the value of the process comes from stuff that's not officially part of the process
• What we noticed about every business disagreement we've witnessed ... and why arguing about the data will never fix it
• Whether something that's not a turnkey process can be taught, including Dave Snowden's plastering story
• When did rules stop being judgement calls? We waddle off on a little detour into the surprising history of rule as hard-and-fast line
• Picking at a scab that isn't quite ready to come off (Something you want to think about? No. But is it a good analogy? Also no.)

For anyone who sells a method they've never quite managed to point at themselves.

Recorded while walking, featuring occasional wildlife a small human.

References

• Brian David Hall — facilitated the introspection workshop, and the episode's original audience
• Ben Sauer — "you make it feel safe for people to be wrong"
• Innovation Tactics by Tom — https://pipdecks.com/products/innovation-tactics (currently out of stock at time of recording)
• Dave Gray's Gamestorming for the importance of opening and closing the game https://gamestorming.com/
• Dave Snowden's ASHEN (Artefacts, Skills, Heuristics, Experience, Natural talent) https://cynefin.io/wiki/ASHEN
• Douglas Adams' sentient puddle https://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/
• C. Thi Nguyen's books Games: Agency as Art and The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game (correction: The Score is the synthesis of the games/metrics tension, not a separate third book)
• The illusion of explanatory depth (Rozenblit & Keil)
• Pitch Provocations / the Innovation Positioning Sprint — Crown & Reach
• The ASHEN episode — https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/071-granularity-part-1-decomposing-people-via-ashen
• The heuristics vs rules episode — https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae9323

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A quick request: we're running our own method on ourselves, and we want to speak with marketing leaders: marketing directors, VPs of marketing, CMOs, and anyone else who's trying to position or launch a new business line. No selling, just a listening tour! Participants usually find the conversation somewhere between enjoyable and cathartic. If you know someone, please take 2 mins and introduce us: [email protected] – or share this episode :D

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Your new product or service is nearly working. But it's not quite there and you need to know WHY. So you do the responsible thing: user research. And everyone tells you the same two things: "it's not differentiated enough" and "have you considered adding more colours?"

Everyone's right that something's wrong, but everyone's wrong about why. So now what?

Recorded on a windy Bournemouth beach (with a windy baby asleep between us), this one's a debrief from a workshop we ran with a client. We walk from the classic usability-research dead end to the full mechanics of a Pitch Provocations sprint, including a new element of the sprint that we'll definitely be using again.

Incluuuding:

• Why products can use the same two reproduction strategies as nature
• The analyst trap, where school taught you there's always a right answer, but it fails you when novelty matters
• "It's like having someone else's thinking running through your own brain", the workshop moment a CEO called out, and why forcing execs to sit in silence reading transcripts is weirdly addictive ... for us but probably also for them
• Pre-registering intuitions: the new twist that shows a team how their own minds changed before and after exposure to the data
• How to secretly dissolve the classic "my idea vs your idea" stalemate without anyone losing face or getting butthurt
• None of your current ideas will be the one that works, but you gotta hurry up and test them anyway
• It's all about the Uncertainty Bubble: temporary rules, taboo behaviours, and reintegration

This is for anyone whose product or service is stuck at "nearly there", especially if you're frustrated that your research keeps telling you it's broken but not what to do about that.

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

References

• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• r/K selection theory (the "K versus L" moment) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
• The secretary problem / optimal stopping (the "ignore the first 30" rule) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
• Neil Gaiman on feedback: "when people tell you something's wrong… they are almost always right; when they tell you exactly how to fix it, they are almost always wrong"
• The "starving crowd" idea that's usually attributed to Gary Halbert though we didn't name him
• The adjacent possible, attributed to Stuart Kauffman, though we didn't name him either, oops
• Multiple parallel safe-to-fail probes is a Dave Snowden concept, where safe-to-fail and parallel are both vital
• Robert Walters case study https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/l14lgb5wpesqefksaxscw/Robert-Walters-Case-Study.pdf?rlkey=mkycy26n6rm7h7gtdd5h65hmd&dl=0
• Pitch Provocations — episodes 007–009 https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy
• Uncertainty bubbles https://reach.crownandreach.com/posts/uncertainty-bubbles

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A friend of the podcast got hired to run a facilitation: "vision on day one, backcasting on day two."

He asked Tom for tips on backcasting workshops. Tom rolled up his sleeves and out fell a number of beefs.

In this one we walk through why visions and step-by-step plans keep falling apart, and how to smuggle something that actually works into a workshop that's already been sold as backcasting.

Including:

• Why the first hour of every exec visioning workshop is people scrawling "seamless interactive experience" on every sticky note
• Our many beefs with backcasting (assumption of linear cause and effect being only the first)
• Sidecasting, and the curious joy of paying attention to the evolutionary potential of the present rather than gazing forwards or backwards
• Jabe Bloom's "Ideal Present" 2x2, plus an extra scaffolding step Tom adds so people don't freeze like deer in headlights
• Why your organisation's "maladaptive" behaviours are actually adaptive (you just don't like them)
• The rule that makes it all work: you're not allowed to throw future you under the bus
• Why a strategic plan is really a holiday brochure

For anyone who's ever been asked to deliver a vision on day one and a plan on day two — and suspects neither will survive contact with reality.

Get in touch: [email protected]

References

• Dr Jabe Bloom's Ideal Present, explained by Ben Mosior https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19KUsV_qeyk
• Pavel Samsonov's recent piece on vision workshops and the ubiquitous "interactive experience" sticky note https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/ai-is-not-the-future-of-software-development-but-the-last-dying-gasp-of-the-past
• Dave Snowden — Estuarine Mapping: https://cynefin.io/wiki/Estuarine_framework
• Stafford Beer — POSIWID ("the purpose of a system is what it does")
• The Serenity Prayer (Reinhold Niebuhr)
• Intro to Multiverse Mapping: https://youtu.be/577_CXCfHMI?si=NhgLcF4KqL0n2VN7

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What does a six-year-old cartoon dog have to do with a maverick fighter pilot's theory of strategy?

In this one we feel our way through two theories of how humans create knowledge — David Deutsch's collaborative "Taking Children Seriously" and John Boyd's adversarial OODA loop — and discover that Bluey's dad needed both, and had neither.

From bath-time burger shops to spitting toddlers, we try to work out when to problem-solve with people and when to (gently, lovingly) run rings around them.

• Why Bandit got comprehensively outsmarted by a 6 year old in a bathtub
• The radical parenting philosophy that works beautifully right up until your toddler wants to run into a road
• How a fighter pilot reverse-engineered his own brilliance (and why he loved discovering he was wrong)
• Is deception a necessary ingredient of all strategy? Tom didn't want it to be. He's coming round.
• The "playing the opposite" move that turned a spitting contest into the best half hour of the day
• Can you be collaborative one minute and Boydian the next without it becoming good cop, bad cop with your own family?
• Green blackberries, apples under car wheels, and where exactly the boundary sits

For anyone who's ever tried to reason with a toddler, a colleague, or an entire leadership team — and wondered why what it said in the book didn't work.

Can you wield both approaches without gaslighting everyone? Drop us a line: [email protected]

• Bluey — "Burger Shop" episode (Season 2) https://www.bluey.tv/watch/season-2/burger-shop/
• Taking Children Seriously — Sarah Fitz-Claridge & David Deutsch https://takingchildrenseriously.com
• Karl Popper — fallibilism and falsifiability
• John Boyd — the OODA loop, Energy-Manoeuvrability theory, and his paper "Destruction and Creation" (1976)
• Sun Tzu — The Art of War
• Carl von Clausewitz
• Gödel's incompleteness theorems and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (Boyd's source material)
• Mia Wisinski — Playful Heart Parenting ("playing the opposite") https://www.playfulheartparenting.com
• Immanuel Kant — the categorical imperative
• Red Dwarf — Lister on the real lesson of the Trojan horse
• Taskmaster — the lolly-licking task (trigger warning: don't look up that clip. Or do.)
• The Matrix — bullet time

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More apps are shipping to the app stores, but the same number of apps are getting downloaded.

In this one we're pushing a pram round Bournemouth with a one-month-old and making sense of the current AI moment — from the slop machine that online advertising has become to why the big frontier model bet may have misfired, and what a walking creature that just falls over can teach us about software development.

We feel our way through some stuff:

* "Trend slop" ... how every frontier AI model tends to give you the same strategic advice regardless of context (and what does change its answer — infuriatingly)

* Why running a team of AI agents is starting to sound suspiciously like managing that guy from Memento

* The harness that matters more than the model — and why the frontier model arms race may have already peaked

* "Boring tiny tools": the overlooked category of software that now makes sense to build (until the pricing changed)

* What an evolutionary algorithm that learned to just fall over reveals about agentic engineering realities

* Why growing software might be better than thinking we can build it

Jus' tryna think clearly about AI and block out all the hype and panic.

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

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