Hands up, who else loves a spot of brand-flavoured navel-gazing? 

Two years ago we picked the company name Trigger Strategy Group in a last-minute scramble for our first client project. The name has, shall we say, one or two issues. (On the upside, it was a perfect example of Hard Test Easy Life: if you can make something work despite its flaws, you know you might be onto something.) But it was about time we gave things some proper thought.

• How naming a company in 20 minutes can haunt you for 2 years
• The surprising violence baked into “trigger strategy” (thanks, game theory)
• The difference between command, control, and cephalopods
• What bees, psychiatric hospitals, and chatGPT have in common

In short, our company is now called Crown & Reach, and our podcast is called Tentacles.

Why? To find out, you'll have to listen...

References:

• Hard Test Easy Life https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/stop-polishing-turd-products-with
• Innovation Tactics Pip Deck https://pipdecks.com/products/innovation-tactics
• Dave Kang's Octopus Life https://davekang.substack.com/
• Taylorism - Frederick Taylor’s scientific management model
• Coherent Heterogeneity, a concept from complexity thinking https://cynefin.io/wiki/Common_fallacies
• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith
• Crown & Reach Website https://crownandreach.com/

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In which we sit in the garden, roast gently in the sun, and talk about cognitive biases, Panglossian optimism, Russian roulette, snakes on planes, and why most design is... fine actually. A very one-take kind of episode. Leaf-in-coffee energy throughout.

• Confirmation bias affects individuals. But if you want to harm an entire organisation, you need validation.
• You can be right, they can be right, or (more likely) you’re both missing something and a third way exists.
• Heuristics are usually good. It’s when you step into a new context that they betray you.
• Change start with acceptance. Weirdly, that’s when things can shift.
• Almost everything on our shelves is poorly designed in some way ... and yet it’s still there.

Links, Ideas, and People Referenced

• Gary Klein – firefighter heuristic/pattern recognition story – more at https://youtu.be/QKpMLYwLRR4?si=8ie9txFbL__Q88gI
• Daniel Kahneman – cognitive biases, focusing illusion
• Nora Bateson – snake instinct, context-specific intuition
• XKCD’s "10,000" Comic – https://xkcd.com/1053/
• Taylor Pearson on Ergodicity – https://taylorpearson.me/ergodicity/
• Prisoner's Dilemma – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
• Candide by Voltaire – Dr. Pangloss and "all for the best" satire
• Gary’s Economics (YouTube) – https://www.youtube.com/@garyseconomics
• Oliver Burkeman – stress, lateness, perspective
• 10–10–10 Rule – “Will I care in 10 minutes, 10 months, 10 years?”

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You were hired to fix it. You did! Customers are happier. The company made millions. Your reward? They shut it all down.

We sit on a garden bench and talk about those times when you feel like you're being punished for doing your job well.

It turns out you can't mostly change a narrative with data. Your choices are power, influence, or acceptance.

We share real stories, reflect on past mistakes, and explore safer (?) ways to inspire change when truth-telling gets you sidelined. Along the way: multiverse mapping, toddler psychology, and why the best performing landing pages often don't stay live.

Books & Articles:

• Stealing the Corner Office by Brendan Reid
• Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t by Jeffrey Pfeffer
• Why Design is Hard by Scott Berkun
• Why Your Org Doesn’t Want Optimization to Succeed by Andrew Anderson
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Ramit Sethi’s framing: “If someone is succeeding doing something that looks stupid… what do they know that I don’t?”

Frameworks & Tools:

• “Show the thing to change the thing” – concept from John Willshire
• Wardley Mapping
• Multiverse Mapping (Trigger Strategy Substack)
• Play the hand you're dealt – "Don't start with what you want people to do. Start with what people want to do." – Dave Trott

Character References:

• Wormtongue and Gandalf (Lord of the Rings) – models of influence

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While sipping homegrown bay leaf tea, we explore how road signs, surprises, and deliberate confusion can unlock better thinking.

From missing signs under railway bridges to the tangled journey of Google Glass, we trace how aporia — the ancient art of being productively confused — can help you build faster, align better, and see the hidden struggles that are gonna derail your projects.

• Why some signs should disappear to make things flow better
• How "productive confusion" can trigger better decision making
• What Google Glass, magic roundabouts, and fast food kitchens have in common
• How to rapid prototype a billion-dollar product... with clay and wire
• The curse of "pseudolignment" and how to catch it before it wrecks your team
• The Align-o-matic: an emerging tool to help you spot hidden assumptions early

Linky goodness:

• Magic Roundabout (Swindon, UK): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon)
• "A symphony of efficiency, not a waste of motion" from The Founder: https://youtu.be/F-7cjdtrQ9Y?si=3eyzPlVq71Ws-R8o
• Tom Chi rapid prototyping: https://youtu.be/d5_h1VuwD6g?si=h29WjP8xvX3vxPak
• Rory Sutherland on defensive decision-making: https://fs.blog/defensive-decision-making/
• Zeigarnik Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik_effect
• We may have confused Zeigarnik with Ovsiankina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovsiankina_effect

Innovation Tactics cards we mentioned:

• Language Market Fit: front | back
• Solve for Distribution: front | back
• Hard Test Easy Life: front | back
• Time Machine: front | back

Get your copy of Innovation Tactics: https://pipdecks.com/products/innovation-tactics

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We often talk about things being emergent in business, strategy, and life at large. 

The problem is, emergence can be kind of a pain to wrap your head around. And we were wondering: what if the starting point is what's NOT emergent? Does that help clarify what IS emergent?

So we sat down in the garden and chatted it through. 

We landed on the discipline of conversion rate optimisation as an example of a business area where an understanding of emergence (and its opposite, if you could call it that) is fundamental to success or failure.

Our conclusion was that it was indeed a helpful conversation, but we want to know – what do you think?

Linky goodness:

• Andrew Anderson's website: https://testingdiscipline.com/
• Andrew Anderson's story about Comic Sans: https://cxl.com/blog/organizational-push-back/
• Dave Snowden and Cynefin: https://cynefin.io/wiki/Cynefin
• Signals, Stories, Options: https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/signals-stories-options
• Pivot Triggers: card front | back
• Multiverse Mapping: card front | back
• Tom's Pip Decks card deck, Innovation Tactics: https://pipdecks.com/products/innovation-tactics
• Master Multiverse Mapping (online course): https://multiversemapping.com/
• Episode 39 about Bounded Applicability https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae9306

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We made it to 100!

Corissa and Tom look back over the year and a bit of podcasting and talk about what they've learned, some anecdotes, and some highlight episodes from along the way. They talk about allowing something to unfold into what it's meant to be, rather than trying to force a specific framework or result.

Expect some of the usual themes: constraints, complexity, experimentation and psychology. And shout outs to Anna Brook, Louis Childs, Paul Tevis and all our lovely listeners.

Linky goodness:

• Visakan Veerasamy's Do 100 Thing: https://www.visakanv.com/blog/do100things/
• Venkatesh Rao's Portals and flags: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/06/25/portals-and-flags/
• Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework: https://cynefin.io/wiki/Cynefin
• Henrik Karlsson's Unfolding: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/unfolding
• Tom in JP Castlin's Strategy in Praxis: https://strategyinpraxis.substack.com/p/triggers-and-pivots

Episodes mentioned:

006: OKRs, moon landings and oil fires: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae9327

018: a blustery annotated reading - A/B testing ain’t for settling your disagreements: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae931b

019: North Star Metrics and Framework - are they “dumb”?: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae931a

032: How Capable Leaders Navigate Uncertainty and Ambiguity - an annotated reading - Part 1: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae930d

039: Bounded Applicability: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae9306

040: Why isn’t [Role] doing what I think they should?: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae9305

043: Do 100 Thing: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/043-do-100-thing

044: The one with the bees: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/044-the-one-with-the-bees

053: Smell the roses: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/053-smell-the-roses

058: Reflections from UX London: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/058-reflections-from-ux-london

060: Chesterton's vestigial doorman: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/060-chestertons-vestigial-doorman

061: Tumbling into the Vision Chasm: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/061-tumbling-into-the-vision-chasm

069: The alignment problem (not the AI alignment problem): https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/069-the-alignment-problem-not-the-ai-alignment-problem

070: Lobster dinner with a toddler: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/070-lobster-dinner-with-a-toddler

081: Alignment alignment alignment: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/081-alignment-alignment-alignment

086: How big things get done (part 1): https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/086-how-big-things-get-done-part-1

090: Should changing your mind mean changing your past work?: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/090-should-changing-your-mind-mean-changing-your-past-work

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We talk about signals. Specifically, how can you settle on success signals when your wider context is always changing?

We talk about a small example: setting Pivot Triggers for our Multiverse Mapping course, while our context is always changing in terms of overall cashflow. When the runway is tight, we wish the course would hurry up and sell more, but how do we avoid over-reacting or putting all our eggs in one basket?

We map that onto what happens in organisations when they need a new value stream to spool up quickly, how they can set unrealistic expectations, and how you can use something like Multiverse Mapping to figure out what's reasonable, and something like Pivot Triggers to help avoid sunk cost bias without having to be "the negative one".

Linky goodness:

• J P Castlin's Strategy in Praxis
• Gary's Economics – interview with Krishnan Guru Murthy
• Intro to Multiverse Mapping
• Master Multiverse Mapping
• Notes on Chasm Crossing – a "better" version of the S-curve, because it shows the dip you'll feel in the early part of the curve
• Signals > Stories > Options
• Episode 095: Enshittification

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With one exercise, we can't predict whether your startup will succeed, but we can reliably predict if you're going to fail through procrastination.

In this episode, we talk about mental blindspots. Corissa and Tom rib each other about their own mental blindspots. And we discuss how to pronounce the word "satiety".

"It's more comfortable to fail when it's something you yourself have caused than when you fail at the hands of something that's outside your control." – Corissa

“Hmm, I dunno, do you have any solutions that involve me doing everything 100% exactly like I'm doing it right now, and getting better outcomes?” – from Experimental History's So you wanna de-bog yourself.

Can you detect any of these mental blindspots in yourself?

Linky Goodness:

• Finish Your Projects - great, if winding article that inspired this episode
• So you wanna de-bog yourself - awesome article
• Time Machine exercise Front | Back
• Snyder's Law neatly encapsulates one way founders procrastinate
• Episode 077: Do you have to spend years in the pain cave?
• Can you stop the pendulum swinging? – where both ends of the pendulum swing encourage procrastination because they give you the illusion (or fact) of control and are comfortable to an MBA-worldview
• Belief Whack-a-mole from David McRaney is in either You Are Not So Smart or How Minds Change ... anyone know for sure?
• Load bearing copes from Visakan Veerasamy

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A lovely, meandering conversation about the nature of success, the binds we often put ourselves in and more.

Along the way, we touch on maverick musicians, maddening constraints, and McDonald's coffee.

Linky Goodness:

• Henrik Karlsson's note: https://substack.com/@henrikkarlsson/note/c-95418840
• My note on his note: https://substack.com/profile/2368401-tom-kerwin/note/c-95543621
• Paul Millerd's Pathless Path: https://newsletter.pathlesspath.com
• Notes on an introduction to Christopher Alexander: https://www.edovanroyen.com/p/notes-of-ryan-singers-introduction-to-christopher-alexander

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In this one, we answer a question:

"I recently attended your Intro to Multiverse Mapping event and really enjoyed it. I'm also looking into Dave Snowden's Estuarine Mapping and noticed on your website that you facilitate that as well! What's the difference between Multiverse and Estuarine Mapping?"

Linky goodness:

• Estuarine Mapping resources
• Master Multiverse Mapping
• Bent Flyvbjerg's How Big Things Get Done in episode 86 and episode 87

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