Trigger Strategy is now Tentacles

The concept of “High Agency” burst into the online leadership conversation in recent years. And it sounds good, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to be high agency? Who wouldn’t want to have high agency employees?

As with many such “obviously good” concepts, turns out it’s not that simple.

In this episode, Corissa and Tom also look at the other side of hopes for high agency.

We talk about how some leaders might wish for high agency employees, but would balk at what a very high agency employee would do in reality.

And we talk about what you need to know if you’re an employee being expected to demonstrate more agency.

And we signpost a whole load of lovely rabbit holes to go explore.

• Mushfiqa Monica Jalamuddin - the Estuarine coach you’re looking for
• Estuarine Mapping
• Multiverse Mapping (free course)
• Venkatesh Rao’s Gervais Principle
• Jeffrey Pfeffer’s Leadership BS
• Brendan Reid’s Stealing the Corner Office
• Luca Dellanna’s 100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late

00:00 Introduction

00:28 What is High Agency?

01:10 The Serenity Prayer

02:00 Estuarine Mapping is the Serenity Prayer in map form

03:45 High agency as a positive trait … & its permeation into leadership mythology

04:06 “Sound like a challenger, but be an obedient drone”

06:20 Perhaps it’s about not waiting for permission, while also not doing silly things

08:09 Tools to create higher agency if you want that – including Multiverse Mapping

13:01 What if the traits we want in leaders are not the traits that get you promoted?

17:31 A magic question for you to use

18:34 What would have to be true for that stupid thing to make a lot of sense?

19:42 “You can choose the game you play, but not its rules”

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 our work and resources at crownandreach.com

... and you can contact us through [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Surveys are almost always biased in several ways, notably both the way questions are asked but also sample bias: who in the population even answers surveys?

In this episode we discuss: is the SenseMaker collector we shared biased just the same as any other survey? And if so, is that a problem? And if so, what can we do about it?

Plus stories about skullduggery in presenting data, hiding gorillas in radiologist scans and the "magic" or standard questions:

• What's similar, different and surprising?
• What, so what, now what?

Linky goodness:

• Don't send that survey! Here's what to do instead.
• Complex facilitation principles and the standard questions

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 our work and resources at crownandreach.com

... and you can contact us through [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's a rain-soaked chat this time as Tom and Corissa wander through Bournemouth in a downpour.

We tackle a thought-provoking LinkedIn question from WP Engine's Jason Cohen – a question about how to listen to customers when they ask for features.

00:29 LinkedIn inspiration and the big question we're tackling today

02:28 Customer feedback creates an apparent puzzle

03:40 Mistakes we've made by asking people what they want

05:14 Secret 1: what do people already do?

07:37 Secret 2: imagine your company is a big metal box

10:50 You're always limited by your own internal perspective, and that's OK

16:51 Secret 3: there's no such thing as a feature

19:48 The story in your customer's head is different from the story in your head

20:18 Don't make things look simpler than they are

20:48 "Feature" is just a label to make your own life easier

21:41 Secret 4: build as little software as possible to enable the most behaviours that create value

23:32 When customers are reduced to a metric

24:18 Why an Impact/Effort Matrix to decide on features will fool you

27:32 Real-world example: a Calendly integration project

33:33 Unfolding ideas by soaking in rich customer context

36:25 SenseMaker for generating insights in a very different way

38:30 When you try to make too much explicit, you get in trouble

Jason's original post

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 our work and resources at crownandreach.com

... and you can contact us through [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jamie asked: "anyone got good exercises for evolving your brand (and in particular visual identity) in-house? Did I remember you (Tom & Corissa) mentioning an exercise like clustering examples into "we want to be more like this" vs "we want to be less like that"?"

So we wanted to give the exercise we designed its own special episode.

Time and again, we saw projects get in a pickle when people tried to choose adjectives to define things like brand qualities, tone of voice, product principles or corporate values.

This kind of ambiguous, subjective stuff is impossible to define perfectly with words, especially upfront.

You could choose to work with a grizzled expert who can read between the lines of what you're saying to intuit what you really want.

But if you're on a shoestring and want to figure out this kind of thing with your team, then the exercise we share in this episode is for you.

Here's simplified instructions on a card: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2rjpbrj1vqklcfc8glgw8/Sense-2D-Comparison-Back.png?rlkey=71v3muppoho2pnac2v9b9luim&dl=0

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 our work and resources at crownandreach.com

... and you can contact us through [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We talk about alignment. Especially, we talk about relaxing our beef with the word alignment, and embracing the reasonable desire for alignment.

00:00 Welcome!

00:28 Alignment in companies

00:49 Challenges and misconceptions about alignment

04:07 Coherence vs. alignment; JP Castlin's ABCDE framework, and one line in the sand vs two lines in the sand

08:27 A real-world example of a misaligned project

10:38 Strategies for effective alignment, including "via negativa" alignment

12:52 Aligning teams with reality as well as intent

13:25 The role of the "strategy whisperer"

13:47 Empowering teams to find alignment

13:58 Back briefing for effective communication

16:13 Understanding the need for leadership governance vs the needs of teams

17:30 Challenges with leadership expectations

19:49 Navigating company growth realities

20:37 Dropping our beef with alignment and going vegetarian

23:34 Are you clearly a berry? Clear communication taps the forager's gathering instinct

24:41 Exploring alignment beyond the team

25:42 Final thoughts

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 our work and resources at crownandreach.com

... and you can contact us through [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The world of digital/tech is going through "a moment" just now at the end of 2024.

And we've launched a project to share and explore diverse perspectives from across the tech world, using a particular tool and methodology called SenseMaker. The goal is to showcase the diverse range of perspectives and stories of the moment in a way that's normally impossible.

Some topics:

• Why is Tom so excited about SenseMaker?
• Who sees the gorilla?
• Contrasting Likert scales versus triads and dyads
• How standard "feedback surveys" are ruined by averaging and dominated by recency bias and the Halo Effect.
• Cynicism about the annual 360 feedback game
• What if feedback could be descriptive instead of evaluative? And real-time instead of averaged over 6 months?
• Beef with the "product trio" concept
• A few nuggets we've picked up in the early data.
• Our plans for open sense-making workshops
• Patterns of care and rule-following in healthcare
• Vector change using "more stories like these, fewer like those"

Take 10 minutes to share your experience, and you'll be able to opt in to access all the responses at the end.

👉 https://bit.ly/stories-from-tech

Thank you for contributing ❤️

How to use a new generation data collection and analysis tool? https://thecynefin.co/how-to-use-data-collection-analysis-tool/

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 our work and resources at crownandreach.com

... and you can contact us through [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We talk about a question posed in Innovation Tactics Slack - about a stakeholder who’s skeptical that design research can help with genuine innovation, and wants to create speculative use cases instead.

Topics we touch on:

• Are speculative use cases a "thing"? Is it helpful to imagine people doing something that's just not happening today? Like, 500 years ago, nobody got their shoelace trapped in an escalator. In 2003, nobody was planning out how they'd price their product on the App Store.
• Is it reasonable to be skeptical about design research?
• What do you do when you're working with someone who's already decided what they want and isn't interested in evidence?
• Radical repurposing as an alternative – follow the pathfinders
• Snowmobiling as a possible approach – remix the adjacent possible
• Jamming with your stakeholder to understand and clarify (with the side effect that you might expose gaps or incoherence)
• Bias in research

Some quotes:

"Getting a shoelace trapped in an escalator - that's not a thing that happened 500 years ago."

"Just doing something because you think it's cool is totally valid as a way of operating a business"

"Everyone who has a brilliant idea thinks that their idea is the next big thing. And everyone but one in a million is wrong about that. And even the one in a million tends to be wrong about exactly how it's going to work."

"Play Doh was invented, not as a toy for kids, but as a putty for removing coal soot from walls. It was repurposed into the kids' toy after people stopped having coal fires"

"You're very unlikely to invent something novel that works. You're very likely to find somebody doing something novel that you can scale."

"You can absolutely go and do the best interviewing in the world and not come back with anything that's going to be a breakthrough innovation for your company. It may be that your company is not positioned to make a breakthrough innovation."

"this is the trap that so many people fall into and I've heard it more times than I can count. It's that need to educate the market. Do not, do not try, red flag, back away slowly or run, run speedily off into the distance."

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 our work and resources at crownandreach.com

... and you can contact us through [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the last episode, we introduced Rob Snyder's framing of finding your repeatable case study instead of building your tech product.

This time, we step back into the Pain Cave to talk through some of the criticisms that Rob (and we) often face when we suggest the approach we do.

We think they're misunderstandings of what we're advocating, but they're also sound points.

First, we consider the scolding that we should follow a proper research and design process and build the right thing at high quality from day one, not throw spaghetti at the wall. Sometimes this is true, but sometimes it's just not possible.

Second, we face the fear of selling "vapourware" – nobody wants to follow in Elizabeth Holmes' footsteps, promising stuff that can't be realised (Theranos). Absolutely right! But that's not at all what we're recommending.

And all this brings us to the concept of Bounded Applicability. No ideas are suitable for all projects, products, etc. So how can you think about what's appropriate in a given situation?

Linky goodness:

• Bounded Applicability: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae9306
• My diagram showing some methods' Bounded Applicability: https://www.notion.so/Pitch-Provocations-54ad05d5740e451db0fa82479debeb91
• Previous episode about Rob Snyder: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/077-do-you-have-to-spend-years-in-the-pain-cave

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 our work and resources at crownandreach.com

... and you can contact us through [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to listeners who've been referred by Rob Snyder of Path to Product Market Fit!

In this episode, we talk about Rob Snyder's core ideas for founders and consider the interplay with our thinking. As ever, you'll hear some stories from our pasts, some methods to try, and some background noises from blustery Bournemouth.

• Why no, you can't break down your idea into a set of clean hypotheses to "validate"
• Why you want to ship a case study instead of shipping code
• Can you bypass the Pain Cave if you have a Time Machine?
• How to spot founders who are going to drag you deep into the Pain Cave
• How to use Pivot Triggers to scaffold doing the case study approach instead of writing all the code
• Introducing "unfolding" as a way to design buildings, businesses, even lives
• How to save face while taking the risk of looking silly (won't you get cast out from polite society?)
• Is the optimisation game dying?
• A puzzle: what do you do when you care about building a business you'll love working in more than you care about just building a business?
• Do we need to go deeper into the Pain Cave?

Linky goodness:

• Rob Snyder's Path to Product Market Fit
• Innovation Tactics: https://bit.ly/innovation-10
• Solve for Distribution: Front | Back
• Time Machine: Front | Back
• A great article that references Christopher Alexander's Unfolding

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 our work and resources at crownandreach.com

... and you can contact us through [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Survivorship bias is unavoidable. By default, we see what survives and not what doesn't. This is OK but it creates the risk that we take the wrong lessons from the survivors.

In this episode, we talk about how we might mitigate the downsides of survivorship bias. We touch on a bunch of topics:

• rejecting simplistic Sinekisms
• theory-informed praxis, rather than copy-pasting patterns across contexts
• challenges to Estuarine Mapping
• zero-sum games
• bounded applicabilty – asking when something doesn't apply, or who shouldn't use a thing
• Double Diamonds
• Shiny Frameworks
• Portfolio of small bets in parallel – as a way to optimise for survival
• And an invitation to you: what are we missing? How do you handle survivorship bias?

Linky Goodness

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

Trigger Strategy website: https://triggerstrategy.com/

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 our work and resources at crownandreach.com

... and you can contact us through [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.