By Tom Kerwin and Corissa Nunn
The podcast currently has 74 episodes available.
A live thinking through of the next chunk in our series of articles about the Vision Chasm – that gulf between the glorious future people are talking about and the reality of where you are today.
In this episode we look at situations where a Vision is unreachable because it's actually deceptive – either deliberate deception to keep everyone looking the other way while people deploy a secret strategy; or accidental self-deception because your reality has shifted but your narratives haven't caught up.
We talk through a few stories from our past.
1) A company workshop where trying to crystallise a vision of the future fell apart - because nobody was ready/able to be honest about the true direction of the company. Still clinging to a cultural heritage that was no longer a fit for their market position?
2) A deep misunderstanding between a C-suite and design team – talking past one another because we were operating in fundamentally different worlds. A third party was able to show us why we were stuck in loggerheads. Looking back, we can see how daft we were being. But could we have done things differently at the time?
3) How the misunderstanding played out when the C-suite brought in an external agency. In one way, it was a disaster that made a mess and broke some hearts. In another way, it was a success that broke the deadlock and massively moved things forward for the company.
References:
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All credit to friend of the pod Pete Shaw for the "Founder mode sounds like brat summer" observation.
Founder Mode triggered a beefstorm on LinkedIn, so we take a little stroll around the topic and share our takes. 3 parts nuance, 2 parts spicy, 1 long run-on sentence where Tom gets lost and forgets what he was trying to say.
Topics include alignment, coherence, intuition, taste and more.
References:
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In this episode, we zoom back in time to a situation when a load of meetings were frustrating people at this one company. Tom used Snowmobiling with a small team to break down the meetings into smaller pieces and then remix those pieces in a new way. We share some of the details and pitfalls along the way.
This same decompose/recombine approach can be used in lots of different situations where you need to find something new. Because everything new is really just novel recombinations of existing stuff.
We read out the steps on the Snowmobiling card (Innovation Tactics) – the exact instructions you can follow to harness the power of the remix.
References:
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Today, we start by adding some corrections to terminology we used in episode 70, which will be confusing if you haven't listened to that one. But it doesn't take long, and then we get into our main topic, which is granularity. When you work with too coarse a granularity, you can find yourself stuck or confused about what to do. When you work with too fine a granularity, you can quickly find yourself overwhelmed, drowning in data, paralysed by too many options. The magic is to find the sweet spot, where you break things down just enough to create good options for action.
We talk through ASHEN as a typology for decomposing people or roles to a more legible and actionable level of granularity, and Corissa tries it out for real with one of her old bosses.
Links
ASHEN on the Cynefin wiki: https://cynefin.io/wiki/ASHEN
Article about stages of companies vs different people's natural propensities: https://newsletter.thewayofwork.com/p/stage-fright
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Q. What do these three situations have in common? Taking a friend for a lobster dinner, business strategy workshops, and personal coaching.
A. They all feature in this episode as examples of how constraints, constructors and actants play out.
The main chunk of this session is us talking through Tom's personal experience being 1:1 coached using Estuarine Mapping. We found this enormously enlightening, and we're excited to share.
If you've been looking for definitions or examples of constraints, constructors and actants, then you're in the right place.
Links and resources:
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In which we coin the word "bungus" ...
If you've ever complained about misalignment, or rallied people with the cry that "we need to get aligned", then this one's for you. Of course the feeling of alignment is a pleasant one, but what if you're in one of the situations where seeking alignment is actually hurting you?
Corissa and Tom unpack the concept of alignment, including some discussion about different kinds of alignment and misalignment, some stories from the real world about situations where strategic misalignment can be good, and some references to our episode about the bees (episode 44: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/044-the-one-with-the-bees)
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Tom had a coaching call with someone who had been on the hook to run a one day workshop. A one day workshop that was expected to both work as a team building exercise AND deliver a complete new concept to go ahead and build. And it was sorta vague what that concept would be. What could go wrong?
Sometimes, you can get a clear, crispy brief. But often, you can't. It's more of an "I'll know it when I see it" situation. It's tempting to try asking more questions, trying to pin people down to get a clear brief before you start making anything. But that doesn't work. Often people can't tell you exactly what they want, until you give something to them and they can tell you, "not that".
One of the issues is about the tricksiness of language. You can't satisfactorily constrain creative work using adjectives. We share one of our favourite exercises for handling this.
Another issue is that you can't get people to predict what's going to make them say, "that's it!". We share some thoughts for how you can quickly and efficiently share ideas for them to react to.
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This is one of our "thinking about things in real time" episodes. Tom & Corissa talk through the next part of the Vision Chasm blog series. For nearly an hour!
We talk about when visions are good actually, as well as when they aren't, and when we could hold many visions lightly instead. And we explore the challenges of doing that.
We look at the squickiness of emergent strategy through lots of examples and stories.
We refer to a post by Stephanie Leue that does a great job of capturing what it feels like when you're in the weird reality distortion of the Vision Chasm: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7211982950198894592-jQsX?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
... but we don't agree with her prescription for fixing the problem.
We criticise the common approach to strategic "wisdom" that won't say this out loud but implies, "if you don't know what to do, then just try knowing what to do instead!"
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When something that starts small becomes bigger and bigger, we can lose sight of what we were trying to do in the first place. We talk through some examples: from workshops, from designing flyers for dance classes, and from Lego bridges.
The trick is subtraction. The knack is knowing what to subtract.
"When putting on accessories, take off the last thing you've put on." – Coco Chanel
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The podcast currently has 74 episodes available.