By Tom Kerwin and Corissa Nunn
The podcast currently has 85 episodes available.
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.
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”
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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:
Linky goodness:
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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
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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
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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
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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:
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/
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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:
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."
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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:
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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.
Linky goodness:
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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:
Linky Goodness
Bounded Applicability: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae9306
Trigger Strategy website: https://triggerstrategy.com/
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The podcast currently has 85 episodes available.