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 helpThe 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 herdThe experiment that made millions and got the programme shut down – and where the org's uncertainty budget was really goingWhy good management and good innovation are quietly at war in every organisationThe one thing leaders say about ambiguity that makes everything worseHow a leader can "take out a loan" on uncertainty, and what they have to put up as collateralFor 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? tentacles@crownandreach.comOne 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.ReferencesBrian – research interviewee who prompted the episodePitch Provocations – our method, which we're currently running on ourselvesMultiverse Mapping – our method that can slice anxiety-inducing uncertainty into budget-friendly chunksUncertainty budgetUncertainty tax versus deliberate investmentUncertainty Bubble / Uncertainty MembraneRisk appetite, risk tolerance and risk capacityThe distinction between risk and uncertaintyCranfield 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.

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 harderThe moment Corissa realised there is no unbiased version of any story, ever, and why that just kinda dissolved the ethical problem, rather than excusing itRadical honesty with a three-year-old around Santa Claus ... and the risk of being chased out of Bournemouth with pointed sticksThe 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 festerWhy 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 deadlineTwo 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" appMild 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: tentacles@crownandreach.comFind out more about us and our work at crownandreach.comReferencesEmily 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/B077JJWJDR4U + CPT Cheat Sheet — how to communicate progress from inside an uncertainty bubble https://crownandreach.com/#resourcesUncertainty bubbles and the double game — Ep 145: What Xerox PARC actually got wrong https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/6a158e1e6ee822cbfbf36be0Coffee & Complexity Club — our Friday morning sessions, where this question came from https://luma.com/stepscollectiveUnpack, 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/686d37638d3d6839f4949285Cynefin https://cynefin.io/wiki/Cynefin

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'sWhat changes when you stop treating your heuristics as a through line and start treating them as a fenceExploration that isn't exploratory: doing all the "correct" discovery work but playing it way too safeWhy you can't rationalise your way into anything interesting, and why so much of business is pretending that's what you didWhether a team can have a collective gut, or whether it needs something external to hand it weird optionsPlus: the MAYA principle, survivorship bias, Alfred Nobel, and BritneyPlease share your stories of rules well broken: tentacles@crownandreach.comFind out more about us and our work at crownandreach.comReferencesHerräng Dance Camp, Sweden https://www.herrang.comAngela Andrew — Tom's teacher and mentor, legendary dancer and artistAlfred Nobel's Vinterviken dynamite works outside Stockholm, venue for The Snowball event mentionedThe MAYA principle (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) by Raymond LoewyThe 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-beesPrevious episode on protocols was 134: The Protocol Problem part 1 – Geoff's shadow spreadsheet sprawl https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/696fea603738e9e7d196e2f5Multiverse Mapping — https://multiversemapping.com

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 instrumentOne finding that came up in every single interview: everyone knows what positioning means, and everyone assumes their colleagues don'tWhy nobody ever asks to be more adaptive – no matter how badly they need toWhat one participant said they actually really wanted, even while admitting it's not possibleThe meeting that repeats, where everybody furiously agrees a decision must be made and no decision ever sticksAlignment 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 scheduleDrop us a note at tentacles@crownandreach.com 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.comReferencesBrian David Hall — thought partner on shaping the provocationsJ P Castlin, friend of Tentacles, and his alignment as a single line versus two boundaries https://strategyinpraxis.substack.comThe 4U process: Unpack, Undergo, Unfold Uncertainty — https://crownandreach.com/#resourcesVision chasm https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/tumbling-into-the-vision-chasm-partUnpacking Pitch Provocations https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/68e3e847d17b81f346e7b927Dogfooding Pitch Provocations, part 1 https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/6a914b54ae4f28333652ada4The backcasting episode https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/6a7ae678616564bf00d5d5a5

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 elseWhy "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 workshopEverybody lies, and it's often got nothing to do with active dishonestyThe illusion of explanatory depth ... go on then, you draw a bicycle from memory and see how you get onKnowledge shields and the painful, essential, wondrous experience of watching yourself on videoFor anyone who's ever sat in a meeting where everyone's certain and the ideas feel like they're on predetermined rails.ReferencesHouse M.D. (TV series) Dr Gregory House, played by Hugh Laurie; Dr Wilson as the Watson figureSherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle, cited as House's explicit originSignals > Stories > Options — Crown & Reach method — https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/signals-stories-optionsGary Klein's Data/Frame model of sensemaking; expert vs. novice pattern recognitionFirst-fit pattern matching, attributed to Klein in the episode; more commonly Snowden's framingKnowledge 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-psychologyThe 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-interviewsMarks & Spencer Collection olive oil ice cream — unsponsored, regrettablyLindy Hop — our dance practice, video-recording story

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 solvesAn 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 workWhy at leat half the value of the process comes from stuff that's not officially part of the processWhat we noticed about every business disagreement we've witnessed ... and why arguing about the data will never fix itWhether something that's not a turnkey process can be taught, including Dave Snowden's plastering storyWhen did rules stop being judgement calls? We waddle off on a little detour into the surprising history of rule as hard-and-fast linePicking 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.ReferencesBrian David Hall — facilitated the introspection workshop, and the episode's original audienceBen 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/ASHENDouglas 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-ashenThe heuristics vs rules episode — https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae9323