Trigger Strategy

If you're someone who puts ideas out into the world, how do you manage the fact that you change your mind over time? What if someone comes across an article or podcast you no longer agree with and takes the wrong idea from it?Should you maintain a living knowledge base or leave a trail of past articles like breadcrumbs in the forest?Does the burden of assessing information fall on the author or the reader?And what if the problem is that your material references someone who now you realise is not great?We think through all this and come to a tentative conclusion, for the moment at least.Linky goodness:Annotated reading of A/B tests are not for settling your disagreements (podcast)Demolish your Creative Block with Graham Linehan and the Power of the SFD (article)Innovation Tactics (Tom's card deck)When your hero is a monster (YouTube video)Gaiman's Law:“Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” – Neil Gaiman

"We often give building a house as an example of something in the complicated sphere. But then we talked in recent episodes about the nightmare build of the Sydney Opera House – that was complex, but people were treating it like it was complicated. What's the difference? What makes one complicated and one complex? Is it a sliding scale from one to the other? How do you know which realm you're in?"This broad question comes up a lot when people encounter complexity.Hello again, CynefinThe phase shift from complicated to complexYou're not "in" any domain: instead, you decompose a project or situation into smaller chunks, distribute those chunks into domains, and then you can use applicable methodsThen your job is to move those chunks from one domain to another – like constraining something complex and unpredictable so you can make it more predictable for youEstimating Complexity by Liz Keogh: have you done this before?Light switches vs electricity substations vs energy markets vs power failures.Fun with etymology"An aeroplane is complicated; a mayonnaise is complex"The role of connectednessGlobal warming and a social ice ageMany folks are intuitively good at handling complexity without knowing all the words and that's OKProcesses and procedures to make things less unpredictable ... until they stop workingMethods to achieve the liminal complex to complicated phase shiftA Simon Wardley example of waste in an organisationThe surface layer of a thing is not necessarily everything that thing doesBoeing and the slip over the cliff from Clear to ChaosChesterton's aeroplane seatSeeds vs SoilThe liminal complicated zone where experts disagree and people have Opinions.If there's disagreement about an element of a project, decompose it until the disagreement goes awayIs there always a level of decomposition where you stop disagreeing? Football example ... Jefferson Fisher's courtroom example ...The move into Aporia and the EU Field Guide for Managing ComplexityLinky GoodnessCynefinEstimating ComplexitySeeds vs Soil – front | backJefferson FisherEU Field Guide for Managing Complexity

More thoughts from How Big Things Get Done while on the way to brunch.(You'll need to have listened to part 1 for some of the references in here.)The fight between data and storiesJimi Hendrix's Electric Lady recording studioSounds obvious that you should think slow act fast, but most projects don't go like thatThe political utility of sunk cost biasTom dramatically underestimated how long it would take to make his Innovation Tactics Pip DeckRobert Caro dramatically underestimated how long it would take to write The Power BrokerInternal forecasting vs Reference Class Forecasting, and the problem of uniqueness biasForecasting and iterating a solo jazz dance workshop ... based on Ashtanga yogaMaster Multiverse Mapping and fighting the Inherent Bigness of Ideas by asking, "how could we deliver the value to one person, right now?"Forecasting example: how long will kitchen remodelling take?Linky GoodnessHow Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg: https://sites.prh.com/how-big-things-get-done-bookInnovation Tactics by Tom Kerwin: https://pipdecks.com/products/innovation-tacticsThe Power Broker by Robert Caro: https://www.robertcaro.org/the-power-brokerLindy Hop classes – https://swingshiftlindyhop.com/Master Multiverse Mapping Course: https://triggerstrategy.com/multiverse-mappingThe Inherent Bigness of Ideas: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/065-the-inherent-bigness-of-ideasTrigger Strategy Group: https://triggerstrategy.com

Tom finally read this book about mega projects and was surprised to find how relevant it was to the kind of work we do.Including: stories of the Bilbao Guggenheim vs Sydney Opera Housea reference to Bernard's Watchcontrasting processes for "think slow build fast"Pixar PlanningSnowflake Method and UnfoldingLinks with Multiverse MappingLinky goodnessHow Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg: https://sites.prh.com/how-big-things-get-done-bookMaster Multiverse Mapping Course: https://triggerstrategy.com/multiverse-mapping

“grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” – the Serenity PrayerThe 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.“imagine that I could sell you a magic pill and you could give it to two of your employees and overnight they would suddenly become high agency. What would be the first thing you’d notice was different when you went into work the next day?”Linky GoodnessMushfiqa Monica Jalamuddin - the Estuarine coach you’re looking forEstuarine MappingMultiverse Mapping (free course)Venkatesh Rao’s Gervais PrincipleJeffrey Pfeffer’s Leadership BSBrendan Reid’s Stealing the Corner OfficeLuca Dellanna’s 100 Truths You Will Learn Too LateTimecodes to help you navigate00:00 Introduction00:28 What is High Agency?01:10 The Serenity Prayer02:00 Estuarine Mapping is the Serenity Prayer in map form03:45 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 things08:09 Tools to create higher agency if you want that – including Multiverse Mapping13:01 What if the traits we want in leaders are not the traits that get you promoted?17:31 A magic question for you to use18:34 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”

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

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 today02:28 Customer feedback creates an apparent puzzle03:40 Mistakes we've made by asking people what they want05:14 Secret 1: what do people already do?07:37 Secret 2: imagine your company is a big metal box10:50 You're always limited by your own internal perspective, and that's OK16:51 Secret 3: there's no such thing as a feature19:48 The story in your customer's head is different from the story in your head20:18 Don't make things look simpler than they are20:48 "Feature" is just a label to make your own life easier21:41 Secret 4: build as little software as possible to enable the most behaviours that create value23:32 When customers are reduced to a metric24:18 Why an Impact/Effort Matrix to decide on features will fool you27:32 Real-world example: a Calendly integration project33:33 Unfolding ideas by soaking in rich customer context36:25 SenseMaker for generating insights in a very different way38:30 When you try to make too much explicit, you get in troubleJason's original post"Ask a customer if they’ll use a feature…They say “yes” but don’t use it.Ask them to name a feature they actually want and there’s the “faster horse” problem of incremental improvement instead of vision.What’s the answer? Just “gut feel” and sometimes you’re right?"

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