Trigger Strategy
By Tom Kerwin
We’re Tom and Corissa from Trigger Strategy Group. In each episode, we dig into strategy and sense-making while taking our baby for a walk.
Our work is about embracing uncertainty and complexity, making sense of the world so we can act in it.
We cover strategy, organisation design, facilitation, research and experimentation, peppering our chats with anecdotes, rants and occasional adorable babbling from the baby.
Our work is about embracing uncertainty and complexity, making sense of the world so we can act in it.
We cover strategy, organisation design, facilitation, research and experimentation, peppering our chats with anecdotes, rants and occasional adorable babbling from the baby.
Trigger StrategyApr 25, 2024
00:00
29:58
041: Nuance, absolutes and shiny suits
Can you get through life without ever oversimplifying something? If not, when is it OK? And what does that have to do with parenting, politics and pole-climbing professionals?
Apr 25, 202429:58
040: Why isn’t [Role] doing what I think they should?
We talk about a post that Tom saw in Reddit: a Product Manager complaining about the designers they worked with (shock horror!). The underlying vibe of the complaint looked eerily similar to many situations we’ve both seen. And the responses in the Reddit thread tended to jump to mono-perspective “root cause” type reasoning (also a familiar pattern). So we took a few minutes to break down the situation from different angles, unpacking more of the conditions and dynamics that might be modulating the situation. Note: the specifics of this situation are quite product/design-specific, so bear with us if we slip into jargon. Because we suspect the general dynamics at play will rhyme with situations you’ve found yourself in. Let us know: what dynamics or conditions do you think we missed? Plus: towards the end, we share Jabe Bloom’s Ideal Present exercise, which is a collaborative and multi-perspective approach to managing the evolutionary potential of the present. Here’s the link we mentioned to a video where Ben Mosior walks you through the exercise in 5 minutes: www.youtube.com/live/19KUsV_qeyk?si=r4hOSMZ_CtFTvCcS
Apr 20, 202430:54
039: Bounded Applicability
How come your favourite methods don’t always work? We know one-size doesn’t fit-all, and we know that it depends on context … but *how* does it depend on context? We’ve been exploring a framework or model that can help iron out the fiddliness, and today we talk through some of the ideas, introducing a sort of spectrum that covers what we might call Solution Oriented — Outcome Oriented — Emergence Oriented (though we don’t use exactly those words in the conversation). It’s a bit of a meaty one today, enjoy!
Apr 10, 202434:42
038: Creativity, innovation and a flawed coffee machine
How do you know if you're being creative or innovative? Does it even matter? We talk about art, business, feathers, and Corissa's fury with an underperforming coffee machine that set her on a path of creativity or innovation or maybe something else entirely ... and if you have a story of creativity or innovation you’d like to share, record it here: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/trigger-strategy/message
Apr 08, 202440:13
037: How Capable Leaders Navigate Uncertainty and Ambiguity - an annotated reading - Part 6
We made it! The sixth and final episode in the series where we read through prompts from an article and talk about what they mean to us. In this episode, Plant Seeds — Watch Them Grow, Tailor Ways of Working and Facing Uncertainty. We encourage you to think about them too! We also talk through some important notes that apply to this whole series at the very end. If you’d like to share a short reflection with us, please record one here: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/trigger-strategy/message. And if you’d like to follow along with the original article: cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-274-how-capable-leaders-navigate
Mar 29, 202441:23
036: How Capable Leaders Navigate Uncertainty and Ambiguity - an annotated reading - Part 5
The fifth and penultimate episode in the series where we read through prompts from an article and talk about what they mean to us. In this episode, Accept Diverse Strengths and Skills, Collaboratively Sense and Shape, and Coherence vs. Alignment. We encourage you to think about them too! If you’d like to share a short reflection with us, please record one here: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/trigger-strategy/message. If you’d like to follow along with the original article: cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-274-how-capable-leaders-navigate
Mar 26, 202439:01
035: How Capable Leaders Navigate Uncertainty and Ambiguity - an annotated reading - Part 4
The fourth in the series where we read through prompts from an article and talk about what they mean to us. In this episode, Both/And, Intervene Safely, and Abduction and Intuition. We encourage you to think about them too! If you’d like to share a short reflection with us, please record one here: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/trigger-strategy/message. If you’d like to follow along with the original article: cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-274-how-capable-leaders-navigate
Mar 25, 202423:27
034: How Capable Leaders Navigate Uncertainty and Ambiguity - an annotated reading - Part 3
What do leaders who are skilled at navigating complexity know how to do? What do they do differently? What would you observe if a leader had these skills? These were questions Tom and John Cutler asked themselves when they co-wrote this article that got a lot of people talking: cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-274-how-capable-leaders-navigate. The article contains 18 prompts to trigger reflection. This is the third in the series where we read through the prompts and talk about what they mean to us. We talk through 3 more patterns: Patience and Self-Repair, Anticipate Effects, and Curiosity and Light Touch. We encourage you to think about them too! If you’d like to share a short reflection with us, please record one here: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/trigger-strategy/message.
Mar 21, 202429:07
033: How Capable Leaders Navigate Uncertainty and Ambiguity - an annotated reading - Part 2
What do leaders who are skilled at navigating complexity know how to do? What do they do differently? What would you observe if a leader had these skills? These were questions Tom and John Cutler asked themselves when they co-wrote this article that got a lot of people talking: cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-274-how-capable-leaders-navigate. The article contains 18 prompts to trigger reflection. This is the second in the series where we read through the prompts and talk about what they mean to us. We talk through 3 more patterns: Identify Plausible Contributors / Multiple "Causes”, Power of the Present, and Blend Diverse Perspectives. We encourage you to think about them too! If you’d like to share a short reflection with us, please record one here: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/trigger-strategy/message.
Mar 14, 202433:10
032: How Capable Leaders Navigate Uncertainty and Ambiguity - an annotated reading - Part 1
What do leaders who are skilled at navigating complexity know how to do? What do they do differently? What would you observe if a leader had these skills? These were questions Tom and John Cutler asked themselves when they co-wrote this article that got a lot of people talking: cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-274-how-capable-leaders-navigate. The article contains 18 prompts to trigger reflection. This is the first in a series where we read through the prompts and talk about what they mean to us. We encourage you to think about them too! If you’d like to share a short reflection with us, please record one here: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/trigger-strategy/message. In this first episode, we talk through the first 3 patterns: Accept We Are Part of the Problem, Encourage New Interaction Patterns, and Patient Divergence. We also reference a lovely series by Hazel Weakly where she’s started to reflect on the questions: hazelweakly.me/blog/observations-of-leadership-part-one/
Mar 13, 202429:26
031: Probabilistic Parenting - is it a thing and how does it map onto work?
We talk about boundaries, commandments and socialisation. If right and wrong isn’t always set in stone, how do you encourage people to think creatively while also not becoming a pariah?
Mar 10, 202424:52
030: We need to talk about “mindsets”
We talk about the fallacy of mindset, and the inevitable failure when you focus on trying to change someone’s mindset. We also consider what you can do instead, including the magic pill test, and changing affordances, assemblages and agency (cf. Dave Snowden). This has been relevant for some recent coaching clients and is a common sticking point in change management work.
Mar 02, 202431:10
029: Communication is lossy - and that’s OK
What’s in your head is perfectly clear, but then you have to use a string of words to communicate it to others. And the words can trigger different ideas in their heads. It’s kind of amazing that we can communicate at all! Today we dig into some typical confusions, challenge one “fix” that can feel helpful while actually making things worse, and then suggest a few alternative approaches that really do help.
Feb 25, 202432:39
028: Ship an idea in an hour?
Tom compulsively makes Multiverse Maps in Miro during meetings - and it seems to help people clarify things and take action. Why not put an offer out there to see if more people would like it? We talk about what that was like and challenge you: what could you ship in an hour? Here’s the article we talked about: https://open.substack.com/pub/maybeuseful/p/i-want-to-start-a-business-but-i … and here’s the LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tomdkerwin_can-i-ship-a-new-business-idea-in-an-hour-activity-7164298372110041088-Cxgl?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios
Feb 21, 202415:04
027: Are you rushing to tie your shoelaces?
“Slow is smooth; smooth is fast” - we talk about this Marine mantra and how it relates to tunnel vision vs. expanded awareness in our personal and work lives. We’ve found this a transformational lens in our strategy and sense-making work — as well as our personal lives — and we hope you will too. Let us know!
Feb 14, 202432:49
026: Is your marketing funnel killing your offer?
A Hard Test is when you strip away all the accoutrements of what a product or marketing set up “should” look like, so you can distil out the absolute core. How do customers CHOOSE the value you promise, and how do they USE you to get that value? If that core doesn’t fundamentally work, all the fancy visuals and words in the world won’t help. But if the raw, distilled core works, you can be confident that building more around it will make it better and better. We talk about applying the Hard Test philosophy to your marketing and sales funnels in a way that’s so simple - and so terrifying.
Feb 14, 202424:58
025: Change, ready-ing and a caterpillar with wooden wings
What if the theory of change we often try to impose on ourselves and our organisations is actually counterproductive? Is actually blocking what needs to happen for change to occur? We talk about a LinkedIn post Tom shared that stopped Corissa in her tracks, including a story about a woman who found herself giving back borrowed books. Here’s the link to the post, including a trail to get to Nora Bateson’s full essay, Ready-ing: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tomdkerwin_an-essay-on-readying-tending-the-prelude-activity-7160987048626057216-ZZy9?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Feb 10, 202429:35
024: Should CEOs be making day-to-day decisions?
There’s a view of leadership that puts the CEO at the helm, steering the ship with their decisions. This view is becoming seen as “zombie leadership”. There’s another view that the CEO should normally be making no ground-level decisions, only connecting people. The dynamic between decisions and no-decisions varies at different scales of org and in different contexts. That’s what we’re talking about today. If you’d like to share your take, please drop us a note: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/trigger-strategy/message
Feb 09, 202417:22
023: Creating Customer Conversations
Today, we talk about a course that Tom is putting together in collaboration with Dave Grey’s School of the Possible. It’s very much us figuring things out live, explaining the School and then talking through my aims and ideas for the course. If the course sounds interesting to you, we’d love to chat more and help you figure out if it’ll be a good fit.
Feb 05, 202419:17
022: Disconfirmation Bias - do this innovation tactic live with us in under 15 minutes
What’s the biggest risk you need to tackle for an idea you’re working on right now? Today, we walk you through a quick exercise that will reveal the next step you need to take. This is one of the 54 cards in Innovation Tactics: bit.ly/innovation-10
Feb 01, 202414:12
021: The perils of “should”
Do you should all over yourself? Do you have unconscious rules for what other people should be doing? Today, we look at where “should” turns up in matters personal and business, with a spotlight on Donald Miller’s Story Brand framework, and a side quest into bloviating YouTubers.
Jan 31, 202421:26
020: Product discovery depends on you building a model (of your coherent theory of value)
Off the back of an excellent coaching call, we share one thing we’ve found that makes all the difference for UXRs (and product people in general) who need to sift through mountains of observations to find the insights that matter. In our experience, it’s not enough to have documents or a repo etc. - instead you need to build a model. We talk all about what this might mean for you and some of the pitfalls that we’ve seen teams get stuck in. Here’s the link to the Innovation Tactics card we reference: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/40drbzxvy9c4zpuf8q523/Focus-Solve-For-Distribution-Back.png?rlkey=1dka88ysgqcix5x8v4dkivzv7&dl=0
Jan 31, 202426:04
019: North Star Metrics and Framework - are they “dumb”?
In today’s walk, we respond to a question about Cedric Chin’s feisty claim that the “North Star Framework is dumb”: (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cedchin_im-thinking-of-writing-a-follow-up-post-activity-7157641902496870400--59g?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios). One of our friends asked, “is it though? I’ve found North Star metrics to be useful in working with complex adaptive systems - to give a sense of direction without limiting adaptation. What’s your take?” We break down the metrics and the framework and when they may be useful or not. Do we think they’re dumb? You’ll have to listen to find out!
Jan 30, 202416:48
018: a blustery annotated reading - A/B testing ain’t for settling your disagreements
Warning: we lost the little foam hat off the microphone, and this makes wind noise much more audible than usual. If you can cope with the audio, you’ll hear Tom read out an article from 2017 that he no longer fully agrees with. We dive into several related topics around the know-ability of future outcomes, the prevalence of Underpants Gnomes, and our past experiences trying to make stuff better without really understanding what we were doing. What still holds up What’s different now? If you’d like to read along (and see the picture of the digger) here’s the link: tomkerwin.substack.com/p/a-b-testing-aint-for-settling-your-disagreements-3653285a4377
Jan 29, 202428:18
017: You can’t leap directly from data to actionable insights - a live annotated reading
We’re trying something different in this episode. Tom reads out one of his old articles and we discuss our questions and issues as they arise. The article is an early version of his thinking about Signals, Stories, Options, which we talked about in episode 016. Does he still agree with everything? What would we change now? Can we describe a diagram in audio? If you want to read along with us, the article is: tomkerwin.substack.com/p/are-you-trying-to-leap-directly-from
Jan 28, 202423:54
016: Signals, Stories, Options - how to avoid getting trapped by simple stories
Corissa interviews Tom about the Signals > Stories > Options framework that appears (as “Anatomy of an Insight”) in his Innovation Tactics card deck. We get into how the concept of telling more stories can free you in both your personal and work lives and Tom shares some of the people who influenced his thinking as he traveled through the wilderness of narrative fallacy.
Jan 27, 202420:33
015: Continuously discovering beef on Linkedin
Everyone knows you should stay out of social media beefs, so we’re going against all common sense and wading in. This showdown between two camps has been a long time coming: should research be democratised, or does that only devalue research? Recently one populariser of democratisation has become a bit of a scapegoat. We think the debate on social media lacks nuance (surprising precisely nobody) and so we try to dig into some of the layers of nuance we can see, and have lived through ourselves.
Jan 26, 202428:47
014: Emergent Properties, Self Care and Leaf-Cutter Ants
What’s an emergent property? We take a tour through this sometimes confusing aspect of complexity theory, sharing some practical examples. Ant hills are emergent, but in a different way from human complex adaptive systems because of the 3 “I”s. We talk about how to manage the evolutionary potential of the present, changing conditions to allow emergence to happen, rather than setting explicit targets and instructions. Also: why adjectives are death.
Jan 17, 202431:45
013: How experiences shape us
We share small experiences from our careers that fundamentally changed the way we think about the world. Topics include tacit knowledge, retrospective coherence, the pain and pleasure of glimpsing reality, and the Cynefin framework. And we suggest two tiny little exercises you can try today that might just change you. Dare you to try one!
Jan 16, 202427:34
012: Psychological safety is an emergent property
Psychological safety has been a bit of a buzz term for years, since Google’s internal research. We talk about what it means in different companies, and our own past experiences. We discuss how it’s not something you can simply choose to have, but an emergent property of many aspects of a given context. What does this mean for fostering psychological safety where you are? You’ll have to listen to find out :)
Jan 16, 202421:10
011: Make stand ups useful with coherent pitches
Stand ups are common in tech companies, but are often inefficient and confused - often little more than “busyness theatre”. Leaders need to know what’s going on somehow, but stand ups and progress updates are mostly bad ways to achieve this. We talk about the worst stand ups we’ve experienced, and suggest a couple of simple tweaks we’ve used to make stand ups and progress updates way more effective.
Jan 16, 202419:28
010: Rules, norms, heuristics and a stacking block toy
When do you need to follow the rules and when should you break them? When are rules not rules? We share some experiences from our pasts and talk about how to shape your environment for innovation.
Jan 16, 202421:04
009: Using Pitch Provocations to poke the market - Part 3
We get practical about how to create your pitch provocations fast and how to write them effectively. Then we talk about what’s next - testing the market, and learning what it’ll really take to deliver.
Jan 16, 202435:34
008: Using Pitch Provocations to poke the market - Part 2
We pick up from where we left off last time, and talk about what you do once you’ve got some signals from your pitch provocation sessions. Also: how do you find people to do those sessions with, what makes pitch provocations hard, how to work around those mistakes, and how do you know who to listen to? Part 3 coming soon x
Jan 16, 202426:57
007: Using Pitch Provocations to poke the market - Part 1
Many founders think “figure out how to build it, then figure out how to market it” but in our experience, it’s much more effective to move the “figure out how to market it” and do that right away. What founders who do this find is that they quickly get much clearer about what to build (and what not to build) too. And one of the fastest ways we’ve found to do this is using Pitch Provocations as parallel safe to fail probes. Today, we talk about why and how.
Jan 16, 202431:32
006: OKRs, moon landings and oil fires
Following on from Tom’s Substack pieces about OKRs, we talk about some of the issues with OKRs, when they can work, and what to do if you’re in a situation where they don’t work but you have to use them anyway.
Jan 16, 202426:44
005: The bucket of features problem
We talk about the bucket of features problem, common to startups and corporates alike. What gets so many smart, brilliant people stuck in this problem? And we share a way to get out of the bucket too.
Jan 16, 202422:03
004: Beans, noses, elephants and startups
How many times do you watch while someone puts a bean up their nose? That’s the question we go at today, Tom working through a frustrating client engagement.
Jan 16, 202427:37
003: Startups, assumptions and coaching
1) Can big company “A players” do scrappy startups? 2) Assumption mapping - does it work? Can you make it work? 3) Coaching vs tricking people into thinking your idea is theirs … spicy!
Jan 16, 202423:10
Why your stakeholders will only ever know it when they see it
In school, and in countless articles, we’re shown a way that design and copy “should” work. Not only does this not match the way design and copy actually work, it’s built on false underpinnings. In this episode, we explore this common frustration and consider what designers and copywriters might practically do about it.
Apr 20, 202110:48
What ‘The Control Heuristic’ means for design research
A quick informal chat about Luca Dellanna’s book. We hash out why people tend to put off design research and noodle about how we might adjust that.
Apr 13, 202115:29