Tentacles - the podcast from Crown & Reach

144: The domino rally delusion

What do you do if Strategy Doesn't Exist? Tom and Corissa have built a strategy consultancy and they're here to tell you that strategy doesn't exist. At least, not in the way everyone sells it — and probably not in the way you've been trying to do it. This one was sparked by a recent episode from friends-of-Tentacles Kyle and Jen on Notes from the Swamp. We start with domino rallies and end up somewhere genuinely uncomfortable: what if the thing you're planning isn't real, the thing that worked was partly luck, and everyone who sells strategy is either in on the joke or still under the spell? * Why "if you just set the dominoes up right" is a fantasy ... and why we all keep buying it anyway * Deliberate vs emergent strategy is a taxonomy that sounds useful ... until Corissa neatly dismantles it * The project pattern that's almost too perfect to be true: everything that succeeded ended up nothing like anyone could have expected at the start; everything that failed stuck to the vision * Henry Mintzberg, retrospective coherence, and the stories we love to tell ourselves about how we got somewhere good * Can your immune system be strategic? (Tom thinks yes. Corissa is not convinced and does not enjoy the question) * Why Dave Snowden can sell the messy, hard version ... and why most people can't (at least not yet) * The Trojan horse question: do you know what's inside your horse? (Is it another, smaller horse?) For anyone who's ever suspected that "strategy" is a collective polite fiction and is curious about what to do with that suspicion. REFERENCES * Kyle Godbey and Jen Briselli's Field Notes from the Swamp podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TELdIQUd8nM * Henry Mintzberg — strategist, referenced for his empirical work on how strategy actually plays out * JP Castlin's Strategy in Praxis substack; referenced for a four-part taxonomy of strategy types https://strategyinpraxis.substack.com/ * Michael Porter and classic strategy doctrine. Tom accidentally said he came up with the seven S's framework, that's actually McKinsey; Porter is associated with Five Forces and competitive positioning. * Dave Snowden and the Cynefin Company, referenced for practitioner-level rigour and the paradox of "meet people where they are" vs "don't dumb it down" * Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand Prime Minister during COVID; referenced as an example of deliberate strategic choice * Taylor Pearson's expansion of John Salvatier's point that "reality has a surprising amount of detail" https://taylorpearson.me/interestingtimes/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail/ * The OODA loop / John Boyd https://thecynefin.co/a-lamb-in-wolves-clothing/ * Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey Moore), referenced implicitly via "early majority / late laggard" diffusion diagram * SWOT analysis, referenced as a "late laggard" strategy tool * Deliberate vs emergent strategy taxonomy (via JP Castlin's Mintzberg review series) * "The three Is" https://thecynefin.co/anthro-complexity-1-3 Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

143: The breadmaker trick

Bread makers don't knead dough the way a human baker does. They get to the same result via a completely different route — and that turns out to be a pretty good map for what's actually happening with AI right now. We start with brioche, end up in a crisis of professional tacit knowledge, and find a surprisingly useful frame for thinking about what machines can and can't do — and what that costs us in the long run. * Why "harness the model" is the real skill — and what that actually looks like in practice * The 50/30/10 split: surprisingly good, fine, and catastrophically bad — in the same tool (and no the maths doesn't add up) * Why test-driven development went from "boring best practice nobody does" to "the only way this works at all" * The tacit knowledge cliff: what happens in 20 years when there are no senior lawyers who did the grunt work * Explicit → explicable → tacit → relational: a spectrum that explains where AI taps out * Why scarcity and skin in the game are the two things a language model structurally cannot fake * Artisanal lawyers, peak athletes, and the industrial revolution: why commodification always leaves a pocket for the handmade For anyone trying to think clearly about AI without falling for either the hype or the backlash. References * Luca Dellanna's piece on what makes humans different from AI * Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995) – the bread maker as an example for how knowledge is encoded in processes and organisations https://www.scribd.com/document/258487259/Nonaka-I-and-Takeuchi-H-1995 * (Found after we recorded) a critique of Nonaka & Takeuchi's work on bread making machines - bread maker not as incorporation of tacit knowledge, but as fitting a social prosthesis into a rearranged world: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215439406_The_Bread-Making_Machine_Tacit_Knowledge_and_Two_Types_of_Action Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

142: Sit with it

When a hiring manager asks an unanswerable question, what if that's the whole point? In this one, Corissa brings along a Reddit thread that stopped her in her tracks. A candidate who discovered, mid-interview, that the interviewer had never once rejected someone based on their actual answer. What they were watching for was whether you'd sit with the discomfort of having no right option, or immediately reach for a safe response ... one where you try to please the interviewer. That question spirals us into the Kobayashi Maru, the art of giving feedback (and filtering feedback), why founders hold back from the conversations that would actually tell them the truth, and what it means to stop preparing the right answers and start trusting your own judgement. * The Star Trek test designed to be unwinnable — and the eejit who won anyway * Why the interviewer never rejects based on the answer itself * The golden rule for making sense of feedback that's almost always true * Why founders often make every move except the one that would actually test the idea * Why when you hear "other people would ..." it should set off alarm bells * The Red Queen effect in interviews: why every clever question eventually gets gameable * How to prepare for interviews by stopping preparing for interviews This one's for anyone who's noticed that the world keeps getting less predictable, and that "sitting with discomfort" is somehow both obvious advice and surprisingly hard to take. References * The Iron Triangle (good / cheap / fast ... pick two) * Mike Haber's Inverted Iron Triangle (bad / late / over-budget ... you can have all three!) * Neil Gaiman's feedback rule (attributed, then immediately un-attributed, could be apocryphal) * Star Trek's Kobayashi Maru scenario * The Red Queen Effect Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

141: Indifference is the default

Everyone's got a brilliant value proposition. And most of them fail. Tom's been reading a book that argues the problem isn't your messaging, your features, or your market research. The problem is that most people — most of the time — simply don't care. Indifference is the default. And you can't overcome indifference by being more persuasive. (Nor by shipping faster, dear LLM code wrangling friends.) In this one, we dig into why "unmet needs" is a nearly useless frame, what authentic demand actually looks like in the wild, and how a trucking startup found the wrong signal in all the right places. * The "not-not" principle: why "it would be nice" is almost worthless, and what you're actually hunting for * Why a massive client said "when can it be ready?", started talking money, all the signals you'd be excited about ... and still never signed the contract * Our old buddy Ignatz Semmelweis. He was right in a way that was socially unacceptable, and so he was thrown out of the establishment. 50 years later, everyone else finally got it, but only because it became socially unacceptable not to. * What six weeks of not talking to truckers reveals about the psychology of founders (and possibly all of us) * An example based on a fish finder and an accidental twist that created a breakthrough in product demand, from meh to three or four on each boat. * Sturgeon's Law, the Mom Test, and why all the right signals can still point you in the wrong direction This one's for anyone who's built something sensible that people said they wanted — and then didn't buy. References * Heart of Innovation — Merrick Furst, Matt Chanoff, Daniel Sabbah & Mark Wegman (founders of Damballa and Flashpoint incubator) http://theheartofinnovationbook.com/ [http://theheartofinnovationbook.com/] * Cedric Chin's writing on Heart of Innovation — https://commoncog.com/the-heart-of-innovation-why-startups-fail/ [https://commoncog.com/the-heart-of-innovation-why-startups-fail/] * Rob Fitzpatrick — Write Useful Books — https://writeusefulbooks.com [https://writeusefulbooks.com] * Sturgeon's Law — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law] * Goodhart's Law / Strathern's reframing — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law] * The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick — https://www.momtestbook.com [https://www.momtestbook.com] * Innovation Tactics (Tom's card deck via Pip Decks) — https://pipdecks.com/products/innovation-tactics [https://pipdecks.com/products/innovation-tactics] * Multiverse Mapping — https://multiversemapping.com [https://multiversemapping.com] Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

140: A pandemonium of stochastic parrots

Your hospital has a brilliant new security measure. Your doctors have a paper cup. Your IT team demands a new password every fortnight. Your staff have a Post-it note. Every time someone tries to make a system more secure, the system gets less secure. Tom and Corissa roam from hospital proximity sensors to vibe-coded spreadsheets, and find the same story playing out everywhere: different incentives, predictable workarounds, and a cycle that will keep going long after the technology changes. * Why the most dangerous thing about a security measure might be how annoying it is * Geoff the tinkerer, his idiosyncratic Excel spreadsheet, and what might happen when he gets access to an AI coding tool * "A pandemonium of stochastic parrots" — what frontier engineering teams are actually learning about agent swarms (and it's not what the headlines say) * The DevOps precedent: what happened to the person whose whole career was named-server maintenance, and how that rhymes with now * Why your entire product sprint team might look, from the CEO's perspective, like a very slow LLM * The one thing we can reliably predict about how AI will change organisations — even if everything else is uncertain For anyone trying to figure out where to place their bets — on career, on technology, on their team — when the only honest answer is that nobody knows. Links & references * Simon Wardley (and his models for how technology and practice co-evolve) * Clayton Christensen (Innovator's Dilemma, disruption theory) * Episode 134: Geoff's shadow spreadsheet sprawl https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/696fea603738e9e7d196e2f5 [https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/696fea603738e9e7d196e2f5] * Episode 127: The unbundling and bundling of jobs https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/6920570d4105c9a02176f2bc [https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/6920570d4105c9a02176f2bc] Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.