Trigger Strategy

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!

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: https://tomkerwin.substack.com/p/a-b-testing-aint-for-settling-your-disagreements-3653285a4377

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: https://tomkerwin.substack.com/p/are-you-trying-to-leap-directly-from

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 :)

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.

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.