Trigger Strategy – Details, episodes & analysis

The 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.

• Mushfiqa Monica Jalamuddin - the Estuarine coach you’re looking for
• Estuarine Mapping
• Multiverse Mapping (free course)
• Venkatesh Rao’s Gervais Principle
• Jeffrey Pfeffer’s Leadership BS
• Brendan Reid’s Stealing the Corner Office
• Luca Dellanna’s 100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late

00:00 Introduction

00:28 What is High Agency?

01:10 The Serenity Prayer

02:00 Estuarine Mapping is the Serenity Prayer in map form

03:45 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 things

08:09 Tools to create higher agency if you want that – including Multiverse Mapping

13:01 What if the traits we want in leaders are not the traits that get you promoted?

17:31 A magic question for you to use

18:34 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”

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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

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We recorded this one on a whim and we didn't have our microphone with a little hat on it, so the wind noise makes a guest appearance. Apologies – return to quality sound soon.

Corissa grabbed a snippet from an article:

And this inspired us to talk through effectual thinking. We go on a blustery journey through chefs in high-end experimental kitchens, John Boyd's Snowmobiling, Mr Beast, Steve Jobs, Estuarine Framework and Small Bets.

The big question: can effectual thinking give you a happier, healthier way to operate, or is it just the case that, as Andrew Wilkinson put it, "most highly successful people are “just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity”?

Linky goodness:

Sasha Chapin's article: https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/our-perfume-line-is-here

Cedric Chin's Common Cog: https://commoncog.com/when-action-beats-prediction/

Vaughn Tan's Uncertainty Mindset: https://uncertaintymindset.org/

Snowmobiling podcast episode: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/072-granularity-part-2-snowmobiling

Do 100 Thing podcast episode: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/043-do-100-thing

Innovation Tactics: https://bit.ly/innovation-10

Small Bets: https://smallbets.com/

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A live thinking through of the next chunk in our series of articles about the Vision Chasm – that gulf between the glorious future people are talking about and the reality of where you are today.

In this episode we look at situations where a Vision is unreachable because it's actually deceptive – either deliberate deception to keep everyone looking the other way while people deploy a secret strategy; or accidental self-deception because your reality has shifted but your narratives haven't caught up.

We talk through a few stories from our past.

1) A company workshop where trying to crystallise a vision of the future fell apart - because nobody was ready/able to be honest about the true direction of the company. Still clinging to a cultural heritage that was no longer a fit for their market position?

2) A deep misunderstanding between a C-suite and design team – talking past one another because we were operating in fundamentally different worlds. A third party was able to show us why we were stuck in loggerheads. Looking back, we can see how daft we were being. But could we have done things differently at the time?

3) How the misunderstanding played out when the C-suite brought in an external agency. In one way, it was a disaster that made a mess and broke some hearts. In another way, it was a success that broke the deadlock and massively moved things forward for the company.

References:

• Vision Chasm Part I: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/061-tumbling-into-the-vision-chasm
• Vision Chasm Part II: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/066-feeling-the-edges-of-the-vision-chasm
• 2D Comparison / Card Sifting method:

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All credit to friend of the pod Pete Shaw for the "Founder mode sounds like brat summer" observation.

Founder Mode triggered a beefstorm on LinkedIn, so we take a little stroll around the topic and share our takes. 3 parts nuance, 2 parts spicy, 1 long run-on sentence where Tom gets lost and forgets what he was trying to say.

Topics include alignment, coherence, intuition, taste and more.

References:

• Paul Graham's Founder Mode
• Our article We need to talk about Airbnb

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In this episode, we zoom back in time to a situation when a load of meetings were frustrating people at this one company. Tom used Snowmobiling with a small team to break down the meetings into smaller pieces and then remix those pieces in a new way. We share some of the details and pitfalls along the way.

This same decompose/recombine approach can be used in lots of different situations where you need to find something new. Because everything new is really just novel recombinations of existing stuff.

We read out the steps on the Snowmobiling card (Innovation Tactics) – the exact instructions you can follow to harness the power of the remix.

References:

• Everything is a Remix
• Austin Kleon's Keep Going
• John Boyd's Destruction and Creation
• Snowmobiling card from Innovation Tactics: Front | Back
• Innovation Tactics: https://bit.ly/innovation-10

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Today, we start by adding some corrections to terminology we used in episode 70, which will be confusing if you haven't listened to that one. But it doesn't take long, and then we get into our main topic, which is granularity. When you work with too coarse a granularity, you can find yourself stuck or confused about what to do. When you work with too fine a granularity, you can quickly find yourself overwhelmed, drowning in data, paralysed by too many options. The magic is to find the sweet spot, where you break things down just enough to create good options for action.

We talk through ASHEN as a typology for decomposing people or roles to a more legible and actionable level of granularity, and Corissa tries it out for real with one of her old bosses.

Links

ASHEN on the Cynefin wiki: https://cynefin.io/wiki/ASHEN

Article about stages of companies vs different people's natural propensities: https://newsletter.thewayofwork.com/p/stage-fright

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Q. What do these three situations have in common? Taking a friend for a lobster dinner, business strategy workshops, and personal coaching.

A. They all feature in this episode as examples of how constraints, constructors and actants play out.

The main chunk of this session is us talking through Tom's personal experience being 1:1 coached using Estuarine Mapping. We found this enormously enlightening, and we're excited to share.

If you've been looking for definitions or examples of constraints, constructors and actants, then you're in the right place.

Links and resources:

• The article about unfolding: https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/unfolding
• Coach Mushfiqa: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mushfiqajamaluddin/
• More about Estuarine Mapping: https://triggerstrategy.com/estuarine-mapping-2-half-day-pre-strategy-workshop-for-execs

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In which we coin the word "bungus" ...

If you've ever complained about misalignment, or rallied people with the cry that "we need to get aligned", then this one's for you. Of course the feeling of alignment is a pleasant one, but what if you're in one of the situations where seeking alignment is actually hurting you?

Corissa and Tom unpack the concept of alignment, including some discussion about different kinds of alignment and misalignment, some stories from the real world about situations where strategic misalignment can be good, and some references to our episode about the bees (episode 44: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/044-the-one-with-the-bees)

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