In Case You Missed It ...

A collection of stuff for your earholes and eyeballs

Hola!

I’ve been doing things in places other than Substack this past couple of months, and they’re the kind of thing I think you might like. There’s a podcast, an article and a couple of videos.

👂 For your earholes

Trigger Strategy Podcast

My partner

Corissa Nunn

and I have been digging into strategy and sense-making while taking our baby for a walk. The result is Trigger Strategy Podcast. These are raw, loose, and mostly unedited conversations that each last about 20-30 minutes. Get ready to hear us (literally) thinking on our feet and sharing stories and actionable tips, peppered with gentle trolling of my “thought leadership”, amusing background noises and the odd brain fart.

There are 29 episodes out already, and the most popular so far include:

• 028: Ship an idea in an hour?
  I’d just shipped an idea in the previous hour, and we talked about it. We were both delirious with lack of sleep for this one, so it’s amazing that we nearly sound lucid.

• 017: You can’t leap directly from data to actionable insights
  This is a live annotated reading of an article from this newsletter, adding some colour and new thoughts around the edges.

• 025: Change, ready-ing and a caterpillar with wooden wings
  What if the way we try to impose change is blocking what’s needed for change to occur?

• 014: Emergent properties, self care and leafcutter ants
  A fun tour through one of the most intriguing and misunderstood aspects of complexity theory.

👁️ For your eyeballs

Article: How capable leaders navigate uncertainty and ambiguity

I was excited when the brilliant

John Cutler

suggested that we co-write an article.

He asked the question:

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?

We started bouncing ideas around in a doc at 10pm UK time, and the piece was drafted, edited and published by the very next afternoon. He’s a publishing machine.

There are 18 capabilities in the article, each with a short description plus a hiring interview style question to prompt reflection. Note: I wouldn’t recommend using these questions verbatim in an actual interview, because the questions tip off the respondent as to what answer is desirable, but I’d love to hear what you make of them.

Read How Capable Leaders Navigate Uncertainty and Ambiguity

There was also some meaty debate when the piece landed on Linkedin.

🫣 For your earholes and eyeballs

Webinar: Is it a real problem?

I did a short webinar with

Debbie Levitt

for her Delta CX channel. We talked about problems. How do we know which problems to solve? How do we “validate” problems?

I challenged some narratives about what a problem even is, and shared a particular systems lamentation that designers are especially prone to. And introduced some simple methods and ideas that can set us free.

One thought to pop in your noggin: designers often complain about having to work on “a solution that's looking for a problem”. What if our insistence on doing design “properly” is in itself a solution that’s looking for a problem?

Take a look and let me know what you think!

If you’d like to jump past the technical hitches and throat clearing:

• The group exercise starts at 4:15

• The philosophy bit starts at 8:48

• The simple techniques start at 18:43

• Q&A starts at 25:15

Video: Can I ship a new business idea in an hour?

I love helping teams get clarity and take meaningful action incredibly quickly. And people have told me the way I use simple maps to do just that is pretty cool. So I thought maybe I could turn that into a business. And so I set myself an hour to get clarity and take meaningful action, and I recorded that hour.

In this video, you can see:

• how I make Multiverse Maps to get clarity

• how I layer stories and options onto the map

• how I think through the available options to crystallise a way forward

• how I formulate an offer and draft copy and workflows.

• how I get stuck and then unstick myself by “zooming” out and in again

I’d love to hear what you make of all this, and I’ll be back soon with some more on OKRs. Promise.

Tom x