Podcast 092: Twenty Twenty (Meta) Four
Garden decking saga reframes rearchitecting of our business
Oh wow is it 2025? Where did that come from?
Some of what’s on the cards for 2025:
Events
Intro to Multiverse Mapping event – 21st January at 5pm UK time:
Been wondering about Multiverse Mapping? Know someone who should check out the multiverse but need somewhere easy to send them? This 1-hour session will introduce the concept, then give you a little practice getting started, plus time for questions and puzzles. I’m going to experiment with running this every month as a way to get new people started.Sense-making sessions to review the data and stories from the What The Heck’s Goin’ on in Tech? study. We’ll start small and then open them up. If you want to get in on the action, first share your story via the linked post then sign up to get the emails.
Thinkings
Lastly, a request:
Can you put me in touch with a C-suite person who’d be a fit for this offer:— Tired of feeling like you’re herding cats in the fog? Spend a couple of hours with me mapping your constraints and creating new options for action. (I’ve got one last free spot up for grabs. It needs to be someone at an established company with several teams, not a scrappy startup.)
What podcasts should I go on? I’m checking out options, but I’m willing to bet you listen to at least one podcast that overlaps with the kind of stuff we talk about here. Hit reply and tell me!
OK into the podcast …
Podcast 092 is a kind of wrap up of 2024.
TL;DR: a garden decking disaster becomes a metaphorical framing for rearchitecting our business.
What metaphor would you use to reframe your 2024?
How to listen:
Or search for Trigger Strategy Podcast in your pod-player of choice
Linky Goodness
Transcript
Corissa: [00:00:00] Hello there! This is Corissa and Tom on Trigger Strategy Podcast. We are digging into strategy and sensemaking while, once again, taking our almost still a baby for a walk. It's been a while.
Tom: It's been a while since he's been with us, uh, because normally he doesn't like falling asleep in the pram anymore, does he?
Corissa: No, he's now very much a curious toddler, desperate to see the world and not keen to just go to sleep in a chair and let it all pass him by. Which we salute him
Tom: for! I like to fall asleep in a chair and [00:00:30] let the world pass me by, to be honest.
Corissa: Yeah, I mean I guess it's a pleasure that comes back with age.
Corissa: Yes, you regress
Tom: to the baby state once more.
Corissa: So yeah, anyway, it's been quite a year. We are recording this on the 4th of January.
Tom: Is it the 4th of January already? Wow. 4th of January
Corissa: already, my sister's birthday.
Tom: Oh yes, of course, happy birthday sis.
Corissa: Um, and, well, we're doing a
Tom: Yeah, we wanted to just A
Corissa: slightly delayed wrap up.
Tom: It is, everybody else seems to get to their wrap up before the new year [00:01:00] comes around, you know, before the celebrations. Mm. Um,
Corissa: yeah. We like to let the dust settle, AKA we're just not quite ahead of the game enough.
Tom: Let's, let's not reveal that then. Gotta, gotta keep that secret. Um, but yeah, I mean one of the things from last year I thought was, was very cool, Was that we published many, many podcast episodes.
Corissa: We did. In fact, nearly a hundred. Nearly a hundred. A hundred was the goal. Um. A stretch goal.
Tom: Yep.
Corissa: I'm happy with 90.
Tom: Yeah, well, it was over 90.
Corissa: [00:01:30] Over 90? Wow, I'm even more happy with that.
Tom: Yeah.
Corissa: And it relates to an episode from the early days, which is Do 100 Things.
Tom: Yes, that was one of, that was one we got some good notes from, I think.
Tom: People liked that one. People
Corissa: liked it. Yeah, the TL, The TLDR is if you think you want to do something, set yourself the goal of doing it a hundred times and you will learn that you either come to hate having to make yourself do it, in which case you can abandon it without, you know, without overthinking it, or you enjoy it and you keep doing it and you [00:02:00] get better at it and it's like a virtuous circle.
Tom: It is. Yep. The key thing being, if you think you want to make a podcast, you're first. Probably several 50, 60, 70, well you'll know if you've listened to them that the first few aren't going to be very good even if you put a lot of effort in because you haven't done it enough to know what it's like.
Corissa: But the fact that you like doing it is motivation enough to keep doing it and I guess the point is if you do something a lot you can't help but improve.
Tom: Exactly. The goal
Corissa: isn't perfection to be clear.
Tom: [00:02:30] It's not, no. Which, I mean, it's hard to tell from our podcast with its high production quality. I
Corissa: know, it's really, it's really up there with the best of them, isn't
Tom: it? The background noise of cars going by. The clunkity clunk
Corissa: of the pavement, um, and the chitter chatter of a toddler if he wakes up.
Corissa: Yeah. Let's see if he, if he, uh, if he wants to share his thoughts with you today.
Tom: That's it. But yeah, if you have enjoyed the podcast, Or if you have thoughts for us that you think, hey, you should change something, um, then please get in touch. We love hearing from [00:03:00] people because, you know, you put these things, this is something that all sort of, I hate using the word, but creators, people who make stuff like podcasts or articles, they all share this experience.
Tom: When you put stuff out in the world, you just don't know actually if people are listening, if people are enjoying it, if they think you're an idiot and it's really nice whenever you hear back from somebody. So even if you don't say something nice to us. Think of someone else that you do enjoy the content of and just drop them a note and say hey Really like that episode on whatever
Corissa: it will be appreciated.
Corissa: And [00:03:30] also we do genuinely welcome the constructive Criticism type of feedback. Yes, in fact, I think there was it's one of the reasons we ended up getting a better microphone The background noise was just so loud It's just too horrendous, so invested in a better microphone, and we have made various other tweaks to the format based on feedback, so we genuinely do welcome it.
Tom: We do, yes. I used to have it as a strapline in my email, I think, that I value feedback, especially negative feedback, because most people are too polite to give it. [00:04:00]
Corissa: Exactly. Oh, and bear with me, we're walking up a hill, I seem to spend a lot of my life doing heavy breathing into a microphone. I often send voice notes to a couple of people.
Corissa: Mum pals and invariably for some reason I'm always walking up a hill. Yep. So it's like, how are you doing? This is,
Tom: this is why you're very popular.
Corissa: Yeah, it's great. People just can't get enough of it. Anyway, speaking of a wrap up. Yeah, I mean, you pointed something out the [00:04:30] other day, Tom, which I thought was very apt.
Corissa: Yes. And it was, it involves the hell hole that is our garden. As a metaphor for what our year has been like, in general. Yeah,
Tom: conceptually. So yeah, to go back to the garden.
Corissa: Let's start at the beginning.
Tom: We inherited some choices that the previous owners had made.
Corissa: We did, yeah, that's a very diplomatic way of
Tom: putting it.
Tom: And one of the things was, it's quite a nice little garden,
Corissa: north
Tom: facing, so it doesn't get loads of sun.
Corissa: But [00:05:00] secluded with lots of mature trees around the side, it's in a conservation area so lots of tall trees in the area. Which is very nice for kind of foresty vibes and privacy and all that jazz.
Corissa: Exactly,
Tom: as well as having to do lots of leaf blowing. All the time. Um, but yeah, then they had also chosen to put in some decking. A
Corissa: rather large amount of very grey decking.
Tom: Very grey. Very
Corissa: grey, very wooden.
Tom: Yeah. And it was, it felt quite oppressive, but we didn't want to invest in changing it right now. [00:05:30] We thought, that'll do as a baseline.
Tom: Exactly. All we need to do is put up some railings to make it safe. Because it was, you could just fall off the edge of it onto concrete, and And with a toddler who's exploring the world and elderly relatives who aren't quite as nimble on their feet, it was very dangerous.
Corissa: Exactly. One of the platforms, well it was the only platform of decking, was well over a metre tall.
Corissa: Um, and I nearly walked off the edge many a time, so, uh, so that, we thought that was, that's it, we just need to put some railings up, job's a good'un. A weekend's work, [00:06:00] no problemo.
Tom: Ordered some railings, marvellous, and my, my dad and my brother who are very, very good at this sort of thing, they came to help, uh, and so they, they came and started investigating, well how, what's it like if we try to start fitting the, the foundations for the railings into the decking that's there.
Corissa: Right, yeah, they just needed to sort of screw some, deep screws into the wood, or so they thought.
Tom: So they thought, because what they found was, as they went in, the wood underneath was just like wet tissue paper and was just falling apart. So [00:06:30] they lifted up the decking and found that because it had been built not particularly brilliantly,
Corissa: it was
Tom: just all rotten underneath.
Corissa: Rotting away, yeah, it wasn't, there was no way for the wood to dry out after it had rained, so it was all just Damp all the time, and there weren't enough support, I mean I forget the technical details but you're supposed to put in a certain number of supports after a certain distance and they haven't done anywhere near, like, the required amount.
Corissa: Nowhere enough. Even if it hadn't been rotten it would still have been a ticking time bomb.
Tom: Exactly, it was, and that was [00:07:00] it, it was a ticking time bomb. They, they started out by thinking, oh we can salvage some of this and we'll just fix up the bits that are the worst and then relay the, the boards on top.
Corissa: And
Tom: then every layer that we dug down, it was more and more rot, more and more rubbish. It
Corissa: was, and it was one of those rare moments where like, I think it's safe to say I'm slightly more pessimistic than you are. Yeah. And very early on in the process I was a bad feeling about this. I don't think any of it's going to be salvageable and you, and you and your, you know, your [00:07:30] parents were like, ah, let's see, let's see what, you know.
Corissa: See what we can do with it, but in the end I was vindicated. You were vindicated. And I'm sad about it, but I was vindicated.
Tom: Yeah. And it took a few months really to get to the bottom of it, didn't we, but we ended up having to rip the whole lot out, um, lots of fun with the reciprocating saw and various crowbars and other tools, just ripping up this old decking, which most of it just fell apart.
Corissa: And actually, I mean, this is where, um. It starts to turn into a happier [00:08:00] tale because it was pretty satisfying work. Yep. Um, compared to the sort of ephemeral online consulting type work. That's true. Where it's kind of ongoing and you can't necessarily see it, it's not very tangible. The process of ripping up decking, carrying planks around, loved it.
Tom: Very physical.
Corissa: Absolutely loved it, broke a sweat and everything. Yeah,
Tom: oh yeah, lovely. And what was really nice was underneath that pretty ugly decking was a rather beautiful old wall.
Corissa: Yes, a, a [00:08:30] sort of a traditional Dorset stone, what's the name of the stone? Purbeck, isn't it? Purbeck stone. Purbeck stone.
Corissa: Beautiful old wall, um, that had just been, um, Papered over essentially. Yeah, covered over for I'm not sure why. So that was a real gem. By peeling back the layers of crud, we found something beautiful and have now begun the process of restoring that wall to its former glory. Exactly. And coming up with a slightly different plan for the garden.
Corissa: Yeah.
Tom: And we've, we've decided then, we've rejigged it so it's going to be much more More [00:09:00] durable and long term, it's, what we've done now in terms of putting in some more decking is with a, with an eye to the future so it's not going to rot away and it's going to be well ventilated and suitable. And all that jazz, yes.
Corissa: Composite, not plain old wood. Anyway, this has turned into a very long winded metaphor. It has. I promise there's a point to it. Yeah, well. And the point is.
Tom: The point is that whole process of ripping up the decking and finding all this out is and deciding what to do and building something better [00:09:30] took the best part of a year, didn't it?
Tom: I mean, it's still ongoing now, but we're seeing the end in sight and to me that feels very much, or it just connected immediately with what it's felt like trying to run our business in 2024, where we thought we'd got to a good place, you know, and it was like, it wasn't perfect, but we could start building on top, putting up railings.
Corissa: And then as
Tom: we started to add those things in, it just, the foundations didn't feel particularly [00:10:00] solid when it came to the offers we were making and the sort of, the people we were talking to.
Corissa: And then suddenly everything kind of came crumbling down, didn't it? It did
Tom: a bit, yeah. So we've
Corissa: It was all rotten underneath.
Corissa: It's not quite that bad.
Tom: No.
Corissa: Um, but there has been a process now of dismantling and re mantling, Re mantling, it
Tom: is, yes,
Corissa: it's a weird word. This is a very steep hill.
Tom: Yeah, yeah, you do forgive us. Um, but yeah, yeah, dismantling and then re mantling, re thinking what [00:10:30] is the, the structure underneath. the business that we're building.
Corissa: Yeah. Which
Tom: is very cool.
Corissa: Yeah. And I guess it's, I mean, I guess the buzzword of 2025 was adaptive adaptability. It was, well
Tom: 2024. Sorry
Corissa: 2024. Yes. My God. I'm, I've just wiped out a year of our lives.
Tom: Yes. Tempting, but yes.
Corissa: And I think it's been, Oh my goodness. It has been a [00:11:00] process of. Adapting our plans based on, like, the unwelcome reality.
Tom: Yes.
Corissa: Which is something that is hard enough in your personal life. Businesses have to do this all the time as well.
Tom: Oh yeah, they do.
Corissa: And it's exponentially harder.
Tom: I think, well, yeah it is isn't it, yeah. Because it's, you've got more sort of structures, you can't just make a change quickly. Exactly,
Corissa: there's more people involved.
Corissa: Yeah. When it's a, you know, even if it's just a team of a few people, that suddenly, you know, Four, [00:11:30] five, six opinions to balance. Yeah. Sets of needs, etc. Hopes, dreams, fears.
Tom: Exactly. Yeah. And it's, I think another theme of 2024 was around energy gradients and making the things that we want to have happen easier.
Tom: Um, so yeah, make the energy cost of virtue less than the energy cost of sin. I
Corissa: love that. How does that relate to the decking?
Tom: So one of the things that we did, that we chose to do, [00:12:00] immediately when you step out of our back door there's a big drop down into a sort of weird gully and then you step up again onto the lawn over a brick wall.
Corissa: Now
Tom: when the people who put the previous decking in, they were like, Put it in they kept this sort of weird step down step up idea But while also destroying some of the brick walls, you couldn't leave it. We couldn't put it back to the brick wall as it was But it wasn't workable either and it was all going rotten and soft soggy and squishy [00:12:30] But the thing is stepping out down and then up creates a little energy gradient that makes it slightly harder to go into the garden.
Tom: Not loads harder, but it's just that little bit of friction, isn't it? It's
Corissa: a little bit of friction and a little bit of a trip hazard which has caught us all, you know, by surprise.
Tom: A little bit, yes, and a bit terrifying for the toddler, falling onto concrete and stuff.
Corissa: So it is, it's surprising small the bit of friction has to be to actually have quite a big impact on your daily life.
Tom: Exactly, so what we've done, [00:13:00] well we did a little test, it was fun, we did a little probe, didn't we, my dear? Dad actually came up with the idea, hey, do you know you could have this decking just straight across from the back door to the garden bit, to the grass. And he just used some bits of the old decking to mock it up.
Tom: And then we tried that out for a couple of weeks and it was lovely. And so that was enough information to say, actually, yeah, that would be worth us building something proper that would give us the same free flow into the garden.
Corissa: Right, that gave us the window into the fact that So the cost [00:13:30] was, like, to do it properly, it really felt quite painful and we just didn't think it was at all going to be worth, worth it given the fact that.
Corissa: It hadn't been the most lucrative of years,
Tom: but
Corissa: then having that, I don't know what you'd call it, a safe to fail probe? It was a
Tom: safe to fail probe!
Corissa: Of just seeing what it felt like to be able to get across that little patch of land. It was like, wow, okay, yeah, we know we want that. This made a material difference.
Corissa: It made a material difference, and it changed the value of the work in our eyes, which was amazing!
Tom: [00:14:00] Yeah! And that, that's something we're always exploring safety fail probes in the business side, aren't we, and looking at ways to, to show a little bit of value for very little effort, uh, in order to, to change the landscape in the eyes of clients and partners.
Corissa: Mmm, and would you say, so your Now that you're on the, this is the third release of your Master, uh, Master Multiverse Mapping course. Yep. What was your, which is [00:14:30] now actually 2025 looking up somewhat, people are buying it, it's wonderful. Yeah. What was your first safe to fail probe for that? Can you think back to what it was?
Tom: Ooh, so the very first safe to fail probe, So I mean it started life as something that I would use with lots of teams that I was working with and people telling me things like you should, you should make Twitch streams of this, of you doing this, because it's really cool and it just providing value very, very quickly [00:15:00] and exposing the landscape to people very, very quickly in a way that I think a lot of people I worked with found helpful, not everybody, some people don't want to know
Corissa: Well yeah, nothing's ever for everybody.
Corissa: If you try and please everyone, you're going to have a unbelievably bad time. Yes.
Tom: Yeah, that is the famous quote, isn't it? I like it. Um, so yeah, then I did a safe to fail probe by doing a maven course about it, which started out as a, that starts out [00:15:30] with a safe to fail probe. where you have to do a survey of your audience to see if enough people might be interested.
Tom: Oh,
Corissa: hang on, just to check I've understood, so MAVEN actually, as part of their process, they insist that you do a survey to like, to kind of see what level of interest there is. Exactly, yeah. Amazing.
Tom: Because they're looking for course market fit, to use a sort of slightly silly buzzword. Yeah, and so they want to know that you're, you know, Figuring out your course that way.
Tom: It's really common, I think, with people who make courses, [00:16:00] myself involved, involved, included, you, you want to teach the stuff that you're excited about, and, God, I have this with dance as well, the stuff that I'm excited about isn't necessarily the stuff that the students are excited about, or framed in a way that the students get excited about it.
Corissa: Yeah, you've got to kind of have that overlap, and it's a sort of frustrating fact of life that there isn't always overlap. Yeah. You might have something that you love doing, but nobody wants it. I mean, keep doing [00:16:30] it to amuse yourself, but, you know, just, it's not always workable to turn it into a business.
Tom: That is the challenge, yeah. And then, uh, the, the, taking the other extreme, I think, where you're just sort of pandering to what the market wants but it's not something that you're personally interested in. I think that's a recipe for a quite a sad cold life isn't it?
Corissa: Absolutely, I mean that's the other end of the spectrum isn't it?
Corissa: It's um, do something that makes money but also makes you miserable. It's the lesser of two evils. [00:17:00] I don't know, it depends, depends how much uh Uh, how many resources you've got behind you?
Tom: It does, yeah. Well then you get into the world, we're back at do a hundred thing. Can you do a hundred of those sorts of courses that you're not really interested in doing?
Tom: Can you keep up the marketing and the, you know, the excitement for it? Yeah. If actually you, it just kills your soul. Um, so it is, I don't know if you have a choice. I think they're just, some people happen to be more interested in [00:17:30] stuff that is more commercially viable. That's lucky for them.
Corissa: Yeah, yeah, and luck plays a big role.
Corissa: Bear with me. Do we continue up the steep hill or do I think we go back the way we came. Even though it's very windy. Yeah.
Tom: I'm shielding the mic now so we should be okay.
Corissa: Do you remember when all the little foam hats blew off? Oh yeah. Oh those were the days. That was a good moment. We
Tom: lost the foam hat into the sea.
Corissa: Bad, bad situation. Anyway, um, Okay, so, safe to fail [00:18:00] probes.
Tom: Uh, yeah, and, oh yeah, that was it, the safe to fail probes. So yeah, then there've been several probes with that multiverse mapping thing. It started life as all about teaching you pivot triggers, and then I found that just the concept of pivot triggers was too much for a lot of people to jump straight to, because it requires you to have, I think, a model in your head already that you share with your team, Of what behaviors your success depends on and how you're gonna measure [00:18:30] them with metrics and which ones are the most important, et cetera, et cetera.
Corissa: Mm. I see. And I found a lot of teams
Tom: actually couldn't figure that out.
Corissa: Right. So there's like, there was just this, this kind of bar of, of assumed prior knowledge, which a lot of people just weren't at. They, they just didn't have that. Exactly. That's really interesting. I feel like I hadn't connected the dots that that was going on for you.
Tom: Mm, no. It was, it sort of bumbled along in the background and I only really realized and made that connection later. from talking with a bunch of people. I spoke with people who just [00:19:00] had seen the idea of pivot triggers and were like, yes, and then went and ran off and used it with their teams. And then I spoke with someone at the end of last year who had read the pivot triggers article six years ago, used it with their product team, got themselves promoted to like director of product and VP of product and stuff like that, and was now trying to apply it across multiple teams in a new company.
Tom: And I'd never heard of them or heard anything about them. That was cool. So that was nice. Um. But yeah, then you get back to [00:19:30] this, this thing where multiverse mapping emerged from realising people need a bit more scaffolding a lot of the time to build that shared understanding of what is it we're trying to do, what behaviours do we depend on, which of those is the most critical, the most, where do we have the most uncertainty.
Tom: There we go.
Corissa: Walking in the road in a car is very close to us. Anyway, yeah, so, so you kind of intentionally decided to, uh, reposition [00:20:00] this thing to a, an audience with a lower amount of prior knowledge.
Tom: Yes, I think that's fair to say. And also tried to reposition it away from being all about the tool itself.
Tom: I think I still haven't quite got there, if you know what I mean. Because I'm still, it's still taught or framed as Master Multiverse. So it's not framed as get outcome.
Corissa: Yeah, I mean, this is something that we've talked about endlessly over the years. Yeah, I think, [00:20:30] it's not like, focusing on the outcome is a powerful way to frame a message.
Corissa: It's just, it's not the only way to do it, so it's not like if you don't do that, then you're failing. Like, you're failing yourself, or you're failing your audience, necessarily. Yeah. There's definitely, it's a viable approach to just come up with something that sounds intriguing. Yeah! Uh, and, and, if you make the thing sound like it's gonna be fun to do, that is, it can be enough to get people involved, right?
Tom: That's true, yes, and people [00:21:00] do seem to be more intrigued by Multiverse mapping as a fun idea. Multiverse
Corissa: mapping, it's good, you can kind of get your teeth into it, like visually it has a lot of punch to it.
Tom: Yeah, whereas pivot triggers, it's quite catchy, but as you've pointed out many times, nobody really wants to pivot.
Tom: It's
Corissa: like the opposite. Opposite of the outcome that you, that you, you hope for, right? Yeah. Like the idea of having to pivot is kind of, for a lot of people, it's really a last resort. Yeah. They, they'd rather go down with their shit.
Tom: Yes. And that's, that's been the thing with pivot [00:21:30] triggers the whole way is it's trying to help you to fight some cost fallacy, but often people are happy to just sit with the, some cost fallacy and carry on.
Corissa: Yeah. Which, I mean, we've been guilty of that as well, so not to sound like, not to be uppity about it, but it affects everyone, including us.
Tom: Yeah, I mean, it affected me massively. Going back to one of those early probes where I was teaching the MAVEN cohort based course about, uh, what was it called?
Tom: Innovate confidently with pivot triggers. And [00:22:00] I, I had, uh, a good number of students for the first cohort. And I thought, this is good. Great. Let's up the marketing and do another cohort. And I had fewer students for the second cohort with more marketing. So I thought, right, more marketing. The signals are all there.
Tom: It's not working. I did more marketing and got even fewer students for the third cohort. And then I thought, I finally had to accept that something's not right about the way I'm framing this.
Corissa: I think there's something to be said for giving it a fair chance. [00:22:30] Oh, are we switching sides? We're switching
Tom: sides because the wind is difficult.
Corissa: Yeah, I think often people give up too soon and actually you might need to just do it again but like slightly better and do it again but slightly better because you learn something every time you, you, you try to launch something. you So, I think, I mean, not to, you know, not to be too kind of down on yourself.
Tom: Not to, not to soften the blow on myself.
Corissa: I think, I'm glad, I will say I'm glad that you accepted reality when you did. [00:23:00] But I think if you hadn't tested it at least twice, it would have been, maybe you'd have missed something huge, right? Like, I think Totally, it's exactly what I say
Tom: to teams and what most teams who use pivot triggers end up doing, is the first thing doesn't work.
Corissa: And it can be really disheartening. It can. Yeah. And you think, let's just Throw it all in the bin.
Tom: Yes. Um, or, so there's two mistakes I think. One is to immediately throw it all in the bin, and the other is to do it all again exactly the same. Whereas the best thing is to learn, [00:23:30] adapt a little bit, change something, because you've now, by doing it, you've learned something, so you're going to do it differently the next time automatically.
Tom: And then see how that goes. And then typically, try it three times, is a good rule of thumb.
Corissa: Mm
Tom: hmm. Yeah.
Corissa: Yeah.
Tom: And the trick really is making those three times so cheap and fast that it doesn't eat up all your resources or create too much pain when it doesn't work out. But [00:24:00] yeah, it's not an easy sell I don't think still.
Tom: The idea that you're going to try something expecting that it's going to fail.
Corissa: Mmm, no indeed, but that's why that's no longer the lead message. Yeah. Ah, and I, I think it's also a lesson in, like, like I said before, you know, you can't please everyone. Um, but that, that's kind of like, that's just the start of, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Corissa: Not only can you not please everyone, but you need to really intentionally know who you are trying to serve, and [00:24:30] who are you, who, who's not gonna want what you're selling. Yes. And why. Yeah. And like, also acknowledging that, like, I think it's, it's easy to think that you've done that mental arithmetic, but actually deep down all you're doing is thinking, well, the people who don't want what I've got, it's because they're stupid, or because they, they You know, they don't see the value in it or whatever, but actually that's not good enough.
Corissa: You need to really, like, always start from the default position of assuming that people have very sensible reasons for why they do or don't do what they do.
Tom: Yes. This is something that I [00:25:00] got from Uh, Eli Goldratt's The Choice, I think he says. If your explanation for why people are doing something is that they are stupid, bad, or lazy, then you have a bad explanation.
Corissa: Yes. That's a much neater way of saying it.
Tom: Ha ha! Well, I mean, he did spend a lot of time doing clever things and writing clever things. Oh,
Corissa: yes. Well, Eli.
Tom: But yeah, and, uh, that's a nice lead in because I did do that, that process of thinking through well, hang on a minute, why would somebody not want to do multiverse mapping?
Tom: And there are [00:25:30] genuinely legitimate reasons, which I don't think are disparaging to them. I think they're perfectly legitimate. So one is you might just not be comfortable at all with the sort of visual 2D facilitation type approach that it relies on. If you really hate working in something like Miro or Mural or on a whiteboard, you're not going to like it.
Tom: And it's not going to be a way that you're going to work well. And I've worked with people who are very smart who don't like working like that. And that's fair enough, you know, so [00:26:00] don't try to use methods that are going to go against your, your natural propensity. Right, it
Corissa: reminds me of something we were talking about just yesterday, in fact, which was to do with, to do with our moonlighting as dance teachers.
Corissa: Yeah. And, uh, Tom has a spreadsheet. Um, I'm like talking through gritted teeth here. You're sweating. I'm bleeding from the eyes. Um, he's got a spreadsheet which He is happy to maintain, aren't you? You think it, it does the job for you. You've tried to explain to me how it [00:26:30] works and how you do this except when this happens and then you do that.
Corissa: Anyway, it's evolved
Tom: because classes are messy.
Corissa: It makes me want to cry. Yeah.
Tom: Um, and
Corissa: I'm, I just need something in an app. I just, I can't be trying to do this spreadsheet while you're also welcoming people into the class. You've got lots of people trying to talk to you all at the same time. I, I'm not generally that comfortable in spreadsheets to begin with.
Corissa: It's just not the way my brain works. Yeah. So anyway, so that was just a kind of, it made for a very interesting conversation where Tom was like, you just, what do you mean [00:27:00] it's, it doesn't make sense to you? And I was like, what do you mean it doesn't make you want to cry? Uh, so it was a quite an eye opening exchange of perspectives.
Tom: It certainly is. And it's, it's ironic because when it comes to working in design and product type stuff, spreadsheets are my nemesis. I cannot deal with spreadsheets. Um, and there's a certain sort of product manager who just loves putting things in spreadsheets. Because I think it gives you the illusion of, um, certainty in some ways.
Tom: It's quite [00:27:30] concrete what's in a spreadsheet. You can put numbers on it and do sums with it. And I don't think about product work that way. I do think about accounting for dancing. Classes that way. Somebody who's either been to the class or not, you can write that down in a spreadsheet.
Corissa: Maybe because you are, you, the people who go, you're familiar with more, you're, bleh, you are more familiar with the way that it works and therefore it makes more sense to you.
Corissa: I used to use a spreadsheet for my freelance accounting. You did, you
Tom: ran your whole [00:28:00] business on that.
Corissa: I was perfectly happy, it wasn't my favourite thing to do, but it didn't quite make me want to cry.
Tom: No.
Corissa: Anyway, we digress.
Tom: It's a classic thing in every business, it just reminded me, there's always one person who made the spreadsheet that the whole business runs off
Corissa: and
Tom: they can't be fired because no one else understands it.
Corissa: Make yourself that person, people. That's the secret to happiness.
Tom: The top tip buried in this episode. Um, but yeah, so that was one of the don't use multiverse mapping if types. Conditions. Another one would [00:28:30] be, it's perfectly reasonable for you to be, say, a founder who has a very strong vision and you want to get everyone else to come and join you on that vision.
Tom: What you don't want to do is have, uh, emergence happening. You don't want this to be something you're doing collaboratively with a team that then don't use multiverse mapping because multiverse mapping is all about understanding it collaboratively and letting the, The ideas emerge from the conditions that you're dealing with.
Corissa: Right, and speaking of, [00:29:00] I've just thought of another aspect of the decking metaphor that might be worth talking about. Oh yes! Which is, so, when we ordered the composite decking, we had ordered what we thought was going to be an ivory colour and an anthracite grey colour to match the windows. We had. And then, lo and behold, When it was delivered, and I went into the garage several days after it had been delivered, I was like, my god, it's black!
Corissa: What has gone wrong? This is, this is a disaster! Oh no, we're gonna have to send it back, etc. Anyway, once the initial panic had [00:29:30] subsided, and we, long story, I won't go into the details, but we couldn't actually send it back because it was already in exchange for the railings that we no longer needed.
Corissa: Anyway, long story. We were stuck with this black decking and I was like actually it's a creative constraint. How can we take this black decking that doesn't really match what's there, how can we make it work? How do we work with this unexpected turn of events and And I think there's that aspect of like, just trying to make it fun.
Corissa: Like when the unexpected happens, [00:30:00] how can you challenge yourself to make it work?
Tom: I like that. Did you, did you feel yourself telling yourself different stories? As you did it by any chance?
Corissa: Oh, I did. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm probably a bit of a catastrophizer, so I know, but I'm quite aware of it now. And I'm sort of working with myself to sort of, Stop that happening so much.
Corissa: And, and yeah, so I kind of noticed, I was like, you know, like my default reaction was, this is going to look ridiculous. Uh, [00:30:30] it's cost us loads of money and it's going to look ridiculous. What a, what a palaver. And then I was like, actually, no, like maybe it won't look ridiculous or maybe, maybe it will look ridiculous.
Corissa: And we're going to have to change something else in the garden to make it not look ridiculous. You know, maybe it's something where we have to paint some of the. The, the, some of the, what are they called, RSJs.
Tom: Oh yeah, yeah.
Corissa: Uh, maybe we're going to have to, I don't know, put in some Put in a plant
Tom: pot in the right colour.
Tom: Put
Corissa: in a plant pot in the right colour. Yeah. So I, [00:31:00] no, it's exactly, I did kind of cycle through telling different stories about what it, how it might turn out and what we might do about
Tom: it. Yeah. Which is, it ties beautifully back into multiverse mapping, because that's, the whole sort of idea is that with your team you use these.
Tom: These mapping methods and you get signals back about oh god, this has come back and they're all black instead of anthracite grey, it's all going to look silly. You're telling yourself a story about that which is, oh no, this is a disaster [00:31:30] now, that's no good. But then you can choose to tell other stories like, oh well maybe we can make use of this, maybe we can deliberately redesign things to fit this.
Tom: And what you start to do is create options and what you just described doing is creating more options for action which would end up Being something potentially better than what we would have had in the first place.
Corissa: Yeah, and certainly it's going to be unique.
Tom: It certainly is that. If
Corissa: nothing else, it's going to be unique.
Tom: So we're going to lean into that. We want unique.
Corissa: Be weird. [00:32:00]
Tom: Be weird, yeah.
Corissa: Be more weird. Is a viable path of action always.
Tom: Yeah! Let's say that's true. Well, it's the only choice we've got. So yeah, so yeah, there you go. The metaphor of the decking all coming to pieces. I think we'll do other episodes, won't we?
Tom: Won't we? Won't we, won't we? We'll do other episodes where we
Corissa: Tom's dehydrated. I can tell. I can tell why he's getting dehydrated because he literally, his brain just [00:32:30] shrivels in front of your eyes.
Tom: And it starts being like a, one of those robots in a movie that's running out of power or whatever. Um, yeah, so we'll do other episodes perhaps where we talk about the, um, you know, the new positioning, our new foundations that we're building.
Tom: laying for the business. Um, yeah. But with that, I think, what else would you like to say from 2024? What else ties into that, that metaphor for you?
Corissa: Good riddance. Good riddance to bad decking. [00:33:00] Yes. Um, I think, no, it's been a, I do like a good metaphor. I think I would say it's generally a useful exercise to do for yourself.
Corissa: Like humans need to make sense of things. We make sense of things quite often through stories. Particularly things that are really difficult, how do you turn it into a story that makes it feel meaningful? Um, you can always do that, like there's always an infinite number of stories that you could tell.
Corissa: Yeah. And I found that it is a lifeline. Yeah. So if you're feeling [00:33:30] a bit crappy about 2024, uh, look for a metaphor in your daily life. Yeah. Do you have something going on in the garden, for instance? Um, yeah. But yeah, just, uh, have a play around with it as a, as a fun little diversion. Yeah,
Tom: we'd love to hear about it as well if you want to share it with us.
Tom: Do send in your, your metaphor. Your 2024 metaphor.
Corissa: And with that
Tom: 2020 metaphor.
Corissa: Oh my god! 2020 metaphor. There we go, that's the title for the podcast. Bye for [00:34:00] now!