This time on Tentacles, we do something a little messy and dangerous: we put our own method through itself. That’s right: Pitch Provocations is being pitch provoked.

It's one of our experimental working-out-loud conversations, that's sometimes insightful and sometimes ridiculous.

• Can you compress 12 months of strategic learning into 3 weeks?
• Why most “market research” just creates more ideas, not clarity
• The political awkwardness of selling "painkillers not vitamins" in B2B
• Taste vs Tool belts – how do you tell the difference between someone with good "product taste" and an overconfident asshole?
• What AI can (and can’t) do for folks who want to develop their product taste
• How we’re testing ways to explain Pitch Provocations to make it easier to sell
• Why “doing all the things” is seductive but self-defeating
• Why watching someone’s face is better than any survey.

If you’ve ever struggled to explain your work, or wondered if AI is making everything worse—this one’s for you.

As mentioned in the episode, we're currently putting Pitch Provocations through itself, which means we're looking for thoughtful humans to react to a handful of our rough, probably-wrong pitches.

If you're C-suite or C-suite adjacent and you're curious about what we do (or just want a peek behind the scenes), drop us a line at tentacles@crownandreach.com. You'll help us learn—and we’ll share the playbook with you so you can steal the method.

References

• Rob Snyder's PULL framework: https://howtogrow.substack.com/p/the-pull-framework
• We talked about "Taste" in https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/we-need-to-talk-about-airbnb
• The Reach Newsletter: https://reach.crownandreach.com/
• Lake Wobegon Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#The_Lake_Wobegon_effect

Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What counts as a “stupid idea”? The "out there" one that makes everyone look at you funny, or the safe, respectable one that slowly kills your business?

We took a break from rebrand logistics and wandered up and down the road talking about how people and teams judge ideas.

Teams often close the filter way too tightly for fear of having no filter at all. We talk about the hidden risks of focus and brainstorms, why coherence matters more than consensus, and how our Pitch Provocations method helps teams safely test the uncomfortable stuff.

You can now reach us at tentacles@crownandreach.com. Thanks for walking with us x

In this episode:

• Why “there are no bad ideas!” is a well-meaning lie, and what to do instead
• The coherence trick, and using it to find your boundaries
• How to spot hidden stupidity in apparently safe ideas
• What most orgs get wrong about experimentation
• A practical method for killing pet ideas without hurting feelings

References

• JP Castlin's Strategy in Praxis, home of the article that sparked the episode https://strategyinpraxis.substack.com/
• Andrew Anderson's “You make more money when you’re wrong” idea https://cxl.com/blog/5-tactics-to-changing-how-your-organization-thinks-about-optimization/
• Pitch Provocations – Crown & Reach's lightweight testing method. Also explored way back in episode 07 https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/663109cbcff31b0012ae9326

Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We were going to record a proper episode when we discovered that Coriss'a Otter.ai app had already done the job, while in Corissa’s pocket, mid toddler-wrangling.

This micro-episode is a dramatic reading of the resulting auto-transcript. We think it's a deeply serious and often moving window into the age of AI.

No notes.

Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.