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

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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.

Why is it so hard to start something — whether it’s a blog post, a new product, or a strategic shift?

In this episode of Tentacles, we read out a note from Henrik Karlsson about the fear and freedom and unfolding in first drafts.

We see how this links with journaling, testing app loops, multiverse mapping, design sprints, and what poultry farming can teach us about intuition.

Learning in public, making peace with mess, and pulling the gold back out of garbage.

• Why your first draft should go straight in the bin — and with joy
• How product teams get trapped in “perfect plans” and miss the real work
• What chick sexing can teach us about tacit knowledge and intuition
• How to test your new business idea with words and a Sharpie
• The subtle trap of fear disguised as “planning”
• Why your best intro might be hidden halfway down the page
• A reframe of user testing that makes it feel less like judgment and more like treasure hunting

• Henrik Karlsson https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz, especially the essay Looking for Alice https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/looking-for-alice
• Sasha Chapin essay https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/if-you-have-writers-block-maybe-you
• Multiverse Mapping, a visual collaborative process for mapping and stress-testing strategic intent https://multiversemapping.com/
• Design Sprints, originally from Google Ventures, covered in the book Sprint by Jake Knapp
• 750 Words 750words.com, a site for daily stream-of-consciousness journaling
• Design Testing Methods like transcribing live interviews, paper prototyping with Sharpies, copy-first testing
• “Write drunk, edit sober” often misattributed to Hemingway
• Chick sexing, the practice of identifying baby chicken gender, often cited in intuition training
• Hard Test, Easy Life https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/stop-polishing-turd-products-with
• Pivot Triggers, Crown & Reach’s approach to structured learning from unexpected results
• Innovation Tactics Pip Deck https://pipdecks.com/products/innovation-tactics

Find out more about our work at crownandreach.com

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

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

How do you know what to build when you're surrounded by opinions, uncertainty, and the seductive chaos of a big idea? In this episode, we tackle a listener’s question about testing product ideas, avoiding overbuild, and learning fast—without fooling yourself. Along the way, we revisit an obscure PlayStation metaphor, share painful lessons from financial services UX, and lay out a practical path to avoid launching yet another bloated Figma-instead-of-Illustrator mistake.

• Why most "customer interviews" are secretly fear-dressed-as-research
• The difference between designing with someone vs for someone
• How to spot when your idea is turning into a Katamari Damacy chaos ball
• The simple mental shift that helps avoid product bloat
• What the “hard test, easy life” mantra looks like in practice
• Why your slick UX might be hiding a terrifying mess
• A 48-hour rule to force real-world contact before you overthink it

References:

• Multiverse Mapping, our framework for co-evolving ideas with real-world signals https://multiversemapping.com/
• David Ogilvy “People don’t think what they feel, don’t say what they think, and don’t do what they say.”
• Katamari Damacy – surreal PlayStation game where you roll a ball that picks up stuff and grows absurdly large [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy]
• Figma vs Adobe Illustrator, as a metaphor for building lightweight, use-first tools vs bloated, fully featured ones
• Curse of Knowledge, the cognitive bias where experts struggle to imagine what it’s like not to know something
• Noah Kagan’s 48-hour challenge – get a paying customer within 48 hours of an idea. From Million Dollar Weekend https://noahkagan.com/mdwbook/
• Hard Test, Easy Life https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/stop-polishing-turd-products-with
• Innovation Tactics Pip Deck https://pipdecks.com/products/innovation-tactics
• Safe-to-fail probes – idea from Dave Snowden https://cynefin.io/wiki/Safe_to_fail_probes

Find out more about our work at crownandreach.com/

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

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

Hands up, who else loves a spot of brand-flavoured navel-gazing?

Two years ago we picked the company name Trigger Strategy Group in a last-minute scramble for our first client project. The name has, shall we say, one or two issues. (On the upside, it was a perfect example of Hard Test Easy Life: if you can make something work despite its flaws, you know you might be onto something.) But it was about time we gave things some proper thought.

• How naming a company in 20 minutes can haunt you for 2 years
• The surprising violence baked into “trigger strategy” (thanks, game theory)
• The difference between command, control, and cephalopods
• What bees, psychiatric hospitals, and chatGPT have in common

In short, our company is now called Crown & Reach, and our podcast is called Tentacles.

Why? To find out, you'll have to listen...

References:

• Hard Test Easy Life https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/stop-polishing-turd-products-with
• Innovation Tactics Pip Deck https://pipdecks.com/products/innovation-tactics
• Dave Kang's Octopus Life https://davekang.substack.com/
• Taylorism - Frederick Taylor’s scientific management model
• Coherent Heterogeneity, a concept from complexity thinking https://cynefin.io/wiki/Common_fallacies
• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith
• Crown & Reach Website https://crownandreach.com/

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

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