Hi, we’re Tom and Corissa from Crown & Reach, and this is Tentacles.
With over 100 episodes behind us, this might just be the best bad podcast out there. Unfiltered, unedited, and deeply curious.
We talk strategy, sense-making, and the blurry edges between work and the rest of life — because sometimes, the only way through the fog is to feel your way forward, limbs outstretched.
While we're migrating podcasts across, you can find all the goodness from our first 100 or so episodes here: https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy (https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
Why does the same uncertainty make one team lean in and another freeze?
We think it comes down to budget. Every organisation can only absorb so much uncertainty before it stops feeling like opportunity and starts feeling like a threat. And over the past couple of years, a lot of that budget has been gobbled up by stuff that nobody actively chose.
Prompted by an email from Brian, one of our research interviewees, we unpack the idea of uncertainty budgets. Recorded with one eye on the baby monitor and then with the baby on a lap (transfixed by our microphone's big furry hat).
The tipping point where uncertainty flips from anxiety into curiosity, and why chopping uncertainty into chunks can help
The uncertainty tax: where your budget has gone these last couple of years, and why copying everyone else’s AI strategy is the corporate version of hiding in the herd
The experiment that made millions and got the programme shut down – and where the org's uncertainty budget was really going
Why good management and good innovation are quietly at war in every organisation
The one thing leaders say about ambiguity that makes everything worse
How a leader can "take out a loan" on uncertainty, and what they have to put up as collateral
For anyone who’s been told to “get comfortable with ambiguity” and suspected that was missing the point.
Got a better word than “bubble”? Or a story about where your uncertainty budget went? tentacles@crownandreach.com
One correction: IBM didn’t make loom kit. Its punch cards came via Herman Hollerith’s census tabulators, which borrowed the idea from the Jacquard loom. It's the same point we were making but one step further back in time.
References
Brian – research interviewee who prompted the episode
Pitch Provocations – our method, which we're currently running on ourselves
Multiverse Mapping – our method that can slice anxiety-inducing uncertainty into budget-friendly chunks
Uncertainty budget
Uncertainty tax versus deliberate investment
Uncertainty Bubble / Uncertainty Membrane
Risk appetite, risk tolerance and risk capacity
The distinction between risk and uncertainty
Cranfield School of Management (where we presented our experiment)
Clayton Christensen's The Innovator’s Dilemma
[Unmentioned, but Frank Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit is the classic source for the risk/uncertainty distinction]
Episode 103, “Competence, control and consequences”, tells the experimentation-shutdown story in full.
Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
5 Oct 2026
154: Success in Circuit lies
Someone in Coffee & Complexity Club asked: isn't this Uncertainty Bubbles "double game" thing basically just lying? You tell the organisation one story about your project and run a completely different one inside it. Where exactly is the ethical line? Shouldn't you be honest about the work and let the chips fall where they may?
It's a fair question, we're no fans of dishonesty here. So we wandered up a hill with a sleeping baby to figure out what we actually meant. We started with a bit of Emily Dickinson and ended up somewhere we didn't expect. The storytelling turns out to be necessary, and exactly as honest as any project update you've ever written. It just isn't the point.
Including:
Why you can't logic anyone into anything, and what to do instead of trying harder
The moment Corissa realised there is no unbiased version of any story, ever, and why that just kinda dissolved the ethical problem, rather than excusing it
Radical honesty with a three-year-old around Santa Claus ... and the risk of being chased out of Bournemouth with pointed sticks
The two-prong barbell: how to report on your most certain work and your most uncertain work at the same time, and why the mushy middle in between is where projects go to fester
Why the point of a bubble isn't what you're allowed to get away with inside it, but is to do with the tempo you get to run at inside it
"If you think it'll take two weeks, give the team two days" ... plus the very important caveat that stops this being the cruel fake deadline
Two days, zero budget, and no app: how a Google Form, a WhatsApp group and no code at all were the forcing function we needed and enabled way more learning than more sprints of building a "better" app
Mild spoiler warning for anyone listening with small people: we are frank about Santa.
This one's for anyone who's been told to just stick to the plan, but has a sneaking suspicion that the plan is part of the problem.
Send us your uncertainty bubbles, your radical repurposing stories, and your corrections about the Soviet lunar programme: tentacles@crownandreach.com
Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com
References
Emily Dickinson, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (c. 1868)
Corissa's poetry — Old Lollipops: micropoems in 140 characters or less https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B077JJWJDR (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B077JJWJDR)
4U + CPT Cheat Sheet — how to communicate progress from inside an uncertainty bubble https://crownandreach.com/#resources (https://crownandreach.com/#resources)
Uncertainty bubbles and the double game — Ep 145: What Xerox PARC actually got wrong https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/6a158e1e6ee822cbfbf36be0 (https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/6a158e1e6ee822cbfbf36be0)
Coffee & Complexity Club — our Friday morning sessions, where this question came from https://luma.com/stepscollective (https://luma.com/stepscollective)
Unpack, undergo, unfold — Ep 112: Unpacking, unleashing, and unfolding and Ep 113: Unpack unleash unfold part 2 — the unfoldening https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/685ffe34081ac1df5d8cb371 (https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/685ffe34081ac1df5d8cb371) | https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/686d37638d3d6839f4949285 (https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/686d37638d3d6839f4949285)
Cynefin https://cynefin.io/wiki/Cynefin (https://cynefin.io/wiki/Cynefin)
Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
9 Sept 2026
153: Tom's worst ever DJ set
Tom's worst ever DJ set was one where he followed the "rules" most carefully.
His best was the one where he stopped trying.
And the difference relates to why many teams can do all the right exploratory work and still discover nothing useful.
In this one we wander through DJing for swing dancers as a sort of live complexity practice, and then we crowbar lessons from rooms full of dancers into the world of work, where people dance around strategic bets.
The high profile gig that went so wrong because Tom was trying so hard to get it right
"Find the pocket": how to tune into a room's tempo, and why Herräng's pocket ran twenty BPM faster than Bournemouth's
What changes when you stop treating your heuristics as a through line and start treating them as a fence
Exploration that isn't exploratory: doing all the "correct" discovery work but playing it way too safe
Why you can't rationalise your way into anything interesting, and why so much of business is pretending that's what you did
Whether a team can have a collective gut, or whether it needs something external to hand it weird options
Plus: the MAYA principle, survivorship bias, Alfred Nobel, and Britney
Please share your stories of rules well broken: tentacles@crownandreach.com
Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com
References
Herräng Dance Camp, Sweden https://www.herrang.com (https://www.herrang.com)
Angela Andrew — Tom's teacher and mentor, legendary dancer and artist
Alfred Nobel's Vinterviken dynamite works outside Stockholm, venue for The Snowball event mentioned
The MAYA principle (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) by Raymond Loewy
The waggle dance and the ~20% of bees that ignore it, see Episode 044: The one with the bees https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/044-the-one-with-the-bees (https://shows.acast.com/triggerstrategy/episodes/044-the-one-with-the-bees)
Previous episode on protocols was 134: The Protocol Problem part 1 – Geoff's shadow spreadsheet sprawl https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/696fea603738e9e7d196e2f5 (https://shows.acast.com/tentacles/episodes/696fea603738e9e7d196e2f5)
Multiverse Mapping — https://multiversemapping.com
Find out more about us and our work at crownandreach.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.
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