Tentacles - the podcast from Crown & Reach

Cover up! It's sunny out.

When uncertainty feels impossible, most teams freeze. In this episode Tom and Corissa unpack a three-phase cycle that's powered by getting it wrong first.

They unpack their "Unpack, Unleash, Unfold" framework through real examples - from a messy logo redesign to a heart rate variability app that nobody could figure out how to use.

We also float across the vision chasm between leadership and teams ...

Why do successful projects always end up radically different from how they started? And why do failed projects stick religiously to their original plan?

In this episode, we cast our tentacles over three critical but overlooked manoeuvres: unpacking, unleashing and unfolding. (NB. we only explicitly label unpacking and unfolding in the podcast).

Referencing articles by the brilliant Adam Mastroianni and Henrik Karlsson, we exp...

What do lumpy compost, underwhelming basil, and internal influence have in common?

Tom's Pip Decks deck, Innovation Tactics, contains a popular card called Seeds vs Soil. At time of writing, the concepts of gardening were purely theoretical to him. But now we've dipped our toes into the complex world of home horticulture, we thought we'd revisit the tactic, and share some stories of failure, "fine" soil and fennel.

This becam...

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 awkwa...

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 m...

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.

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

Host...

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...

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 bloate...

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 som...