Who are you and why are you in my inbox?

Hello hello, Tom & Corissa here,

A few people told us they were confused when an octopus-themed email landed in their inbox.

Maybe you've already hovered over the unsubscribe button. Maybe you simply scrolled past.

Let's take a moment to get reacquainted.

Below you'll find a list of the entry points where you might have come across us in the first place. You'll probably recognise at least one!

(If none of them rings a bell, we're Tom Kerwin and Corissa Nunn. Maybe you've worked with us, seen one of us talk at an event, or even danced with us?)

And then we'll give a brief explanation as to why we're now called Crown & Reach and what we're planning with these emails.

After that, if you want to unsubscribe, please do. We don't want to overstay our welcome.

Here are some of our biggest entry points you might know us from. Anything look familiar?

• ​What the heck's goin' on in tech? – a SenseMaker initiative we ran with John Cutler at the end of 2024. We got nearly 700 rich responses, packed with stories and metaphors. Since then we've run a few open sense-making sessions where we dig through the data, looking for new perspectives and possibilities.
• ​Innovation Tactics. Tom's deck of actionable prompts, methods and frames to help you stop guessing and make things people actually want, published through Pip Decks in 2023.
• ​Multiverse Mapping. "Everyone thinks they're aligned, so why does the plan fall apart?" ... This is Tom's fog-cutting planning method that quickly gets teams to alignment and enables antifragile prioritisation. You get a plan that benefits from uncertainty rather than being blown up by it. Helps you kill ~50% of initiatives in <1 hour. Helps you deliver the rest on time, under budget, and way better than anyone imagined. We offer an online course, free intro sessions, and recently, live examples too.
• ​Pivot Triggers. Or: "how to do discovery and delivery at the same time". From back in 2020, the core idea is "what signals can we get today that will make us feel confident to invest more tomorrow?". We keep hearing from people who've used this concept to help projects succeed (and even get a promotion). The method from the original article has evolved into something quicker, deeper and crispier, but the spirit remains the same.
• ​A trip into the estuary. We were lucky enough to co-facilitate the first complete session of Dave Snowden's Estuarine Mapping approach to strategy. Tom shared his notes – and thousands of curious people have read them. This approach is now woven throughout our work.
• ​The MVP Death Spiral. A spicy illustration of how many well-meaning prioritisation frameworks are just fancy guessing.
• ​Tumbling into the Vision Chasm. A series of articles talking about the maaany problems with the sort of strategy that works backwards from a desired future vision, and proposing an alternative. This series was picked up by The Agilist.
• ​OKRs sound good but they don't work. Picking another good-natured fight with a business orthodoxy.
• ​How much research is too much research. A graph that shows how too much research and too little research can both slow you down, and what the sweet spot looks like.
• ​Email Teardown Club. In a past life, Corissa would guinea-pig herself on actual emails she received to gauge their success and unpack what was going on behind the words.

Whew! Now, what's all this Crown & Reach malarkey?

In January 2023, in a rush, we called our company Trigger Strategy Group (named after Pivot Triggers). But we soon regretted the name for its many, erm, unfortunate associations.

So this June we rebranded to Crown & Reach. It's an octopus-inspired name that reflects how we help our clients operate: a light centre for orientation and a long reach for parallel exploration. Think distributed intelligence over top-down control, coherent at the core and curious at the edges.

We work with executives who are thinking, "this should be working, so why isn't it?". We help by diagnosing the handful of hidden constraints that are holding back your initiative, so you can tackle those instead of continuing to deal with all the noise.

And ... what will you get if you keep accepting our newsletter (The Reach) into your life?

This is the best bad newsletter around. We don't follow the blueprint of having a clear niche and value proposition – we follow what's interesting to us. Mostly, that's to do with strategy, operations, complexity, and figuring out why things work, or don't. We share case studies, rants, explanations and a hint of philosophy.

Ultimately, we're all about sensing our way through the murky waters of strategy and operations in an uncertain world. We hope you'll stick around with us to see what emerges.

In case you didn't know, we also do a rather lovely podcast called Tentacles, and a little bit of YouTube.

Tom & Corissa x

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