Episode 76: Cynefin, Complexity and Design with Kyle Godbey

Today, we welcome Yael Mark.  Yael is a product consultant with Extra Product Brain, where she provides fractional product manager services for software products. Her specialty is in behavioral economics and customer behavior, something that is certainly relevant to product management. 

Today, we welcome back Dr. Bart Jaworski.  In addition to being an experienced and full-time product manager, Bart is an author of the book, Next-Gen Product Management, and an entrepreneur as he offers multiple courses for product managers on DrBartPM.com He’s also a super funny guy with the best memes on LinkedIn.

Today, we welcome Nesrine Changuel. Nesrine is a product management expert, author, and speaker who focuses on the concept of customer “delight.” She has Phds in both Electrical/Electronics Engineering as well as physics, which is sure to give her an interesting take on product management.    Get the book here: https://nesrine-changuel.com/product-delight-book/ 

Today we happily welcome back Michele Hansen. Michele is the co-founder of the Software-as-a-Service company Geocodio – a SaaS that provides hassle free geocoding. Prior to being an entrepreneur, Michele was a product manager in financial publishing and a project manager for a web development agency.  Michele is the author of an excellent book on customer interviewing which I recommend everywhere I go “Deploy Empathy”. That’s the one with the yellow duck. Aaand after something like a two year break she’s again the co-host of the Software Social Podcast. Today we will dive into the topic of AI in customer research. I want to add a few numbers from a Qualtrics trend report, just to kind of highlight the relevance of the topic if that’s needed at all. So in the 2025 trend report 69% of respondents say that they have used synthetic responses in their research, 83% plan to increase their AI investment and 73% agree that within 3 years synthetic data will make up more than half of the data they use. So, there’s definitively something going on here. Let’s dive in!   Links to sources: deployempathy.com Paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4551487  

Today we happily welcome someone our listeners will know very well. He’s already written a great book on the JTBD philosophy that brought us all together and now wrote a new book on Jobs-to-be-done. It’s called “THE JOBS-TO-BE-DONE PYRAMID An innovation Architecture for Humans – linking function, emotion and identity” and has been the #1 entry in Product Management on Amazon for several weeks! And the guy who wrote it is our very own Scott Burleson!   Order the book here: https://a.co/d/e3420tx  Morejhere: https://www.thejtbdpyramid.com/

Our guest today, Steven Weissenburger, is director of strategy and innovation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. They are an inter consultancy that helps their company generate strategies and innovations to navigate complex, novel, and ambiguous situations. We will be discussing the Estuarine Framework which is 1 of the three major frameworks in the Cynefin ecosystem which we have discussed on this podcast in past episodes namely with Tom Kerwin, Steven Bartlett or Kyle Godbey. Steven has a lot of practical experience using this framework and we will talk about how it works in practice. The framework is used mostly in the context of dealing with complex situations within an organization or community, but I am sure it can bring super useful insights to listeners in the product and services innovation space, so I am hoping we can make a connection there.dsa

What really separates top sales performers from the rest? In this episode, sales excellence coach and former 3M leader Ivan Stevanovic breaks down the essential habits that fuel consistent sales success—and they might not be what you expect. Forget gimmicks and silver-tongued persuasion. Great salespeople win because they prepare like professionals, ask better questions, and know when to walk away. They treat sales as a craft, not just a quota. Drawing on decades of experience coaching high-performing teams, Ivan shares powerful, practical advice on how to build trust, qualify opportunities, and develop the mindset needed to thrive in complex B2B sales environments. Whether you're a seasoned rep, a consultant who dreads "selling," or a manager looking to level up your team, this episode is packed with real-world insights that will sharpen your approach and reignite your confidence. 🔥 If you’ve ever walked out of a sales call thinking, “What just happened?”—this is the episode you need. Tune in now to learn how the best sellers prepare, adapt, and consistently deliver value.

It’s with great pleasure that we welcome back Robyn Bolton! Robyn, welcome back to the Podcast!   Robyn is the founder and chief navigator at MileZero, a consulting and coaching firm that helps leaders use innovation to confidently and consistently grow business revenue. Robyn is also an assistant professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design where she teaches courses in strategy and product innovation in the college’s master of design innovation program.   Prior to founding MileZero, she was a partner at Innosight, the innovation and growth strategy consulting firm cofounded by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, a manager at the Boston Consulting Group’s offices in Boston and Copenhagen and was assistant brand manager at P&G for the development and launch of Swiffer.   I strongly recommend her blog and newsletter you can find it at milezero.io. Because Robyn is an awesome and concise writer: Every word you spend reading is valuable. She was voted the number one blogger of 2022 and 2023 on human-centered design and innovation. And today we’re going to take a bit of a dive into her new book “Unlocking innovation, a leaders guide for turning bold ideas into tangible results.” So, let’s dive in – we might even touch on chocolate cookies!

Our guest today Kyle Godbey, is a service designer and transcontextual designer and has worked for over 20 years in the fintech industry, government and retail. In this episode we talk to Kyle about one of the methods within the Cynefin ecosystem: the sensemaker methodology. Sensemaker is "an online crowd-sourcing research tool for collecting and self-interpreted micro-narratives and for discovering actionable insights beyond surveys and focus groups"  

We continue our discussion with software engineer and agile coach William Bartlett. Last time we spoke, in episode 68, we discussed William's journey from waterfall to agile. We discussed the many potential benefits of taking an agile approach when it is done well, but also the difficulty many teams face in making it work for them, even when they are serious about making it work.   William argued that the issue goes deeper than a simple problem of mindset and that it has to do with how to teach and learn tacit knowledge.   In this episode we dive deeper into the topic of tacit knowledge and how it plays a role in design and innovation more generally, beyond just the teaching of agile concepts,. We will be discussing 4E cognition, gibsonian ecological psychology and Cynevin.   Topics touched upon: Can tacit knowledge be taught? Why is tacit knowledge an important part of innovation? 4E cognition Nassim Taleb’s concept of antifragility