That's because when you're cracking a code, you need to know why a letter is replaced with another letter, so you need to actually understand the mechanism behind that cipher.

Also, I lied to you, it's actually that number, 158, times a quintillion, which was a new word for me, quintillion. That's how many zeros are in a quintillion. And that is for a single keystroke or one letter of one word.

Sometimes in the corporate environment, it feels like there are way too many variables. There's too many things going on for us to be able to figure out what's actually going on.

But the enigma had so many variables, and they broke it. Sometimes it feels like we're underestimated as women, like the women who in our example, were thought by their families to be capable only of doing secretarial work, but we're actually cracking this very complex code. Like the folks of World War II, we will crack this code and figure this shit out.

The Steps to Break the Coporate Code

How do we break the corporate code? We're going to break down our process into three parts. We're going to gather our clues, we're going to review our cribs, I'll tell you what those are, and then we're going to use The Bombe, our delightful code-breaking machine.

Step #1 – Gather Your Clues

Let's start with gathering our clues. We're going to start with what they have told us. For our inspirational codebreakers and for ourselves, context is key. For them, this context usually came from a spy network.

To our advantage, there's likely a lot that our company is telling us upfront, although it's not always as clear as we'd like, it is transparent. We're going to look at the vision and mission, the OKRs and the KPIs, and financial reports and shareholder reports.

What Changes in Company Vision & Mission Might Look Like (with Examples!)

Let's start off with the vision and mission. The vision, this is a statement about your future goals and aspirations. One example is, "A computer on every desk and in every home."

A mission is why the company exists. It's a statement about the why that drives the co-founders, and hopefully, the whole team. My favourite example of a mission statement is, "We're in business to save our home planet." It's like a mission, it's like, yes, that's why I do what I do.

When we're looking for clues with our vision and mission, in particular, we're looking for changes. If the vision and mission have not changed, then there might not be as many clues present there. Of course, what they say is relevant, but in particular, we want to watch for clues like a shift in focus.

If in a dramatic twist, TED decided to change from, "spread ideas", as a mission statement to something like, "be the largest information sharing conference". That would be a shift that indicates some additional new focus on the size of their conferences, specifically, which likely has links back to something like a monetization plan.

Especially if it's started to focus on money, if the focus has shifted, that's a clue that we want to notice. If there's a significant change to the when, which is implied in the mission or vision, that can also be a clue.

Another, perhaps outlandish example, if the Black Panther political party changed their mission from, "revolution in our lifetime", to something like, "revolution for free Black futures". It would still sound good maybe on the surface, but the fact that the timeline has kind of become super vague would be really relevant as a clue.

Last but not least, a shift in focus from them to us. Typically when companies start out, they're focused on a community or a consumer or a specific customer that they care about, and they want to change the world for that kind of person.

Sometimes the focus changes, and it's a little bit more company-focused all of a sudden. We want to notice that, that's a useful clue that something is going on.

If LinkedIn for example, changed from, "connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful", to something like, "be the largest platform for professional connection". That removes the who from their mission and then it's more inward focused.

And finally, the grandness of the vision. So, if Ben & Jerry's went from, "make the best ice cream in the nicest way possible", to something like, "make great ice cream available to all", you'd be like, where'd the best go? Where'd the nicest way possible go? If there's a shift in the grandness of the vision in either direction, again, an interesting clue.

What to Look for in Changes to OKRs & KPIs

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), these do change often on a quarterly basis. They're changing more frequently, and we're going to get a few more clues from these.

Just as a refresher, objectives and key results, or OKRs, those are the goals and milestones that the company wants to achieve. I always think of it as the objective being the less measurable goal, while the key results are the measurable things we think will help us reach that goal.

An example of an objective might be, delight our customers, while the key results might be something like, achieve an NPS (Net Promoter Score) of greater than 24, or, increase our net retention to over 100%, or, achieve product engagement at this percent weekly active users, they're very measurable.

And key performance indicators, these are also measurable, they're metrics, but they tend to be more measuring the success of your business ongoing rather than ambitious goals. So that's just a slight difference there.

What do we want to notice? What are the changes that we want to keep our ears open for? Like always, if there's a noticeable shift in the focus, that's a clue.

If you used to be very focused on growth, now you're focused on profit, you used to be focused on profit, now you're focused on revenue, those are interesting clues about what's going on for your business and what your leaders care about and what they're driving towards.

This one's a nuance of that, if the level of focus itself has changed. If the last quarter the of the OKRs seem to be all over the map and this quarter they're all very specifically focused and aligned, then something is probably up.

The leaders that are assigned or responsible for these objectives, key results, and key performance indicators, that's another clue. If your boss doesn't have any goals at the company level, definitely you want to know why. Something's going on, it's worth investigating.

Are the goals more or less measurable? So over time, if things are becoming slowly more measurable, that's a sign of maturity, people are trying to make sure that things are measurable.

But a lot of companies have pretty questionable OKRs where the KRs are consistently not measurable. If one day your company all of a sudden has their shit completely together, something is definitely going on.

Maybe your leaders have simply finally started using career coaching, they're working with someone awesome like Holly, and they're actually getting their stuff together for the first time. But maybe it's a new board member, or they're seeking investment and they are wanting to clean up house.

Take Note of Shifts in Finance & Shareholder Info

Last but not least, these juicy and often dense finance and shareholder information pieces. If you do have access to your P&L or your profit and loss statement, your balance sheet, your cash flows, or any internal company metrics, as well, if you have access to annual reports for shareholders, if you are a public company, those are often available, we can look at these as well.

Why exactly am I making you read a huge novel when there is no salacious heroine in it? Well, we might notice a change in the level of transparency, especially if the transparency has changed for the worse, that is definitely a sign to take note of.

The structure, similar to what I was talking about earlier, if things are suddenly very structured and in the past they were not, that can be a signal.

As mentioned previously, the emphasis. A company coming out of a funding round will be intentionally not profitable so they're going to have a heavy focus on revenue, where a company heading towards acquisition or a funding round will be very focused on their margin and very focused on their profitability.

These are little clues that we can start to pick up on. What is the emphasis of the reports and of the company and of our leadership?

Last but not least, what is the spin or the story being told? If there's a sudden focus on a customer profile that doesn't match with most of your existing customers, is your company looking to pivot? Are they looking to be acquired about someone who really cares about this new customer? Something might be going on there.

If there's a story being told and you happen to know that it doesn't quite line up with reality, some level of the company somewhere, someone did that on purpose, most likely. They've told us some things through the company statements, the goals, the metrics, and the reports. We've potentially gathered some clues.

Trust Your Radar & Get the Tea by Making Friends

Next, we can look at what do we know, what do you know? This, depending on you personally, might be easier or harder. But what I'm really saying here is you want to trust your radar. Sometimes clue finding is just trusting your gut. If you feel like something is off or different, it likely is. It's worth kind of investigating that a little bit more if your spidey senses are up, just take a look, look at what's going on there.

Everything I just ran through, you may have also noticed something felt just a little bit odd. And then once you actually go look at the details, you might realise that they line up to one of these things I was talking about.

Maybe my tips will help you solidify why it felt off, but the chances are you're probably not going and reviewing everything I just told you on a weekly basis, it's probably too much work.

You really have to trust your gut, trust your radar. If something feels like it's changing, if it feels like there's a change afoot, just chase that down and see, is there actually a change here? Is there a trend here?

The other piece of clue finding is what can you know? In addition to what we do know, what can we know? Another way of saying this is trust the tea. Spies, after all, still have their usefulness. When you make friends, you get to know things, and when you make more friends, you get to know more things.

Gossip I don't think is a dirty word. It's an essential tool that became a dirty word often to weaponize a woman's ability to use community to protect and advance herself. I'm a big fan of gossip, and I'm going to promote it multiple times in this chat.

And when you're tracking down, what can you know? There are also two techniques I like to use.

One is follow the money. This is a classic. If you have customers with outsized revenue influence, if they're a big chunk of the money that you make, following up on what they're looking for and what they're wanting and what they're asking for from your company, chances are that's also what your leaders are talking about.

There's often a relationship between what these customers want and what your leaders want. So that's one way we can follow the money. It's worth noting investors who often want a 3x return on their investment, they feel invested. Makes sense.

They might be putting pressure on your leadership team to do the things that they figure will best get you there. They're relevant to keep in mind. Who are those people? What spaces do they move in?

And then also government funding. Government funding is maybe more rare, but if it is available, there's probably strings attached. If you follow those strings, if you follow the money, there's probably some promises that your company has made and has to deliver on, and sometimes those weren't all told to you in advance.

The other way you can learn more, other than what your company is specifically telling you, is to watch the news. And this might be in the classic ways of reading from a news organisation or watching a news organisation on TV, but it's also very likely that you consume information in other ways that just keep you updated about your industry and your customers.

If you're seeing major competitor developments, if they have a new innovation or a new marketing campaign that's, again, relevant, that's a clue, something's going on in your space, it's worth taking note of.

If there are changes to the laws, the regulations, the taxation that impacts your company or your customers, because your customer's company, if they're impacted, impacts your company, that's also highly relevant.

If you're a pharmaceutical company that has among its portfolio an abortion pill, and Roe v. Wade gets overturned, that's a huge significant impact on your business.

Probably a lot of pivoting is about to happen as far as your marketing, as far as your distribution. So expect changes, something is going to happen now.

Also media influence on both the industry and about your customers too. The concept of a movement of boycotts is the most extreme example here, but there can also be positive influence like a celebrity who inadvertently boosts your product or your industry.

So, what can you know, comes down to, what can you gossip about, what can you follow the money for, and what can you watch the news to learn? All of these pathways lead us to more clues.

Step #2 - Review Your “Cribs” or Common Patterns

Once we've gathered all of our clues, we're going to come into a second step, which is, reviewing your cribs. Another way of saying that is reviewing common patterns.

When we look at our inspiration, the World War II codebreakers, they used cribs as decoding shortcuts. They were plain text phrases that they knew were really common. For example, understanding a letter often starts with, Dear, if it's a personal letter, if they were speaking in English, this, Dear, would be a crib or a common pattern that we look for at the start of an encrypted letter.

Another common phrase was, weather report. Because there was a lot of ship communication and this was really important during the war, what was going on in the marine environment.

If they can find this phrase, weather report, and they can decode that phrase, then they can unlock the entire communication, and in fact, all of the communications from that ship from that day. Knowing what the common patterns are that you're looking for, really, really useful.

Crib #1 – The Company is Struggling (with Clues!)

For corporate codebreaking, I made us some cribs, and we're going to go through those. The first one we're going to look at today, the tough stuff right outta the gate, is my company financially struggling?

Related to that, of course, is a layoff coming? Maybe a more positive version depending on your relationship to acquisition, is an acquisition coming, is that on the horizon?

Another one, perhaps a little bit more personal, but also quite possibly making your day-to-day life not so fun, are the leaders fighting?

And last but not least, is someone important leaving? So before we get into these, I'm going to just give you a heads up. These cribs that I'm about to share are dense.

Is your company struggling? I really hope not, but let's learn. What are some clues that would be indicative of your company struggling?

Obviously, having a bad sales quarter, or two, lots of customer churn or significant departures from high revenue customers. Is your sales team restructuring their compensation, again?

What is being incentivized, is that relevant, and what is going on within that incentivization structure? Is your competitor offering a valuable new innovation? Are they selling snake oil but everyone thinks it's a really cool thing?

Realistically, those are meaningfully the same to you, both present some serious risk to your company. We talked about this, but legislation impacting your value proposition.

If you have always sold weed at a very high price based on the promise that it's high quality and safe, and then the damn government goes and makes it legal, suddenly your value prop of safe weed is the standard, so how do you raise your prices or how do you keep your business going?

Speaking of weeds, I mean, senior leaders, are they getting into the weeds? Is your boss suddenly uncomfortably all up in your business? If there are less transparent financials, the financial information that you used to have access to is harder to get access to, that would be indicative.

Perhaps similarly, it's harder to get expenses approved. Maybe they're still getting approved, but there's extra steps in the process, there's extra approvals or checkpoints, a whole bunch of just extra friction on getting expenses approved.

Perhaps there's a reduction or freezing of promotions, raises and hiring. These would all be clues that your company might be struggling. You don't have to see all of these clues, obviously, in order to know that this is what's happening, but having a few of these clues showing up will point us in the direction of wanting to investigate further.

Crib #2 – A Layoff is Coming (with Clues!)

What would be clues that a layoff is coming? A classic, you were recently acquired. I hate to break it to you, but that's not always the good news that your leadership says it is. Oftentimes, this is the next step in that process.

What we just talked about, if your company is financially struggling, obviously, that would also be a clue that a layoff might be coming. Another significant one that is relatable to anyone who has been in the working world in the last couple years, industry trends.

If everyone's doing layoffs, I've got bad news for you, they're probably coming. A poor economy generally, of course, this is related. If your leaders are being more vague and less specific about the future.

They used to tell you direct things about their plans and now that's not available, specifically if they're vague on costs or things to do with money, or how are we going to make that possible?

How are we going to make that happen? They probably have a plan, they're just not able to share it with you. Has your company slowed or fully stopped hiring? That's a pretty significant clue for something financially related, and often that does also tie back to a layoff.

Does one team have suspiciously too much work, another team maybe, hopefully not yours, have suspiciously too little work? If you have visibility onto these things for these kinds of clues, they're really, really helpful.

I realise not everybody does have visibility, but things like extra board meetings are really relevant. How on earth do I know about extra board meetings you might ask? My company uses Google Calendar.

My leaders don't tend to hide the details of their events by default. That is true of a lot of companies, especially tech startups. So, can you look at your executive team's calendars? Maybe. You should try. I'm just going to say it.

If you're an executive, and that makes you uncomfortable, maybe you should change your settings, I don't know. Do I do this regularly? I do it sometimes.

I used to have a colleague at an old company who did this almost daily. He looked at all of the leaders' calendars, and let me tell you, he had the best gossip, he had the best tea, and he was one of my best friends.

Similarly, if you're able to see this, if you see that there's a lot of meetings between bosses and HR, hopefully not your boss and HR, that could be a signal that this is coming.

Alternatively, sometimes what this shows up as is big blocks of hidden time on people's calendars. If they do want to keep this information more private, that would be how they do this and then you can see that there's just big blocks of hidden time.

This is like a little 2B, what are clues that a layoff is coming right now? If your boss books a 15-minute meeting, especially one with no agenda, especially if it's booked last minute, especially if you had a one-on-one recently.

When I was in India last year on vacation, my boss booked a 15-minute meeting. He created the meeting at the end of his work day, which was 6:00 AM my local time, and the meeting was scheduled for the start of his next workday, which was 9:00 PM my local time.

When I woke up I saw a last minute booking for a one-on-one that was only 15 minutes long with no agenda and I had had a one-on-one just the day before. I was like, oh boy, something is coming. That was a stressful day, I'll say, not my favourite, but we made it through.

In that case, I went and looked at his calendar, and he had finished an hour-long meeting that had all of the details hidden from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM his time right before he had sent me the invite. Our HR also had an hour-long meeting that had all of the details hidden at the exact same time. So that's obviously a lot of big clues.

If HR is in a meeting with your boss and your boss is booking last minute very short meetings, those are clues. Again, if you're a manager or a boss and you're in this call, always add an agenda if you can, so people don't stress out because some of us know these are clues and of course we'll interpret that.

A company-wide meeting scheduled last minute. The company-wide meeting often also has no agenda but usually comes with a note around like, please do make time for this, please do attend, please do whatever you need to make this happen.

If you see these, it might be a little bit too late to do much about it. But let's try to refocus on something that might be positive even though sometimes it's also a negative, but depends on the situation.

Crib #3 – An Acquisition is Coming (with Clues!)

We're going to go through the crib for an acquisition might be coming. Our first clue, are there new asks for strategic models, plans, architecture? These things are things that people do sometimes ask for naturally.

Normally it's not always a clue, but if you feel like there's suddenly an influx of asks in this direction, that could be a clue. Similarly, if you are having third-party audits that are brand new, third parties you've never interacted with before are coming on board to do these audits, that also might be a clue that an acquisition is coming.

In the new trifecta, request to track or provide new metrics that you haven't tracked before, especially if there's not really any reason provided on why those are important to the company or they can't give you a good story around what's going on.

From what they've given to you, is the financial information they share suddenly way more structured, whipped into shape? We talked about this a little bit earlier, that's definitely a clue.

A new focus on cost, specifically if we think back to acronym city, do your OKRs and KPIs suddenly seem to all be focused on cost? That's relevant.

This one is interesting. If you have a major funding and major partnership at the same time with the same organisation, that can definitely be a clue.

In my career history, we had this example although it never successfully went through. It was basically a testing of the waters from this larger company, seeing if they wanted to do an acquisition.

If a series of funding has a major investor, and that major investor is now with you on the projects, yeah, you are probably the car that they're test driving. Perform relevantly.

Speaking of travel, if you can see your C-suite level travel, if you have visibility into stuff like that, are they travelling more? Specifically, if they're travelling without a lot of communication on what it's about. Relevant from before, I'll say it again, if your C-suite is meeting with the board, especially if they're meeting with new people in those meetings.

Again, this is maybe not available to all of you and that's fine. Maybe it's through their calendar, maybe it's through a friendly assistant, we'll see. If we have resources to find this information, it's useful information, if you don't, that is understandable.

Similar to where we started, if there's suddenly a lot more documentation around the policies and the technology than you've ever seen before. And it's not due to the fact that it's desperately needed and overdue but it's just for somewhat more unexplained reason, that might be a clue here.

And last but not least, did someone tell you that you're no longer allowed to wear flip-flops? Firstly, very rude. Supposedly, if you'd feel comfortable at the beach, that outfit is likely not appropriate for work.

If there's a new level of professionalism that's suddenly expected in your company, that's also possibly a clue.

Crib #4 – Leaders are Fighting (with Clues!)

Number four, onto a fascinating one, it's more interpersonal, I find that kind of stuff very fascinating, are your leaders fighting? Is your focus very unfocused? If people are talking about the goals and the metrics, and you just feel really confused about what actually is the priority.

Anytime someone else talks, you're getting more and more confused. Being confused is a code-breaking skill, don't see it as a problem. It's a damn clue, go figure out, why is this feeling so confusing?

Is it because everyone's giving you a different message? Why is everyone giving you a different message? Is it because they don't agree?

Related to this, conflicting departmental goals or poor alignment between different departments or different teams. Are your higher-ups now in meetings?

Maybe there's a boss getting in your damn business again, that would be a clue that maybe they're getting into the weeds because they're concerned about something going on at their level and they're needing more information or needing more involvement.

Are they making direct asks that they don't usually get to that level of detail but they're suddenly in that level of detail? Or are they stalling projects for no obvious reason? This is often a clue that your boss doesn't like the reason.

If they're not willing to share with you what the reason is, it's maybe because they either can't share the reason, or they don't like the reason. They might be actually working behind the scenes to try to get the project unstalled.

In the meantime they're not able to tell you because they don't feel aligned, they're trying to still make something happen. Optics, the optics. If your leadership is suddenly more focused on the appearance of good performance rather than the reality of good performance, that's a huge clue that something is going on.

This can look like something like, very focused on the net promoter score, the NPS, very focused on the number, when previously perhaps they were more focused on the feedback that was provided alongside that number and they were wanting to know how the customer engagement was, they wanted to know what that relationship with the customer looked like, and now they're just really caring about the number itself all the damn time.

They're focused on the optics of their team's performance probably because they want to win a fight.

Related to that, has your leader's relationship to failure changed? Perhaps they used to see and communicate that failing sometimes is part of learning. If things have shifted and now failure is seen as really bad and to be avoided and something, something, something like this, there might be something on their mind that's making them fearful of the perception of failure.

They're worried about being perceived as a failure themselves. Now, I'm pointing to things changing here. If your boss is always like this by default, I'm just really sorry and that sucks.

That also happens, that might not be a clue of anything other than they're not very good as leaders. But if it's a change, if you feel like something's off, that then becomes a clue that something's going on for them.

Similarly, if there is a perceived failure, does your boss shift the responsibility of that failure downward or sideways? In addition to being a huge bummer, that is a clue that they themselves feel at risk. They don't have the confidence to own that failure, and that's a clue that something's going on.

If your boss is suddenly being very honest about other departments or leaders, which is to suddenly say that they're being a gossip themselves, especially if they're sharing frustrations, that's a pretty big and obvious clue. That's crib number four, the details that might point us towards, are the leaders fighting?

Crib # 5 – Someone Important is Leaving (with Clues!)

Our final crib for today, what would be evidence that someone important is leaving? Is there a lot of succession planning going on? Sometimes this is just direct and clear. We've never had it before, now we're implementing full succession plans. That's a pretty big clue.

Sometimes it's more subtle in that someone is ensuring the major projects always have a secondary leader who's fully in the loop. Especially if that secondary player is both new and consistent in all of these major projects, that's informal succession planning or behind the scenes succession planning.

Is someone at a point in their career and their life where retirement seems like a logical possibility? That's a clue that they might be interested in leaving. If someone is very clearly dissatisfied, especially with the company strategy, it's a clue that they might be thinking about leaving soon if they're not already thinking about it.

When you look at the leadership team in a company, especially a startup or a smaller company, they are typically investing a lot into that organisation, and they probably have things like equity as part of their compensation structure.

If they don't think that the company will be as successful as they want it to be or as successful as they expect it to be, they will likely start to think about departure.

Is someone taking a lot of last-minute vacations or time off, suddenly visiting the dentist, the doctor, the chiropractor, they just need a lot of time off during the work week on a regular basis? They might be interviewing.

Another one that's timeline based, is there a timeline that has to do with stock payout or bonus payout? Sometimes an employee has had a low simmer of frustration going on for a while, and they have set it in their mind, okay, I'm just going to make it through till I get that bonus, I'm just going to make it through till I get that stock payout.

As soon as that moment comes, they feel ready, they feel complete, they feel done. They want to get the cash before they hit the gas.

This one's more subtle. It's been true every single time I've seen it. Anecdotal, of course, I am curious, again, drop it in the chat if you've seen it and it didn't end this way.

But anytime I have seen one single VP managing one single director, one of them is usually new and the other one usually leaves. Whoever was recently hired into that one-to-one relationship is probably the transitional succession planning for that other person who is leaving.

We talked about this earlier. If the company share-outs include visibility into what leaders are responsible for and some of the leaders, one of the leaders seems like they don't have any goals, don't have any major projects, they're probably ramping down.

This one is an interesting contrast to the obvious dissatisfaction, less complaining, less advocacy, this is also a sign that someone might be leaving soon because they're probably checked out. They're heading out, they don't care anymore, they're not going to fight anymore, they've lost all the fight.

This ties back to something I've talked about before as well and the succession planning, but if you notice that a different leader is now consistently running an important meeting, it may be a sign that the previous person who was always running that meeting is doing some succession planning, some quiet succession planning.

Last but not least, we refer back to our other crib, if the leaders are fighting, if you have a hunch that your leaders are fighting, it may lead to the point where one of them wants to leave.

Or one of them might start creating a political movement within the leadership team to force the other one out. It definitely happens, so it's worth taking note of.

Practice! Time to Codebreak a Scenario Together

We've reviewed five cribs. We made it through. There were a lot. And what do we do with all of this? That's a lot of information I've just thrown at you, right? We're going to work to eliminate possibilities.

In World War II, our codebreaking friends knew, for example, that the Enigma never encoded a letter as itself. That meant they could eliminate any possibilities where things lined up.

If you think the letter starts with, Dear, and the first letter is actually a D, that letter does not start with Dear, because the first letter cannot be itself. For us, we're going to eliminate anything that doesn't line up.

If the clues don't point in the direction, we don't walk in the direction, it's pretty simple. We're going to practise together.

I'm going to give you an example, and if you're in the real world, of course, you will know what is happening on your team. But in this fake world, I'm going to have to tell you what you know.

Your boss has been more in the weeds. They've been bothering you by asking for lots of details about the project, joining meetings they didn't usually join before, making decisions they used to leave up to you, and generally being in the way and making a bit of a mess.

They seem grumpy, they're kind of hard to work with now, and if you make a small mistake, suddenly they're all over it, focused on what you're going to do to avoid it next time.

Now, your team has delivered above expectations this year. That means your boss isn't micromanaging because there's a performance issue, from what you can tell, something else is going on.

Every time your company talks about retention and sales, they focus on the ideal customer profile or the ICP, and the news is really good. Things are on track from what you can tell, they're sharing this information, they're sharing that it's good information.

Your team structure is unchanged. There's no one new, no one has departed, it's been this way for a while. You used to have stability in how you were working together, and now your boss is stomping all over your stability.

So what's happening, what's going on? We're going to go through a process of figuring out, from those five cribs that I provided to you, what can we eliminate?

We're going to start with crib number one, the company is struggling. So as a refresher, the boss is in the darn weeds, that's a match.

We said the team was unchanged. That's actually what I would consider a reduction or a freeze on promotions, raises, and hiring.

Because in the tech startup world that I work in at least, default assumption is everything goes up and to the right. So even when you plateau, to some degree, that's usually an indication. We'll colour those green, those feel like a match.

What else? Is there anything else that people can see on this list that might be a match? It's a bit more sneaky.

When it comes to customer churn, we actually only know about the ideal customer profile. There's been a focus on this from our leadership team and the financials.

Is the leadership team so focused on the ICP because the rest of our customers are walking out the door and they don't want to tell that story? That becomes kind of a maybe.

We don’t know if there is a lot of customer churn. We know the story that they're telling us, but the story we also know is constrained, it's not the full story. Other than that, I don't think there's any other matches. We'll colour those red.

What do we think? Is this a possibility? As a reminder, we don't need all the things to line up and match, we just want some clues to see that we're in the direction.

I figured this is a maybe, this might be a match. We're just eliminating options that don't feel like they're a match.

Option number two, a layoff is coming. Time to review our second crib. Companies may be struggling, we just talked about how that's a possibility so that might be a clue.

I would also say that we have slowed and stopped hiring, so that's a match, and not much else. At this point in time, we don't know for sure if the company is struggling, but it might be so that might become a yellow.

Do we think this is worth investigating at this point? Probably not. If we did find out that the company is struggling, then maybe we’d change that to a green and then this becomes maybe a bit more likely. For now, we'll call it a no and we'll eliminate it.

How about the acquisition crib? I didn't specifically talk about any of these. None of these are a match based on what I told you.

Now of course in the real world, you might know other things and it might be that one of these is a match, but in this fake world it's not a match, so we'll move on.

The leaders are fighting. What might be a match here? Want to avoid looking like a failure, micromanaging. We have a handful of matches here.

The higher-ups are in our meetings, they're asking direct questions, there's no tolerance for anything that looks like failure, is that a match, is that worth exploring?

I definitely don't think we can eliminate it at this point in time. There's enough there that it's a maybe, we'll keep it on the list.

Our last one, someone important leaving. From the four things that I told you, bosses in the weeds, team has performed above expectations, no one has joined or left the team, and our ICP customers are doing great from a sales and customer success perspective.

The dissatisfaction I mentioned is possibly a match, although it might not be. And of course, the leaders are fighting might be because we talked about that earlier, it's a maybe.

Because we only have two maybes and no greens, I would probably eliminate this for now.

Practice! Test Your Hypothesis (with Example Questions!)

Our verdict. Right now, I think our two most likely candidates are companies struggling or the leaders are fighting. Because we still have a little bit of a ways to go to fully crack this code, we're going to pick a hypothesis to test first.

How do we know which one to test first? Well, with our friends the codebreakers, they used these cribs and common patterns to reduce how much brute force decoding was required.

The review of the cribs itself does not make visible the decoded message, it simply helps us to narrow down the field of possibilities, until it's in a range that we can go and test all of that.

They compared the information they had to their common patterns or cribs, and they validated which things are worth trying to validate or invalidate. We've done the same thing, we just follow their example.

We're going to think through what information do we need? What information would change everything?

Said another way, what information would flip our assumptions on their head? And conversely, what information would lock us in and provide that certainty, that, yes this is it, I feel confirmed?

Now, when we're prioritising what to test, I do want you to think about what options are easily available as far as resources for testing. We want to figure out what options create less risk for us as we move through learning?

The ease associated with the options we have as far as testing these, and I'm going to go through all of those options in a moment, is really relevant, but the risk is probably even more relevant.

I don't want to send you off into the world where you're just fumbling around and asking all these questions and people think, wow, this person is inappropriate, they're poking their nose in the wrong business.

We want to be thoughtful about what we're testing. The goal here is not necessarily to make sure that we are right the first time.

Our goal is to learn more over time and to eventually get to the right understanding. We want to move through that in the way that makes the most sense for us.

Let's start with, is the company struggling? We knew these things, as I already mentioned, we had a micromanage-y boss, great history of value delivery, good retention, good sales, unchanged team structure.

What could we do that would confirm what we thought as far as maybe the company is struggling? If we had a high churn associated with our non-ICP or ideal customer profile, that would be an indication that we do actually have maybe a high churn but they've focused on this very specific definition so that they can tell a better story.

If there's no sales associated with that portfolio, that would be a sign that perhaps the company actually is struggling but they're trying to hide that fact by focusing on a different set of numbers that tells a better story.

Also, if we had a full hiring freeze. I told you that your team has not changed, but if we could learn that none of the teams are changing, there's a full hiring freeze, that would probably confirm that there's maybe some struggle going on.

In the opposite direction, what would change our thinking? If we found out that there are great financials across the board, that would change our thinking pretty dramatically.

Since our primary clue here is that the boss is micromanage-y, if we could find another reason to explain that, then that might also change our thinking a fair amount because these other signals on their own don't really point to company struggling as strongly.

With hypothesis number two, what would confirm that the leaders are fighting? If someone quits, that would be a pretty clear sign that something was going on. It's a dramatic one, but that would help confirm. Figuring out what the fight is actually about would also confirm.

On the flip side, what would dis-confirm, this is really tricky. To be honest, some people are really great actors so there's not much that we can do that would ensure with confidence that this isn't happening.

When we think about what we would need to learn to both confirm or dis-confirm our thinking for both of these situations, and we think about how risky that might be, what do you think we should do? Where should we test first? What should we focus on?

There's a lot less risk associated with testing if our company is failing, as compared to testing if the leaders are fighting because it's just really hard to confirm or dis-confirm the second hypothesis.

We're going to start with the first one and we're going to move on to step three, which is using The Bombe. What is The Bombe, besides a great name?

Well, with the codebreakers working on the Enigma, there were a lot of possible settings and arrangements that created many possible configurations of this Enigma and this cipher.

They would eliminate as many possible options like we just did, and then they developed this machine that brute force-tested all of the remaining options. It was incredible, it took a lot of time though.

They did as much as they could to narrow down their options before they went through with brute testing. Now, we have even slower brute testing because it is just us navigating into our corporate landscape, that is our brute force-testing.

We have to be The Bombe, maybe even The Bombe-diggity, and we want to eliminate our possibilities down to one to begin with, and then we will try other ones if needed.

How do we test our hypothesis becomes the next question that we're getting clues on. Now that we've picked one, we have to figure out how to test it.

We need some spies, we're going to circle back. We want people who are better connected than us, they always make great spies. We want people who have access to different information than us, so they're on a different team, they're in a different department.

If they're willing to gossip, great. That makes it a little bit easier for us. But also, people who have access to different information, and won't realise that it's gossip. They're undercover spies, they don't even know it, also useful.

When we think about our hypothesis that the company might be struggling, and we know that we want to confirm our assumptions by confirming that there's bad sales and churn going on hiding under the non-ICP umbrella.

We also figured we could confirm if the company had a company-wide hiring freeze. And conversely, we thought if we could prove that there were great financials or some other reason for the micromanagement, that would also be really informative.

But what do we think we could do to try to confirm or dis-confirm? The ones that we thought of, the company career page, the lowest risk option and therefore the place that I would always start.

If we're trying to see if there's a full hiring freeze, check out your hiring page. It's not always honest. Sometimes your hiring page shows a lot of roles that you're not actually hiring for. It could mislead you but it is a place to start, it is some information worth knowing.

Friends in sales, friends in customer success, friends in finance, those are all great friends to have. That's great, but how, Jeanine, how does this actually work?

When we want to test our hypothesis, we want to request more information than we give. We want to lead with empathy. We need to make sure it's the right time and the right context when we're talking with someone, especially if we're talking about something that's a bit more sensitive in nature.

We want to use questions that seem innocent, especially if you're talking to someone who is unaware that you're actively gossiping. And we want to use questions that let people avoid breaking the rules.

We don't want to put people in an awkward situation, especially if they're unaware that they're gossiping. We want to be able to ensure that they can respond in a way that won't explicitly break any confidentiality that they've committed to, it won't put them in an awkward position.

Let's talk about figuring out about the financials. If we have a friend from sales, which I would recommend making, we can ask them something like,

“Hey, how are things these days for non-ICP customers?”

Obviously you're going to have to figure out how to phrase that more naturally for your company. If you have a definition of the ideal customer profile that states that you'll only work with enterprise companies, you could ask what it's like these days for mid-size customers.

Hopefully, know what the definition is of your non-ICP or of your ICP, and therefore you can figure out what would feel natural to ask about, especially if you have historically had a different ICP.

If you've had a different focus in the past and you've shifted your focus, you would probably have an existing pipeline, existing book of business that has to do with a former definition, so you can ask about these other areas of the business, right?

If your ICP is enterprise, "Hey, how are things these days for mid-size customers?" If your ICP is MedTech companies, "Hey, do we ever sell to FinTech companies?"

If your ICP persona is a project manager, "Hey, what's it like to sell to customers who don't actually have a project manager?"

You can ask these different questions that are poking at, what's going on outside of what I've directly been told?

Another version of that invitation for them to brag, "I hear you're absolutely killing it with those ICP sales. Does that mean you're getting a big bonus?"

If things are going well, they may be stoked to tell you what that means for them personally. And I would genuinely be interested and excited for them because they tend to be very highly compensated for these targets, and it's always nice when you hit a milestone and you get rewarded.

If they're doing well, they might want to talk about that. If they're not doing well, even though what's been shared with the whole company is very positive, this might invite them to vent a little bit about how they're actually not able to reach the targets that were set, they feel unrealistic, their boss is unrealistic, things are unmanageable.

They might also share reasons like, "Oh man, we're killing it with them but we're not able to sell to anyone in this other definition at all these days because of our competitor."

They might share more about what's going on, and that would all be valuable information. Let's assume in our situation that our friends in sales are like, "Yeah, I'm actually so close to hitting my bonus and I'm really excited about this cool concert I'm going to this summer as a celebration. Like, man, within three days, I hope I'm going to be just ready to book those tickets becausse I'm going to hit my numbers." And you're like, “Great, awesome!”

If you have a friend from customer service, which I would also recommend making, you can also ask about someone in their portfolio who doesn't fit that ideal customer definition. Especially if you know they have someone who's a significantly sized customer as far as revenue goes, you can directly ask about that kind of customer.

If you don't know specifically about their portfolio or you don't have that kind of information, you can ask more generally again. You can also follow up with something like, "Oh, I know that this thing means they're no longer fitting our ICP, but they've been with us a while so I was curious what it's like to work with them or how it is these days."

Again, you're going to have to adapt the exact language, but basically opening a conversation around the kinds of customers who don't fit that definition that your leadership is telling you about will help you get that more rounded perspective.

"Tell me more, great, interesting. What's it like to support this kind of customer?" A bit more blunt option, but if your ICP is enterprise, "Hey, what's it like to support mid-size customers? Do they actually like our product, or do they just run into issues all the time?"

People love to vent if you give them an option to vent. And it's also just genuinely good relationship building outside of this clue-finding stuff too.

In the same way that I just gave you all those examples for sales, you can use all of them here. "Hey, do you support any FinTech companies? I'm really interested in them, what are they like?"
Don't outright lie, but you can just ask questions wherever you're curious.

In this example, we're going to assume that they tell us about a customer that's actually doing great and doesn't fit our ideal customer profile, that would be good news.

And finally, friends in finance. Obviously, they have very privileged information, so if they're willing to share it with you, that would be hugely valuable and directly and obviously useful.

They tend to have more of a confidentiality- minded perspective on the information that they have access to. Here's where we must be a bit more thoughtful about exactly what we're talking about.

You should definitely ask, "Where is the full set of what I'm just allowed to see? I don't know, is there a dashboard you set up somewhere that's really cool that I don't know about yet?"

They're probably excited to talk about their dashboard that they set up that no one ever looks at, and you might be really interested in seeing what the dashboard has to say.

So that's one obvious and direct path is just asking for the information that is officially available to you. And then this one is an open-ended, again, an invitation for a conversation. Something like, "Hey, what's the most challenging thing to track? Oh, we have a new set of OKRs, how are you guys able to actually figure out if we're on track with those? How are you guys able to actually see if that's what's going on, if we're hitting our targets?"

If you stay open-ended and curious and you invite them to kind of talk about what's hard about their job, but you're not asking about specific confidential information, and you're just asking, what's hard about that with your job? Then they can open up.

They might tell you a bit more like, "Oh, well, my boss seems really focused on the profitability lately, but it's really hard to track because of X, Y and Z. I know we set an OKR, but I actually don't have a way yet to figure out how to know if we've hit it."

Again, that's useful information, and it's not too far off on what is officially available so they might be willing to share it or not quite realise that they're sharing something new.

In this case maybe they show us a new metrics dashboard. There is some interesting data there. We're able to see our churn and our sales for the whole business. And things look pretty healthy, up and to the right, growth on the chart.

If that's the case, we got some clues from a few different friends, from our company website. Basically, what I've told you in this fake example is this hypothesis is probably not what's going on because we got a lot of clues.

We're going to jump into that second hypothesis and start testing it. As a refresher, what would confirm? Someone quitting, that's unlikely to be something that we can really suss out or clue out, it'll just happen.

Knowing what the fight about, it's definitely an interesting challenge because I don't think we're going to get this one confirmed. We are trying to figure out what this fight is about or confirm that there is a fight going on.

We have our categories of spies, people who are better connected, people who have access to different information, people who report to other leaders, assistants of other leaders, our boss, those other leaders themselves. Anyone who works between departments, all great resources.

Are we ready to start asking some potentially awkward questions? How can we make them seem innocent? The challenge awaits us.

If we have friends who report to that other leader, these are people who have access to different information than us. And they might be willing to gossip, they might not know that they're gossiping, that's okay.

Something along this line is an easy invitation. "Hey, is your boss also micromanaging you on this project these days?"

When it comes to your goal of getting more information than we give, this route obviously requires some trust in the process. You are giving the information that your boss is micromanaging you, but hopefully extending that olive branch will give us some comraderie, some new information, and also maybe a new friendship or a deeper friendship.

As a side benefit, if you are both being micromanaged, you might need a friend, or someone who can relate and can help you navigate through that. Even if we're not focused on finding clues, if we zoom out here for a minute, it's just good to also have friends that you can lean on in the workplace.

Maybe you reach out and the two of you do end up venting for a while, and you learn that the other leaders have also been micromanaging and acting a bit different lately. And their team also had some projects put on pause in order to tackle this new collaborative project that you've probably been working on.

And you learn maybe that their leader is really excited about this collaborative project, which feels very different than what your team is up to where it's not excited, it's negative vibes. Maybe that's the result of your conversation, maybe not.

There's also the more direct option if you are actually friends and not just corporate friends, "Do you think your boss and my boss get along?" You can ask if you have that kind of relationship.

Now, what about assistants? You have to be careful because of course like the people who work in finance, they're usually very aware that there's confidential information that they have access to that they're not supposed to share.

Don't outwardly lie or be fake, but if they seem like they might actually just be a cool person, the easiest way to start is, "Do you want to hang out sometime?" As long as you do have a genuine interest in them as a person.

They might not have a lot of friends because they might not actually work with a lot of other people since they work closest to their boss and that is a weird relationship. If you don't want to go that route, doesn't feel like a good fit, then I don't encourage you to be a false friend, that's weird.

You can also ask questions like, "Hey, what's it like to manage this person's calendar? They're so busy, it must be tough, especially if you're trying to book something with them or your team is trying to book something with their team."

If you're already in that zone, you might get a clue from their body language. There's an exacerbated sigh and you're like, wow, their job seems hard these days.

Maybe they say something like, "Oh, their calendar is way too busy, I can tell that they're really stressed out." They're stressed out lately, that's useful to know.

Depending on your relationship with your boss, this may be an easy or a hard resource for you to get information from. Considering in the example we gave, your boss has been micromanaging you and driving you a little bit crazy or a little bit frustrated, we'll assume they're not on board for obvious gossip and so we can ask other questions.

Starting with the obvious, and the things that will just help you do your job better no matter what's going on. "Hey, it seems like you've been really worried lately about this project, is there anything else I can do to help ensure we are successful?"

This might help you glean information on what it is they're worried about. Perhaps they take it in a different direction and share something like, "I just really want to finish this up so we can move on to that other thing we put on pause."

No matter what the answer is here, it will help you be successful in your role. It's a win. You're just asking, hey, what should I focus my energy on? And if we get clues to help with our codebreaking, great. If we don't but they tell us what they want from us, also great.

Another one in that vein is, "Hey, who should I be collaborating with more for this project?" Although you might be midstream, you already have things set up, if they are actually fighting with someone, they might want an out.

If you ask questions like, "Hey, who can I collaborate with? What can I take on?" They might say, "Oh, thank goodness, please take on this, I can't handle it anymore."

They might not tell you that, but they might just be very excited to hand off something to you, like a relationship management piece. Even if you're already well underway and you think this was a settled deal, you can still ask again and just see, maybe they're the same people you're already working with.

The most simple of questions, "How are you?" And if you ask something like this right after they have had a meeting with the person that you think that they're fighting with, they might respond, body language, communication, in a style that gives you a clue that they were just in a fight and do have a heightened sense of fight or flight.

The actual verbal answer might tell you, but it might also be those more indirect clues. This is the height of an innocent question; it's just how are you?

Also, they are human, if they are fighting, it is a nice thing to have someone ask, “hey, how are you?” It can be really stressful for them and you can be a kind human maybe in that moment.

With these questions, my goal is to give you ideas around how you can ask things that are just good practise outside of this clues and codebreaking thing.

What about the other leader? Again, it kind of depends on your relationship with this person, but the most obvious and direct one, "Hey, what can my team help your team with this quarter?"

Asking the simple stuff like this can help you understand what's top of mind for them, what they're actually thinking about, even within the project scope, what's of concern to them.

It just helps give you more puzzle pieces to understand that bigger picture. And so, in the territory of trying to figure out what people are fighting about, we need a lot of puzzle pieces to probably feel confident that we understand what's going on.

The more we can ask these innocent questions of a lot of different people and see which puzzle pieces we come up with, the more likely we are going to be able to see that bigger picture and actually put these puzzle pieces together.

Say the leader talks about how they really want your help convincing your boss about how great this new project is, like, "Oh this new collaboration, I'm so excited. Actually, how you can help is get everyone inspired about the vision and the mission of this new project. You can help me get everyone else excited about it."

Maybe they don't name your boss, but they want you on the hype train. And you think, interesting, you need a hype train. That's a best-case scenario. They're pretty clearly telling you what is going on if that's the case.

Let's revisit what we know. For our first hypothesis that the company is struggling, we found out that sales is above average. Found out that customer retention is the same last year. We found out that that's probably not what's going on and the company's struggling.

But from the leaders are fighting, you found out maybe your colleague is feeling micromanaged as well. Maybe that assistant looked exhausted and was like, "Ah, I just can't say anymore." Maybe you got clues from your boss or that other boss, mild complaints maybe around this new collaborative project and it's a distraction, "I just want to get back to that other thing."