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Strategy
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If you’ve ever wondered how to make money, here’s the trick: take something that seems magical, make it complex, and then sell yourself as the way to solve the complexity and to get to the magic.
Most businesses that sell services do this. And the advertising, research, and strategy functions are no different.
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“There’s gold in them there complex hills.
Fetch your pans.”
How To Do Strategy
If you do strategy, account planning, brand planning, or whatever you want to call it, and you’re making money from making your work complicated, you’re either:
A huxster, or
Incompetent
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What is a Strategist?
A strategist exists to help the strategist’s team make projects more successful and to do that by reflecting research about people, competitors, and the client’s company into the thinking that makes it into public.
The job of strategy is to find meaning in mess. The act of strategy is simplicity. Yes, it is a messy business but it’s complex in the way that our brains are complex and see patterns everywhere and jump from one thought to another and then settle somewhere if for a second.
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How To Do Strategy
This complexity is very different to industrial complexity where a business person takes what is very much an intuitive process and designs it onto a piece of paper to look official and detailed and complicated and expensive.
So, if you’re designing strategy with intentional complexity to make money and to take money from dumb money, then you’re part of the problem.
But if you’re new to strategy and are confused by all the techniques and concepts and you are doing the best you can to represent strategy in your agency (which is not an easy feat), then it will seem complex in the way the first day you walk into a job or a martial arts school seem complex.
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It’s a similar journey for many strategists. Someone will present the basics to you – then you’ll discover some incredible IP about how to do strategy, it will seem more scientific and justifiable, and then you’ll work out that it’s a bunch of boxes with a trademark icon and that what we do is – finally – simple.
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How To Do Strategy
Bruce Lee once said, “Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I’ve understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. The height of cultivation is really nothing special. It is merely simplicity; the ability to express the utmost with the minimum.”
Most martial artists go on a journey where they start with the basics, then the tricks seduce them (fancy spinning kicks, for example), and finally they return to the basics now understanding the basics in depth, almost in a spiritual way.
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How To Do Strategy
Strategy is art.
Strategy is part-science and part-intuition. But it’s closer to art than it is to economics, closer to absurdism than logic, closer to comedy than business.
Art helps people see themselves and the worlds in which they live with more truth. An artist will gather information, generate ideas, and then display an idea to which people can choose to catch up and with which they can update their mental operating systems.
That strategy is art is a dangerous idea only if you are dogmatic with the idea. Some people will need to front-load the word “art” with an adjective such as “commercial” for accuracy;
other people will relish their disgust at the statement because it places planning far from the idea of planning as a marketing science and they’ll fear it will lead to reckless planning, but here’s the thing: planning is better when it starts reckless.
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How To Do Strategy The fallback argument is this:
Strategy is a creative act.
This idea is easy to defend but we need to define the words to defend the idea. So here are the words:
Creativity is the act of having ideas, and
Ideas are useful combinations of things that don’t usually belong together.
The job of strategy is ideas (more: How to explain an idea - a mega post). If you say this to someone who disagrees, they’ll disagree for one of these reasons:
It affects their sense of self,
They don’t have definitions for these words,
They have a different definition of these words,
They are using a silent adjective every time they say “idea”, or
They’ll have to change how they see you.
This is why “creative strategist” is a tautology. The title appeared to differentiate cool planners from those research types. It’s unnecessary. If you’re a planner and not doing creative work then you aren’t a planner.
And here’s how to see you, the strategist, and your version of creativity while you’re on the job: the ideas a strategist has are like the ideas of a good non-fiction writer where a good non-fiction writer will lace every paragraph with a new way to see the world.
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How To Do Strategy
Strategy is your words
The best books on strategy are books on writing Why? A writer must notice what others haven’t noticed and then express what they notice in compelling ways. Grab a good non- fiction book and try to highlight the most meaningful phrase on each page for a chapter. You’ll highlight ideas. These ideas don’t sound like campaign ideas, taglines, or manifestos, but they are ideas because they combine things that don’t usually belong together in useful ways.
Examples? Yes, please. Grape scissors are:
The appendix of the sharp cutlery species
How a monster acts gentle
Paper scissors that refused to grow up
How weak people get to eat grapes
How an educated person in a dead-end career cries for help in public without anyone hearing
These are ideas and, as the audience, you get to decide if any of them are good but if you snorted or giggled then we’re onto something because good strategy is full of primal noises.
Start with these books on writing.
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How To Do Strategy
Strategy is an informed opinion about how to win
A strategist needs questions that unearth information and then the strategist needs to unearth his or her own opinion about the problem to solve and how to do it.
But I’ll let you in on a trick - you can define the word any way you’d like to. The point is to define it in public so that you and your colleagues don’t hide in the jargon you use to impress and horrify each other. You can even dislike the word, as many people do. It doesn’t matter.
Just choose your words, define them, and hold yourself accountable to them, while also knowing you can later update your own understanding of the words. It’s cool.
Many of us squirm at the word “process”. We can replace it with a word like “practice” but, whatever. This is how I’ve approached Strategy and creative ideas in the past.
Here’s a scribble of a Strategy process from 2010.
You can click the image for the larger version.
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How To Do Strategy
Having worked in many different kinds of agencies - advertising, digital, and PR, as well as a dot-com - and having published a magazine, hosted a radio show, promoted music events, all this diagram ever attempted to do was to get me to get my thoughts together about how I worked. It isn’t dogma.
In fact, this is a difficult way to work in companies and markets that:
Want to make everything complicated and take forever, or
Want to execute and that is all they want.
The slow-moving, political companies will want a process that’s more difficult and the executional companies won’t want a process at all.
For these reasons, I tend to focus my thinking on this rubric now:
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How To Do Strategy
This rubric assumes interrogation of the business issue and the audience but it tries to capture four ideas that, when captured, are wonderful forcing functions. Here’s what they try to force:
Asking better questions
Finding the problem to solve
Not hiding in too many words
Better insights
A connection between the thinking, a theme
Strategy as ideas
Provocative thinking
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