To blend social and comms strategy, combine rigour and restlessness

Something strange happens when you’re in the limbo between social and comms strategy. You metabolise their different energies and end up navigating the discipline of strategy at different, often competing, operating speeds.

This may be why, for many, it’s impossible to keep track of both disciplines at the same time, but for others it’s simply another way to combine two seemingly contradictory concepts in our heads. Contradictions and tension are often where the most interesting truths live, even if it hurts the brain in the long run.

The challenge of competing strategy speeds

Even though social strategy is something that gets done once a year, with a few quarterly adjustments here and there, the discipline as a whole feels quite restless. One way or another, you’re attuned to feeds of some kind, and you’re used to thinking of comms and culture in daily and weekly periods.

When it comes to comms strategy, the rhythm is a little bit less frequent, more measured. You might be brought on to help with campaigns, so your attunement happens at a quarter or monthly level, usually against the backdrop of a broader yearly theme. It’s a bit more compartmentalised.

The pit of restlessness: where speed lacks substance

I used to work with a UK telecommunications business and would often talk to their head of strategy about the importance of navigating these two mental states without it feeling like a contradiction. We got to the idea of “just enough strategy” to balance this constant battle between the restlessness to get going, and the rigour needed to get going on the right things.

Our industry has a strong action bias towards wanting to work out what to do next, but the reality is all that restlessness in the world may often produce just a lot of heat, not a lot of warmth. I recently read some research suggesting at least 30% of brands’ reactive social content was seen as pointless by audiences, and I suspect it’s more. It’s a lot of running for not a lot of playing.

This is the pit of restlessness. It’s where all your anxiety goes to the bin before you get some more anxiety to generate more work that goes to the bin. It’s what happens when a brand is more worried about reacting to the latest social trends than they are about what said reaction compounds to over time.

The peak of rigour: when decision paralysis delays growth

On the other hand, there’s a section of the strategy craft that advocates for doing the right things, evidencing everything, which at face value feels like a useful thing to do until you realise all that evidence-shaped armour weighs on you. Which is to say, you aim to be 100% right and go to market too late.

This is the peak of rigour. It’s where all your evidence accumulates around you, and you’re dead sure you know what the problem is, but you don’t want to move too quickly because the argument is so tight you don’t want it to break. It’s also where you, armed with all the evidence in the world, portray yourself as being above all others and prefer to be right over being effective.

Between the pit of restlessness and the peak of rigour lies most of the market, or more specifically the middle market in most categories, who know they need to move relatively fast to make a dent in the market, but also want to have the rigour to back up their decisions, if nothing else to justify them to the board.

Enter ‘rigorous restlessness’

This creates a seemingly impossible mental state which we might want to call rigorous restlessness, whereby you’re always keeping an eye on the evidence you need to make the next step, without letting the evidence become the point. Because the point is indeed making those steps.

The question, then, is how to capture this in a practical way that benefits brands in the mid-market who know pace needs structure to create velocity. This becomes especially pressing at a particular moment of inflection: a business who’s a scale-up and wants to grow up their operations without losing what made them special in the first place. They want armour without weight. Or at the very least they want a sense of defensibility for new types of ideas that doesn’t just rely on “it’s how this gets done” or “they simply don’t get it”.

Five principles for ‘just enough strategy’

While every business culture will be different from the next, there are a few general tools of thumb (an excellent term I stole from a book on writing) that have served me well and might be useful for you, too:

Operate at 70%

Although it’s mathematically impossible to prove this, I always advise clients to operate at 70% of information and indeed even 70% of confidence levels, because this is how you know you’ve done some due diligence. You don’t need perfect answers, just shared confidence.

One-page speedrun

When I start a client engagement now, the first milestone is not to get to the most thorough version of the strategy. It’s to get as quickly as possible to an exec summary level of our diagnosis and strategy and what it might mean for how we make decisions differently. This is what a good CMO often expects, with some rationale for those decisions, but really they want to see decisions sooner rather than later.

Specificity at speed

The benefit of speedrunning to that one-pager is that it forces you to be specific in your argument, but you get to do it at speed. This allows you to troubleshoot any problems with the direction of travel early on, especially when speaking to a decision-maker who wants to see where you’re headed before you’re 100% ready to commit. It also means you can have a strategic discussion and be proven wrong or corrected without feeling you’ve failed. Strategy as a team sport.

Parallel paths

I always aspire to write 2-3 different strategy statements which others can critique and frankly kill. This is especially useful when working directly with your clients, because it creates movement value around strategic work without creating a sense of preciousness that one of them needs to be the one because I really love it. It democratises the process without creating a sense of agreeable vagueness along the way.

Post-deck thinking

Sure, you will need to eventually produce a deck, but don’t mistake your output with the value of your work. The work is to create simple artefacts that are digestible and shareable in a corporate culture, which force decisions in more or less un-ambigious ways, which can be made without you being in the room later on. These usually show up in 2-5 slides tops that are a portion of someone else’s presentation or become the PDF they share to team members, not endless slides no one will ever read.

The endgame: using rigorous thinking to channel restlessness energy

All of this isn’t to say you shouldn’t end up with a comprehensive and thorough deck outlining the rationale behind each of your decisions. Hell, the latest client engagement I had resulted in a 90-page document with everything the business needed to know about the choices we made. But that wasn’t the key artefact that unlocked the conversation among senior stakeholders.

That deck exists as proof that we did the due diligence on all the work, and that instils a sense of latent confidence which is important. But the real value came out of being able to show a one-page framework to their entire team, and getting them galvanised about everything that would come after that.

Going back to the start, this is how we balance restless energy with the importance of rigorous thinking. We get to artefacts as quickly as we can, knowing we need to equip ourselves with just enough evidence to know we’re not shooting air out of our ass. And this also becomes a shared endeavour where it’s less important to be right alone, than it is to make decisions together.