Make meaning by making tools

Sometime in 2017, I attended a School of Planning event in London, and we had Richard Huntington on stage talking about the 7 Sins of Planning. But what really caught my attention was something he said as a little talk preamble.

Meet your makers

For historical context, this was when a huge part of the industry was still enamoured with the fact that agencies could now do things and experiences, not just ads, and everyone loved obsessing about Nike+ and R/GA back then.

The frustrating thing, Richard said at the time, was that people would interview with him at Saatchi&Saatchi and moan about how they like strategy, but deep down they want to be makers. First: who shows up at an interview moaning about things, instead of putting your best foot forward? Second, and more to the point, Richard offered a counter that stayed with me ever since.

“We are makers.We make meaning.”

Meaning machines

And we do. Meaning is how we boil down complex stakeholder dynamics and market dynamics and conflicting pieces of research into a coherent narrative that people can get behind before they decide to make some real decisions.

By this notion, sure meaning is not ‘tangible’ like an app, except try doing some work that feels meaningless and I can tell you right now it will feel tangible enough. If perception is reality, meaning is the soil that makes perception feel worth investing in. This is also useful direction about where we’re at with AI.

The bear case is that strategists, as makers of meaning, have decreasing roles in this world because AI will, as Mara Dettmann says, make things make sense. But I’m not so sure it’s as simple as that, because meaning is more than the words on a page, they’re about the social contract around those words too. Good luck having and encouraging the same level of buy-in and conviction around a strategy that no human actually authored, or has a stake in.

The bull case is that strategists will now be able to do end-to-end work, and so you can do research, strategy, but also ideas and production, because the tools allow you to do so. This would be fine except a) headspace, b) interest, c) taste, all of which exist in different levels in us all, but not everyone wants to do end-to-end. It also presumes this is what clients want to buy, a crucial factor. And I’m not convinced they do, because a lot of clients want deep expertise.

Skills not slides

I believe the answer is somewhere in the middle, by blending what we make and how we make it. The ‘what’ is fundamentally the same, we make meaning so people can make decisions, and we make those things often in collaboration with clients – at least that’s how I like to make them, and how my clients do too.

But the ‘how’ has a few different kinks to it now, and my recent experience with a US-based tech business gave me a fascinating insight into how things might evolve. We did all the usual stuff: stakeholder interviews, mini workshops, sprint-like sessions around key bits, socialising among key stakeholders, a couple of stress tests with the CMO, and in the end we had a polished deck that people had bought into, and that we all believed could solve their problems.

The project deliverable didn’t end there, however, because there was a final real deliverable. We were asked to encode this level of decision making into a bunch of Claude skills that would be part of a bespoke project, and develop a v1 prototype that could work as a strategic assistant for anyone who wanted to stress test their own ideas, or to generate net new ideas based on a brief which the AI tool would help refine with you.

Stratops-maxxing

It’s the first time I made this with a client, but frankly it’s so useful that I might incorporate it on all client engagements wherever possible, for two reasons:

1. It’s an acid test as to whether your strategy actually forces choices and rationales behind those choices, instead of standing on clever truisms.

2. It helps you operationalise the thinking in more effective ways, because part of making the prototype work is other people need to find it useful.

Given so much of our work often sits in a shelf because the project is done and, well, maybe not much has changed really, this feels like a good iteration and evolution on what strategists make, but also how they make it. The brief hasn’t changed, we’re still there to make meaning that encourages decisions. But what changes is how we make that meaning feel more tangible and usable.

Meaning through tools

We make meaning by making tools that operationalise meaning across organisations. Sometimes those tools are a deck, sometimes just a good conversation that shapes how clients play back their own brand or business narratives, but every now and then it means making actual tools that others can use and build upon. It’s not a Nike+, but it sure beats the Strategy Folder From Hell, where all those beautiful 100-page documents go to die a death.