Reveal or riff: two ways to work with a strategist

One of my clients recently asked me how it felt to be part of their Slack and discussing the work as we went along. They were coming from a place of – maybe – embarrassment, asking if I was ok that they kept sending instinctive responses vs consolidated feedback.

My answer was quite simple. If it works for you, it works for me. But I was also secretly reflecting on how, in fact, this is how I best prefer to work. I've probably written 5 versions of the same framework in something like 2 days, because every time we looked at it together we realised there were new questions, so we tweaked it yet again.

For many, this might feel criminal because strategy is all about deep work. And they're right in part, a substantial part of strategy work indeed should be about sitting with a problem and working through it. But to say this is the only way to do it feels quite exclusionary.

Some of us – myself included – thrive on strategy being as much an ongoing conversation as it is a presentation. Or to be more precise, some of us are actually quite averse to needing to always show up with a big reveal, and thrive far more on strategy riffs instead.

It's worth asking ourselves where this need for a big reveal comes from. It comes from an era where agencies and external providers were expected to wow clients, and operated with total creative control over everything that needed to happen with the work. Alas, I'm not sure we're in that world anymore. For a few reasons:

• Clients are much wiser about how to do strategy and even have ideas, some of them are probably ex-agency people

• Structurally businesses are far more intertwined and alignment between departments is important for end-to-end stuff to work

• The pace at which some businesses like to run, or feel they need to run, means thinking on your feet is more important

There are many other factors, this isn't an exhaustive list, but it's more a call to consider if our need to always reveal a big transformational answer is all it's cracked up to be. Personally, I've never dealt well with the pressure that creates on me, as I'm more of a chatty strategist who likes to kick things around with others.

So when thinking about your own ways of working, ask yourself: are you more about the reveal, or more about the riff? Neither is more valuable than the other in isolation, it really comes down to the context of the people and organisational cultures you're working with. Part of diagnosing and solving a brand's problem also comes down to knowing how the client wants to work with you to get there.

P.S.

Riffing is what we do all day long in the Salmon Crew private Slack. We've been discussing cool things like ​how to interpret modern culture through a medieval lens​, ​tech bros discovering nicotine​, and ​people presenting interview tasks as a Claude-made presentation​. You should join us. It's the algorithm-free space your mind needs.

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