Control is a scale
Like probably many of you, I have opinions about the state of agencies, from the quality of the work (probably better than we think), to the quality of the business models (maybe worse than we think?), to the quality of the working conditions for their people (probably worse than we think).
And while many things depend on factors way above our pay grade, from mergers to acquisitions to, ahem, 'right-sizings', there is a danger that if that's all we focus on then all we're left with is despair and rage bait.
The Stoics had a simple answer to this: focus on what you can control. And this applies to most situations, whether they're large and complex in nature, or simple and predictable. All we have is what we can control.
The challenge with this line of thinking is that we experience events in relative terms. So if I can control, say, the quality of my work, the quality of the relationships I have with the people I work with, that still may pale in comparison to the wider complexities of the business we're both in, or working with. So, in comparison to all that, we have very little control.
But that doesn't mean the relatively little control we have is insignificant. In fact, from a pure surviving-and-possibly-thriving perspective, it's the most significant thing we can focus on. The reality is, many projects fail or never reach their full potential despite the fact everyone did the best job they could. Does that mean we failed? Well, there are two types of failure:
You fail even though you did your best
You fail because you didn't do your best
What I'm talking about is the former. Giving it all you've got, and still experiencing failure, should be rebranded as perhaps 'lite failure' or 'contextual failure', rather than personal failure per se. If nothing else, because it gives us the energy to get up and do the work all over again.
Why does this matter? Because if we look under the hood of what might be driving a lot of anxiety and depression among marketers, strategists and creative people of all kinds (not clinically, but symptomatically), is the fact that we have very little control over things like the role of AI, whether the new boss is going to decide to scrap it all and start over, and so on.
What we can control is the effort we put in. This applies to a range of fields, not just strategy (where you have direct control over the diagnosis, the goal, the plan, how we measure if it's working, but little else), but also something far more important, and definitely strategic – parenting.
I was reading something the other day about how the role of comms and media strategy is shifting from trying to control attention through a few concentrated channels, to trying to influence attention through an elegant orchestration of a range of multiple channels. There's a lot of truth to this.
But it goes beyond comms and media, because indeed we're in the game of influence and trust, not control and command. At least, if we want to work in good places, and raise emotionally healthy families, we are.
On the role of strategy, this is relatively clear. You can't force anyone to do anything, but you can know how to argue for the right things to do, and work the room (and outside the room) to get people to agree on a direction and commit to it (agreeing and committing are quite different things).
But as a parent, it's also true and important to acknowledge. I've been reading Dr Becky Kennedy's book and she talks about our obsession with behaviouralism, where the supposed goal of parenting is to get kids to behave as we want them to, or as they 'should'. But this creates a problem: they may behave, but internally this creates damage for their identity and self-narrative, which pays very nasty dividends for many decades to come.
Instead, Dr Becky argues for a simpler strategy around acknowledging what our kids are feeling and connecting with it, while still maintaining boundaries. Acknowledging and connecting are not the same as agreeing, it's simply about making the other person feel heard. Which, ironically, increases the probabilities of them then actually listening to you too.
I find this delicate dance between control and influence fascinating, because it speaks to our ongoing need to socialise as people but also to help socialise ideas, recommendations, options, decisions. If my role is to advise clients to the best of my ability, even though ultimately I have little control over what happens in the end, the same is broadly true for how I help build a family system that can lead to better decisions for my child.
Of course, the comparison falls short because clients and colleagues are not children, but psychologically we're all governed by similar needs. And the need to feel seen, acknowledged, to be part of a discussion, to feel we have options, to feel our perspectives matter? That never really changes.
Control, like most things, is a scale. And this analogy works in two ways: first, it's a scale in the sense that tilting one part of it will necessarily create imbalances in the other part. Second, it's a scale in the sense that there are degrees to it, and wider or narrower surface areas for you to exercise it, which means that in the vast relativeness of complex systems, knowing the scale of your own levels of control is a great place to start.
The alternative to this, of course, is to let go of any ideas of control altogether. The game there isn't about controlling events, but influencing them, which makes it less about a top down thing, but more like a broad peer to peer thing. And for that, you need more than imposed credibility or authority to make your stand, you need to earn those things. Regardless if you earn them to direct a new brand strategy, or inform it's now bath time.
