Get messy and obvious faster
At my most insecure, all my life I've tried to codify as much of what I do as possible. Time, experience and – probably – a healthy relationship with anti-depressants (i.e. not a huge dose, just enough to strike an equilibrium) helped me snap out of it. Just about. I still do it, just... more loosely.
This is on my mind because I find that, these days, my process for strategy, writing, thinking or generally forming points of view on things, can best be described as 'emergent discipline'. I think this works. Why?
Because it's one thing if you're all about discipline, a 'guardian' of the truth if you will, and ultimately it's your narrative or people are plain wrong. I've seen many strategists like this. It's not an approach I subscribe to.
However, it's an approach I have learned from. It's something that definitely comes in handy from halfway through to the later stages of a project, where some codification is emerging. Your job is to protect it.
Thoughtful discipline
An extremely talented Creative Director I am working with now says I'm a disciplinarian. I think he means it in a good way, at least he said it with a smile and he clearly respects my work and perspective. I'm gonna take it.
What I think he fundamentally means is that, once we get to a set of strategic parameters, we lock in and hold ourselves to that standard. And this works for him because his mind is always going loose. He likes a challenge, pushback, counter-points, to ensure we get to the best shit.
The question for me is, therefore, not whether the role of a strategist is to uphold those guardrails. It totally is. It's how you get to those guardrails. And as I said, I'm not about controlling the narrative like a mastermind.
So what am I about? What are other forms of thinking about it? Remember, I said emergent discipline. The discipline is the endgame, but its emergent properties are what really interest me these days. How do you exactly get to codify the elements you need to then keep the work tight?
Yes it's a team sport
Emergent strategy is not new, but it seems to me most of us still think of strategy by itself as a solo act. It is not. In Playing To Win, Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley talk about how their great unlock at P&G was to frame strategy sessions as a shared debate, rather than a presentation on trial.
If strategy can and indeed often is a shared endeavor (if nothing else because you need to secure other people's buy-in), then our role is less that of a mastermind. We're MC'ing the operation. Bringing questions. Framing jobs to do. Highlighting challenges and letting people air their voices.
Probably the greatest line I've ever heard about the role of a strategy leader (not that I'd get so self-grandiose to call myself a 'leader', but I think I can exhibit some leadership qualities and others have said so to me too) is this:
"It doesn't matter if you wrote the strategy, as long as there is one."
And once you acknowledge this as the core premise of our role, especially as you get more senior, then the role is much more about facilitation. This is where the emergent properties come into play. These days, I'm at my most comfortable not writing strategy, but co-writing it as I go.
Shitty first drafts
Like a poor man's version of a flaneur, I often find myself floating around the agency or office I work at and asking people if they have five minutes to talk about something I've been thinking about. I may bring a 5-bullet point summary. I may just bring a question. Or a statement I wrote.
The point of this is not to show people how smart I am, but rather to help them be smart with me. Please tell me if this is good. No, wait, please tell me if it's anything. I may well be full of shit. In case I am, great, we can move past this rabbit hole. In case I'm not, the buy-in has already begun.
Although I acknowledge that strategy has a performative element to it, in how you deliver it, I'm convinced it's counter-productive to make a performance out of how you get to the thing in the first place. Fewer meetings, more shitty first drafts. If you can't yet discuss where your strategy is at while casually making a coffee next to your Account Director, question whether it's simple enough. And then go back in again.
Mess and obviousness
Two extra areas I'm fascinated these days about how we fuel the process so that these emergent properties can manifest themselves:
Things that are obvious
Things that are messy
It is a tried and tested framework that indeed we need to fuck around to find out, but given the time crunches on projects these days I'm interested in how we can get to mess and obviousness much faster. So that, of course, we can move past them and get to some better, tighter, shit.
This is where I see one role of LLMs these days. Sure, they can help summarise documents or write your emails for you, but that's lower hierarchy of needs stuff. Not wrong, just incomplete. So what else?
I recently re-structured a custom GPT to help me get messy and obvious faster. I call it my Salmon Lab Assistant. It has all my favourite and most used frameworks loaded in, from cultural analysis to brand positioning to tone of voice to comms strategy to social hooks, and so on and so forth.
Process with others (including the machines)
The purpose of this is not to replace my thinking, but to supplement and sharpen it. You'd think, armed with this bot, I'd start every project with:
Here's the client brief
Write me a strategy
Now I make it better
But the problem with that is a) IP violation much, b) thinking isn't just a mental thing it's an embodied thing, you need to feel your way through what you actually think, and c) I never fully 100% trust its responses (yet).
Instead, my process these days is about using it latter to make early drafts (the stuff you can get to in maybe 1-2 days) better, so I can go back in again. Your mileage may vary, but just this week I tried this as a process:
I digest the client brief, do my research, write a broad first story
I feed that story to the Salmon Lab Assistant to challenge it
All while I'm kicking around shitty first drafts with people
This may sound messy to you, and in some sense there is some mess involved, but that's the point. I want to process the mess with others, be that other people (my AD, my CD) or other mental models (LLM), so we can get to the obvious faster, so we can move past the obvious faster too.
As I do more of this workflow, I may find more effective ways to integrate these various components, but the core point is they are designed to be integrated. With intention, not panic or knee jerk reactions. It's all part of the system man. And when done well, that system can work beautifully.
