Partnership is messy
Here's how you can slowly but surely go mad as a strategist:
Read up on how strategy should be done, the frameworks, the processes, all the elements we need to do things well, and so on
Do the job for more than two seconds, only to realise reality and business are never that clean or linear or devoid of interests
Go back to step one, feel reassured that you're right and the entire world is wrong, and eventually use your bonus to pay for therapy
Or, there may be something else we can do. I've been thinking a lot about this because I keep thinking about the difference between someone behaving like a provider, as opposed to behaving like a partner.
Now, of course, most of us would say, "I want to be a partner not a provider". And that's probably the right thing to do, especially if you want to command a higher price premium over time. But here's what bugs me: partnership is actually not a very clean state of affairs. You know what business partners do? It's not just the sexy stuff. That's the narrative.
But that's not reality. The reality is partnership is as much about unlocking opportunity as it is about managing bullshit and ensuring the wider team don't get exposed to it. It's rewarding at its best, but also not always fun. Full of meaning and sometimes contentment? Yes. But messy as fuck too.
The reason I'm pointing this out is that perhaps our expectations of what partnership is are too aligned with what the expectations of being a provider is. A provider needs a clear brief and all the elements in place before they can get started, and until they have a brief and task and all the elements in place they can't get started. "Computer says no".
A partner also needs a brief to get started, but what I observe is that, more often than not, not all the elements are in place yet. And you need to get started anyway! Why? Because as a partner it's in your best interest that, as imperfect as the starting point may be, you're there to help the business be more effective. And that means starting before you're 100% ready.
There is such a thing as a terrible brief (we could do a horror stories series on this alone, maybe next Halloween), but that doesn't mean we should expect every single time to receive a perfect brief and set of circumstances before we can start moving a single finger to solve a problem. That's what providers do, it's not what partners do. A partner works with what they've got, instead of just complaining about what they don't have yet.
I've done comms strategy projects that often begin without a budget, or from a very tactical starting point, only to then a couple of weeks in the actual brief being officially revealed and we need to see what survives from the original thinking now that we have more elements in place.
Is it annoying? It can be. But what do I, and the agency I'm working with this, as partners to this client, do about it? Complain? Sure, can do. But you need to move on from that pretty soon. Can we help the client learn how to brief us better? Possibly, but that will take time to do right.
What I suspect is going on with situations like these is: there are conflicting interests within both the agency and the client's business to get going on some of the work (production schedules, stakeholders demanding to see some stuff), while we wait for the full final brief to come. So you don't have the full picture yet, but you have enough to get started.
So within this, sure complain and reiterate what you need for a bit, but it feels to me that the worst thing you can do is just... wait for the final thing to finally emerge, like a Pokémon who's perfected its final form. No, your role as a partner is to sit with what you have, identify what you don't have yet, and get on with it. Maybe I'm becoming too British stiff upper lip about some of this stuff, or maybe I'm learning what being useful means. And as strategists, by not being indispensable (sorry we're not, great work often happens despite strategists being involved), we need to be useful.
