Order is less important than integration

Over the last few weeks, I've consciously set next to the Account Directors I work with on a range of projects, rather than with the strategists. This isn't because I don't value the company of strategists (I do), but rather because this makes 'the strategy' less of 'a thing'. Let me explain.

Layers not phases

In a recent conversation with Amy Daroukakis, about a little joint thing we're cooking up for agencies who want to do well in 2026, we were discussing how strategy should change to be most useful for organisations.

And one thought I shared with her is that strategy, although it's seen as a phase of a project, it's more of a layer across a project. Which is to say, you 'do the strategy' but then throughout you offer some sort of strategic counsel on things like future executional or even production decisions.

This doesn't mean you need to actively be involved in all those stages, but rather that you can be consulted or informed and have a chance to offer your two cents so that people can take a wider picture into consideration.

This strategic layer across projects is something that interests me, because it directly challenges our need to atomise the different stages of a project, but even the different components of each stage. You have the strategy. The creative. The production. The delivery. It's a baton passing exercise which sounds great on a one-pager, and also reflects very little of reality.

But even within each stage, and let's talk about 'the strategy stage', we love to atomise the components and impose a natural order in them, outside of which a project is supposedly too chaotic to do anything good with. Except, again, that's not always how things turn out. Perfect briefs, like perfect lives, are an illusion. All we ever have, at best, are trade-offs.

Atomisation ruins everything around me

When we discuss (at length! Until infinity!) what an insight is, we perhaps miss the wider picture that it's less important than you have a killer insight, but that your entire strategy story is insightful. I've worked with CSOs who didn't obsess with the insight section, they obsessed with the insightful layer of their entire presentation. It either was, or it wasn't.

Let's take a similar view to the integration of brand and comms strategy, or comms strategy and social strategy. Supposedly, they follow an order, right? First brand, then comms, then social. But sometimes the thinking that is born out of social can influence comms. And the thinking that comes out of comms can influence brand. This last one may be rarer, and takes a bit longer to be bought into, but I've seen it happen successfully.

The order of components is less important than the integration of those components. Who cares (apart from, as always, our ego) if the social strategy unlocked a more interesting thought which led us to question the wider comms approach? Or if the comms strategy thinking revealed new ways to look at a category which re-frames the brand's role?

In Playing To Win, Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley argue that between the stages of where to play > how to win > capabilities > management systems, it's only natural and indeed necessary to go back and forth between the stages. Sometimes capabilities-like discussions force you to question your preceding decisions, so you back to move forward.

The value of negotiation

Sometimes you inherit a brand, comms and advertising model which sounds great on paper, and gets you to win a pitch, and then the realities of how a complex multinational organisation, with differing and often contradictory incentive structures, force you to adapt and compromise.

Compromise feels like a dirty word until you realise that you either find ways to compromise, while still retaining some 'right thing to do'-ness in the overall approach, or you will forever be the person who loves to moan about how others don't get their brilliance. Sounds impressive. It isn't.

Or if you don't like the word 'compromise', think of it as a negotiation instead. You argue for a model that is at a 95% purity level, grounded in evidence and relatively simple to execute, but you might need to negotiate down to a 70% purity level, which is still above the 30% that preceded it.

When we think in terms of ideal ratios vs acceptable ratios of how far we're willing to negotiate, the role of strategy and how we integrate different disciplines becomes significantly easier. "This is where I got to" is a much more useful state of mind than "this is definitely the answer". Only the Sith – and chaotic evil strategists – deal in absolutes.

Integration as a service

So whether your starting point is brand, comms or social/content, recognise that there is an order for things, yes, but the ultimate endgame is to what extent there's a good degree of integration and interconnectedness. This also extends to the relationship between strategy and 'the creative', another false distinction that can be more detrimental than helpful.

Sometimes the creative development reveals a better, or sharper, strategy. Or a better way to articulate the real problem to solve. This doesn't mean you didn't do your job, but that you took it somewhere, then through other disciplines it went somewhere else, and that is an overall better place.

Ultimately, the fact that effectiveness case studies feel clean (and somewhat unrealistic considering how messy the job can be in reality) could be a source of liberation. Not because we ought to always assume that we need to follow the process just like it happened in those case studies, but rather that depending on where we get to, we can get to a story that feels like it would be a reasonably good effectiveness paper outline.

Does this feel like post-rationalisation? Perhaps. But the reality is that most of what we do, whether we start from a place of quantitative data or a hunch, is to develop narratives that are acceptable by a group of people, whether that's an organisation or the public, beyond reasonable doubt. Ignore the hype. We're not doing science. We're arguing for cases in court.

Work with what you've got

What I don't want you to take away from this is that we shouldn't ask for a certain order of events as the ideal starting point. You can ask, it's your duty in a way. But don't always expect it to happen, learn to negotiate the next best thing, build the narrative as you go, and do the best you can.

Just recently I got asked to help with a comms strategy exercise for a client, in the absence of a budget or a media plan. We had some AV assets, and needed to explore what else we run and why. I know a fair few folks who would have said this is a recipe for disaster, but I went with Jean-Paul Sartre instead. "Freedom is what you do with what is given to you".

So we are structuring our presentation based on what we know, what we don't know, and considering those factors the best recommendation we can produce to date. We know, and the clients know, it may change. But my experience is that it's easier to sell something specific and change it later, than to ask people to believe in abstractions until we have all the data.

We started by evaluating the latest performance reports. The latest brand lift studies. The brand and business health. The latest media responses. The latest channel best practices. A few relevant effectiveness papers. And slowly but surely, we're getting somewhere that warrants some discussion and decisions. And in time, budgets, plans and priorities will help us make more definitive decisions, without fucking up our production schedules.

Narratives emerge

Not everyone has the appetite to work this way. I know it's not been natural to me until recently, once I realised there are almost never perfect briefs so the healthiest thing we can do is get over it. And even some days I struggle, usually when the chaos is one degree too big for my taste!

But this is how business happens a lot of the time, I'm afraid. And sure, we could have moaned that we only do brand or comms or content strategy in a certain way, with certain ingredients in certain orders, but guess what? That would have made us right, and also not very unhelpful. Be helpful.

So, as best as you can, don't worry so much about the order in which some of these things happen. Even seasoned writers sometimes say that their stories are not something they design, but rather they're something that emerges in the process. Perhaps our job as strategists is fairly similar to that. It certainly feels more emotionally sustainable if we assume it is.