The Subtle Suffering of Strategic Solitude
As I type this, I’m listening to the ‘GTA Vice City’ official playlist on Spotify and can’t help but come up with music references for my words. But this one feels apt. 80s music, at least the one I listen to, is often packed with emotion plus vindication. These are people taking a stand against a system.
When I listen to ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart’, I feel like I can do anything, and yet there’s some sorrow keeping things running in the background. Which makes me think of something that feels quite true of most strategists I know: we all have moments where we feel bouts of deep solitude.
A while ago, a Salmon Crew member shared that “being a strategist is a lone job, but it should never be a lonely job”, and this hit me hard. Because I felt it. But also because I also realised others were feeling it. And looking deeper, others are feeling it too. A recent Gallup survey says 1 in 5 employees feel lonely on the job, and sorry, going back to the office by itself is not gonna fix it. We don’t need more meeting rooms. We need more meaning.
The Meat Is In The Meaning Part
I’m always curious to find out which parts of the process other strategists enjoy the most. Some are “ad nerds”. Others are what I could call “problem nerds”. They care about ads and creativity, sure, but only to the extent that they know that distinctiveness is a powerful tool to solve brand problems.
I count myself in this camp, and felt very seen by the words of David C Baker when I read both of his books on building expertise businesses. We could spend ages trying to psychoanalyse why that is, and to some extent I think it’s a protective measure. When you grow up with few structures to find meaning, you become obsessed with structures to help you find it.
Problem solving is an act of meaning making. But when I look at our industry, something feels off. We see awards shows saying creativity is the future (it is), all while trying to make sense of the fact that, according to CreativeX, 45% of ads that are produced are almost never used. Fuck me.
My hunch is this maps quite neatly against more advertising work being globally produced, where a lot of the work (and indeed people’s KPIs) is more tied to producing playbooks than demonstrating results. Nothing wrong with this, of course, as this can be a source of meaning. But among the maker-types I know, this really ain’t it; they want to be closer to reality.
Reality and meaning map closely together. Baudrillard wasn’t thinking of brand governance models when he wrote about simulacra and simulation, but it applies. Of course, we need consistency and I’m not denigrating those roles. All I’m saying is that, for some, meaning comes from doing things, and from others it comes from ensuring things are aligned before they get done. And it matters to know which part of the camp you prefer to be in.
There Are Only Agreed Answers
The idea of coming up with “the right answer” never sat right with me. I can probably trace it back to 11th grade, where I took my first philosophy class, and my teacher (naively?) said to a bunch of 15-year-olds that for his tests he didn’t care about our conclusions, but more our critical thinking.
Mark Rukman (great LinkedIn follow) offers perhaps a similar point that is more practical for our workplace realities. He says that since going client side, he notices people care less about “the right answer”, and more “the agreed answer”. Strategy is closer to diplomacy than it is to academia.
Perhaps, in divisive and undecided times, this is a net positive. It certainly feels like a saner way to make our living, because it minimises the role of a lone genius, and maximises the role of a collective one (or ‘scenius’). A strategically minded scenius feels like a rare thing to have, especially as more of us witness redundancy around us, or are victims of it ourselves.
We shouldn’t even even blame AI for these rounds of redundancies. We should blame the short-sightedness of ‘leaders’, who are reducing their businesses’ ability to renew their own expertise pool (i.e. the people). Either way, this only accentuates the feeling of strategic solitude, because being ‘really smart’ but feeling lonely is a shortcut for inevitable burnout.
Perspective Makers Need Perspective Makers
Do your social feeds energise you, or suck energy out of you? For me, it depends on the dosage, but it’s probably 5 minutes of energy and anything after becomes soul sucking. This definitely says more about me than it does about the people I follow, but that saturation feels real across the board.
Again it’s easy to blame AI slop, and no doubt this is part of it. But a deeper problem, which I see reflected in IPA TouchPoints data, is that feed-based media seem to put us in an anxiety-induced state. Which means that feeds, while great at prompting us, might be terrible at giving us perspective. It’s hard to have perspective and be an anxious waterbag at the same time.
Douglas Rushkoff talks about ‘finding the others’. Knowing which people are our kinds of people, and which are not, and determining this based on the type of energy we receive from others and deliver in return. In the era of incendiary hot takes, I’d much rather have a sustainable dose of warmth, thank you very much. We don’t shout ourselves out of strategic solitude.
Find Clarity Together
This is precisely why I created the Salmon Crew membership. It’s a private group where smart people are finding clarity together every single day. If the powers-that-be have stripped you of a team or department, consider this your own strategy crew to help you navigate the thorny brand and business problems you face. If you’re struggling with strategy solitude and want to find clarity together, we’re here for you. Join the Salmon Crew.
