Sparring within structures
Sometimes you have one of those weeks where the jigsaw, like the Radiohead song goes, falls into place. This was one of them. Mostly on the professional front, though with a few personal moments of bliss too.
I've been reading The Art of Gig, by Venkatesh Rao, and it seems to me that it's a book that's not only long overdue, at least for me, but also hugely reassuring in that there are things I feel which others have felt as well.
From the writing style, to the mental models, to the methodologies that best suit Venkatesh's brain and ways, there's a lot in there I identify with. Sure, I may never write something as spectacular as Premium Mediocre, but one can always aspire to explore the world through words like he does.
Strategy as sparring
The style of 'sparring partner' as a way to do strategy is something I relate to quite a lot, but not only in relationship to how we deal with people. It's also a useful way to deal with ideas and the expression of those ideas.
Whenever people ask me what my writing process is, the answer is underwhelming. I start, don't filter, and then at some point stop, and filter. This is also how I start my strategy process once I identify some areas.
I recently started working on a direct response campaign for a big retail investing firm, who wanted to persuade people in the upper percentiles of income and investable assets to switch to them before Tax Year End.
Putting aside all the motivators and detractors we have already identified around this brand and product proposition, a strong instinct I had early on was that I needed to spend time with behavioural economics techniques.
Which one, you might wonder? Well, I could probably improvise 10 on the spot, the real question was which one was right, and why. But the start of the process wasn't about finding the right one, just identifying loads.
This is where gathering a few of your colleagues to kick around some BeSci helps. It's also where having your own LLM as a sparring partner (my Salmon Lab Assistant, now as a v1.2) becomes extremely valuable.
Within a few hours, I had 20 options. Within a day, I boiled it down to 7. And then, through logic, discussing with client leads and speaking to their market research VP, we boiled it down to three pretty good ways in.
The process itself, of identifying a specific enough but broad enough area of investigation, then going all stream of consciousness within it for as long as you can (or as long as the timeline or scope allows), then applying some cold logic to how to make it work for you, is simple and satisfying.
Trust and confidence
The real value comes in then deciding, through a broad and often embodied understanding of what a) this audience is most likely to want, b) the business are most likely to accept, and c) backing it with logic, evidence and perhaps some persuasion and performance. This is our role.
I point this out because through the process I could have just theoretically pasted the client brief on a LLM, asked it to go all behavioural economics on it, and then regurgitate the answer back at clients. But this would not only be hugely unethical, it's not even that effective, because there's a difference between giving the answer, and explaining why this answer.
More, it's being able to say 'why this answer', and also why not others. Strategic decision making made by exclusion of parts while understanding the overall context you're asking people to make a decision. This is the value that AI cannot provide yet. There's a world of difference between a client trusting what an AI says, and trusting what a person says because they've seen a whole range of other options, and decided to discard them.
Trust then, and shared confidence in other humans, becomes a more potent lever for us consulting and strategy types than pure knowledge ever could. Perhaps it's time we move on from calling ourselves knowledge workers, because knowledge is cheap. But trust and confidence? Premium shit.
Layers not phases
Strategy, through this lens, is far more embedded in an organisation's processes than a pure project plan could suggest. Sure, there is a strategy phase, but the reality is sometimes you revisit your assumptions, sometimes you need to go again, and sometimes strategy is helpful to remind people again why we're doing this when we're at the last lap.
Venkatesh talks about the difference between lack of imagination and lack of nerve, and correctly (in my view) points out that the biggest problems we suffer aren't lack of imagination. Everyone has tons of ideas. Not all of them are good, but they exist and can be imaginative. That's broadly fine.
The real question for me is lack of nerve. And strategy is about reiterating why we're doing what we're doing, reminding people to hold their nerve when the hard decisions come knowing at the door. We're nerve-holding agents who operate on trust and confidence, but without ever creating the conditions where responding or reacting nervously becomes the norm.
When we ask clients to be brave, we're saying the onus of holding nerves is purely on them, we're just there for the ride as merchants of imagination applied to a business context. Magic, logic-ified. I'm not sure I believe this anymore. Our role is to turn nerve-holding into a deeply shared endeavour.
Strategy is perhaps best useful as embedded nerve-holding, not isolated imagination-sense-making. This is how I'd reframe the silliness of saying our role is to do setup slides before the meeting. As if that's ever sufficient.
Twist premises without breaking them
One helluva powerful lever for trust, confidence and nerve-holding has been, at least for me, the ability to have stupidly large amounts of stamina to consume all the research others don't have time or headspace to. I read effectiveness papers and think thank reports for educational purposes, but also for fun. I collect dorky strategy charts and mental models and cultural artefacts that aren't useful yet, but probably will be sometime in future.
This all adds up to an ability to draw the right evidence to support the right instinctive calls, or sometimes to challenge them, but while making it logical enough. This isn't about showing we're smart, but drawing from a wide enough palette of reference points to help others be smarter together.
None of this, in fact, is about us strategists as individuals. The worst thing we can do as strategists is say we like something. It doesn't matter if we like something, it matters if it solves the problem. We're not merchants of our own taste, we're merchants of other people's – our audience's – taste.
But we're also merchants of understanding what, statistically speaking, is most likely to work. This is often rebranded as "best practices", which is Latin for doing the least worst thing so you can't get fired, but actually it's great to manage expectations on what tends to work – and then twisting it.
In other words, it's actually ok to start from a best practices position. Branding matters. Branding in low attention environments matters more. Emotional payoffs at the end of a film are hugely effective. Encoding the brand as close to those emotional payoffs gives you positive effects.
These are all best practice things, the question then is how we take them and find a way to introduce some surprising elements without throwing away the baby with the bathwater. Know the basic premise of how things tend to work, then twist it. You can try and break it, but the risk is on you.
Surprise, not disruption
Sure, sometimes breaking the rules altogether is helpful. But there's a difference between introducing an element of surprise, and disrupting the whole thing altogether. As with advertising, so too with consulting. You can show up as chief disruption officer and say everything the client's ever done is wrong. It's disruptive. It's surprising. And then they kick you out.
The answer, at least as far as I can gather, is in knowing how to work within the premises of how a business runs, and then introducing elements of surprise within it. Freedom within a framework. Spontaneity within structure. It sounds 'incremental', but it's actually how shit gets done.
The MAYA principle – Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable – is our friend here. Disruption, frankly, is overrated. We've witnessed a couple of decades of severe technological disruption, which sounds great, until we end up in an inequality and mental health crisis wherever you look.
Disruption sounds sexy but it can work more like a sexual predator. If that sounds like I get angry sometimes at how we're over-supplied with new things to think about, without giving ourselves time to assimilate the other things we were over-supplied with, like Prof G says, trust your instincts.
Rules of thumb
One thing I reflect on quite a lot these days is that, objectively speaking, there are no rules. But subjectively speaking, there are rules of thumb for how things get done. The more we can understand those rules of thumb, the more we can learn to navigate the complexity of human systems we call 'the organisation'. And as a free agent, knowing how to navigate different systems isn't an admission of defeat, it's how you start winning.
There is also, of course, merit in knowing which types of systems suit you best and which ones don't. For example, I don't deal well with what you might call pure 'organised chaos' environments because I like to think my role is to establish some elements of clarity, a bit of solid ground. If the nature of our work has no solid ground whatsoever, I start to struggle.
This doesn't mean I want total predictability. Not at all. It does mean that our role is to apply rigour at the start and the end (objectives and success measures; where to play and how to win; problem definition), and then let the 'how we do it' elements follow their true nature. Creativity is chaotic, it has to be. But strategy is about ensuring all that chaos is being channelled to solve a clear thing. Without this, we're lost. Or we slowly burn out.
