Why (and when) we need strategy sprints

After 15 years of writing about strategy, I still get surprised that people reply to what I write. Perhaps as a sign of what Eugene Healey calls the ‘social media recession’ though, I now get replies in DMs, email and WhatsApp.

I’m not complaining. I prefer these environments. The feed feels… too much. But last week, after finally caving in and posting about some recent work achievements, I got a message from a fellow Salmon Crew member.

He was interested in how I’ve done strategy sprints before. It’s something I’ve instinctively proposed to clients when it’s right, but never fully wrote down how I actually think about them. This is a first draft to formalise them a bit.

But let’s start with where we are today.

Waterfall woes

We say clients think about strategy in linear ways. But the irony is some of our processes get pretty linear pretty quickly as well. We can’t discuss strategy until we’ve done a brand immersion. We can’t do a brand immersion until you’ve filled in this form. You can’t fill this form until you’ve attended a “reframing your brief” session with the CSO. And so on, and so forth. Ugh.

I’m exaggerating, but I’m also playing back things I’ve actually read from both agency people and CMOs who are frustrated with prevailing processes. The problem with these processes is they create the illusion of brilliance happening outside of a team environment, not as a result of it.

Strategists take the brief. Go away for two weeks to do research. Emerge weeks later with a comprehensive deck with polished recommendations. A – wait for it – grand reveal. It all sounds very promising, but. There’s a but.

Halfway through week one, there was some important information that came through from the C-suite. And it was important to feed this into the process if we wanted stakeholders to buy into this thinking. But because we were no longer in briefing stage, we weren’t scoped to do things that way.

“Brief better”?

One way of looking at this? To take the ivory tower position and proclaim to clients, “brief better”. It’s not wrong. It’s also not very effective. Because now you not only have a frustrated client because you spent two weeks going down the wrong path, you have a frustrated client who doesn’t like feeling patronised by strategists who have no empathy for internal culture.

Another way of looking at this? Start again. Two more weeks with the new information. Yadayadayada. Of course, this is risky because a) you didn’t scope enough hours to do it, so now you need to charge more hours, and b) it’s two more weeks where new variables may come into play. Who knows.

A third way of looking at this? You create an environment where linearity is not the point, frequency of contact is the point. Strategy is not a process to be followed, it’s a conversation to be had. A team sport. A full body contact one, where you push incrementally, and adapt as and when the game so requires.

One of the great anecdotes about Toy Story is that screenwriter Andrew Stanton didn’t call it a “great idea”, but the product of various “great ideas”. The first of which was to decide to make a film about plastic toys, because the CGI tech at the time made everything feel a bit plastic-y.

Similarly, I’ve not witnessed strategy being the product of one moment of genius. One grand leap. It’s more the collective effort of a series of leaps. These are made over time. Sometimes by a group of people. And it’s ok.

The clever conundrum

The problem with the linear strategy process is that strategy is done at clients, not with clients. This assumes strategists have all the answers, and clients have very few. Of course, we need to justify our value and not just parrot back what the clients think they ought to do. But our value is about more than being clever. Sometimes we show up to facilitate clarity in others.

Russell Davies talks about the importance of listening, in order to say to someone, “that thing you just said, do that”. It seems to me this is a more thoughtful way of thinking about how we show up, rather than simply blindly challenging what is being said for the sake of “that’s the job”.

Another thing I heard a lot from CMOs is that, when strategy is done at them not with them, they struggle to buy into it. Or for their team to buy into it. I recently hosted a content strategy workshop with a marketing leadership team, and one of the benefits was people felt like the work was theirs too.

Of course, I had ideas of where they should go and what they should do, but these came in as a suggestion, not an imposition. Another piece of the puzzle, not the box itself. And they came through conversation, not presentation.

Same result, but far bigger buy-in. And far better chances of that thinking sparking actual action. The greatest feedback I got from this client was that people felt listened to, and knew how to start working on the plan right away.

One final thing is the frustration executives feel if they don’t feel in charge of the process. Let’s be real, clients are not only giving us tighter deadlines. They’re under far more intense deadlines themselves. And so even small deviations from the plan can feel politically costly, not between us and them, but between them and their peers. We need to better empathise with this.

A solution, not ✨the✨ solution

This is where learning from sprints can help. Now, before you grab your pitchfork, I want to say this. I’m not saying sprints are always the answer. There’s a reason we protect deep thinking time. Some businesses welcome that level of structure. But sometimes, a linear process is just not possible.

Our job, on top of helping identify what is the right thing to do, is also some ways to get there. In other words, part of the diagnosis stage, I would argue, is about diagnosing the problem, but also how we work together to find it.

So, if you’ve established that in a particular instance a strategy sprint is the right way to go, here are a few things to bear in mind. First, you’re not foregoing your research stage. You’re just removing the pressure from needing to absolutely nail it and come back with your utter brilliance.

Instead, you’re baking frequency of contact from day one of research. Here’s what I found over the last few days. Here’s what it might mean. Discuss. Debrief. Do it again. No big reveals. Just effective bursts of collaboration. Regular check-ins. And horizontal collaboration, not top-down feedback.

Viva la vulnerability

To do this well, you need a client willing to join you in a vulnerable place. You’re showing up with things that may not be flat out wrong, but are not right yet either. And you’re encouraging the same from your clients. It takes a degree of self-care to know it’s ok to say something weird, no one will hold it against you. To do sprints well, we need to feel emotionally safe. All of us.

Once you get past this mindset hurdle, then the practicalities are, by definition, quite flexible. I’ve done sprints where we checked in every day, because we had a 4-week deadline and loaaaaads of moving parts. So we ensured we were on top of the moving parts as frequently as possible.

For clients, this made the process feel bearable. For me, it helped me get immersed into the brand as we did the work, which also increased my own confidence that I didn’t have any glaring blind spots. Or if I did, we always had time to course correct so it didn’t put the entire project in jeopardy.

I’ve also done sprints where, every Friday, I’d check in with the founder on where we were, what they were hearing, and what all this meant. These were high intensity sessions, 30 minutes tops, which forced us to do a little bit of pleasantries (we naturally got along really well), then straight to business.

Again, this helped us make sense of a moving parts project and buy into the thinking as we went along. In the end, we had the breeziest sign-off process ever. Because this founder had bought into the preceding premises of what we set out to do, and how we were doing it. There was no “wait what the fuck is this then” moment, as I’ve seen happen in waterfall work. Far too often.

Responsiveness and responsibility

The above also only works if clients commit to, operationally, be responsive within 24h or 48h, not only through a small weekly window. Sprints are by definition something you do when you don’t have a lot of time to do things. Or when you want to validate something quickly before committing huge amounts of resources to it. So speed of response needs to go both ways.

This may mean a change of communications altogether. Calls and emails are an option, but perhaps for quick queries or stress testing a thought, being available on WhatsApp is better. This comes down to personal preference, but the best client engagements I’ve had involved a fair bit of WhatsApp voice notes or messages to check or discard a thought. It’s worked very well so far.

The shift is simple but I believe profound. It makes it less about me, or you, showing up as the owners of all the answers, and imposing them on clients. We’re not saviours. We’re facilitators. We’re not always in charge of creating a new strategy, but of helping people find one. This may not be every client’s, or every strategist’s, cup of tea. But at the very least we should accept this is another option to show up, add value, and help others get things done.

Atomic habits not nuclear bombs

I find these sorts of things work well through analogies. So here is mine for strategy sprints. Big Strategy is Tony Robbins, who shows up, thunders through how you should see the world, and you feel uplifted (maybe) but also not sure where to start (probably). Strategy Sprints are James Clear of Atomic Habits fame. Not promising revolutionary change, but saying that simple habitual tweaks can give you incremental results. Slow and steady.

I’m using the word “incremental” here by design. We seem to hate the idea of strategists showing up to add incremental value, but my counter is simple. Sure, we want to offer inordinate value that genuinely changes things. But one scenario is we show up, say what is “the right thing to do”, no one buys it, we get frustrated they “don’t get it”, they get frustrated they wasted time.

Or, an alternative scenario. We show up, facilitate a thoughtful and rigorous conversation about possibly right things to do, that are also feasible, and clients actually feel involved and go and do it next. It feels less sexy, but it can be more effective. It makes me the strategist less the hero, but the team and business ultimately wins the most. Which is the endgame of any of this stuff.

Pride and practicalities

So let’s say you bought into all of the above, or at least not flat out rejected it. To do sprints effectively, we ought to remember a few final important things.

First, this is an option, not the only way forward. There are no “only ways forward”, and anyone who suggests they are is trying to trick you. The very act of giving clients agency in ways of working already cements trust, at least in my experience. Be hard on the problem, but soft on the process. Always.

Then, start small. You don’t need to do this for your next 5-year platform. There are political factors at play which might make it impossible. But try it in your next tactical campaign. Your next activation brief. Stuff that, even if a sprint goes terribly wrong, you can still fall back on tried and tested ways of getting things done. Or start with weekly or bi-weekly check-ins, not daily.

Then, remember: momentum, not perfection. It’s more important to keep the flow of conversation going, than to get the contents of the conversation 100% right at all times. There will be a time for buttoning down the answer and crafting wording. Right now, you’re looking for meaningful options.

If you’re on the side of delivering a strategy sprint, remember you’re there as an ally. You show up to help clients explore the right things to do, but also the right ways to frame those things so others in the business buy into it too. This is how you lower defensiveness and grow collaborative energy. And it works.

As Kevin Chesters once told me, agencies (or consultants) are not from Venus and clients from Mars. Rather, agencies (or consultants) and clients are from slightly different parts of Venus, and the rest of the business is from Mars. Challenge clients, yes. But be, unequivocally, always on their side. They already have enough going on with the non-marketers in the business.

Rigor or mortis

None of this is an excuse for sloppy thinking. There is a whole skill to knowing how to challenge someone’s thinking, or forcing an important decision, without coming across as an arsehole. In time I will explore some of the techniques that have worked for me. But for now, remember that asking questions calmly, and without judgement, makes a world of difference.

If someone’s unsure about whether you’re there to grow share or to grow the category, ask questions to help flow the conversation. Don’t just launch into a parade about how “you must choose because strategy is sacrifice”. Again, you’re an ally, not a lecturer to your clients. Respect their minds. Help them untangle the pressures they will be put under. Help unstick the stuck.

This is an uncharacteristically long post, but in classic fashion I didn’t have enough time to make it shorter. What I hope you take out of this is that there are other meaningful ways to get to solid, rigorous strategic thinking, that don’t involve the headaches that come with a time-based business model, where we all have an incentive for things to take longer than they have to.

And of course, this opens two other whole other avenues of conversation.

One about how sometimes good thinking needs time to emerge, and how do you get this truth to coexist with the truth that sprints can be helpful. In some cases, the answer really is “we need more time”. But there are also scenarios where you don’t have more time, so work with the time you have.

The other is the very way in which we charge for sprints, and no the answer isn’t by putting together billable hours. It’s much more effective to think of sprints as a product, or a programme, with a set number of deliverables and an expected outcome of those deliverables, and pricing for that. I’m not super experienced with value-based pricing, but when you’re going for speed of delivery of a quality product, bake the profit margin into it.

On the one hand, you may come across as expensive. But on the other, you’re also giving clients controllable costs to work with. If you end up taking a bit longer, then it’s on you not them. And that is another way to build trust and transparency that you’re there to solve a problem, not to increase your rates.

This will be the first of many exploratory posts on this topic. The intersection of our work and our ways of working is genuinely fascinating, and it seems to me under-discussed because for some reason ‘operational things’ are not a sexy as ‘strategic things’. But without a good ops model, nothing gets done.

Got thoughts on any of the above, good, bad or ugly? Shoot me an email.