Strategy, Rediscovered?
Image credit: Ali Eser, https://www.artstation.com/ali_eser
“The clients don’t know what [planning] is, we don’t know what [planning] is”
Paul Feldwick
“I feel that strategy is becoming a lost art”
Roger Martin
There should be no need to write this. Indeed some readers (assuming you exist) may get to the end of this and agree, concluding it was nothing more but a long walk for a ham sandwich - a longwinded and entirely unnecessary restatement of the blindly obvious. And yet - the undoubted contribution and achievements of the discipline notwithstanding - if strategists really are the shock troops of creativity (which I happen to believe they are) then why do we obscure both to others and ourselves our value with vagueness and fluff, publicly parade our discomfort with the idea of strategy, limit the size of our canvass, allow ourselves to be marginalised, and whinge that we’re not taken seriously? There should indeed be no need to write this. If the demand and need for good strategy did not vastly outstrip the supply of it. However, if we truly we want to make progress, we really don’t need to examine what creative strategy, or planning, or creative planning, or strategic planning, or strategic brand planning, or strategic communications planning is. We need to be revisiting what strategy is.
Now I’m painfully aware that others - notably and most recently Roger Martin and Rob Campbell - have articulated the value and method of strategy far more concisely and incisively than what follows here. So don’t @ me that this is ‘long’ and just read them instead. Or your favourite fortune cookie strategic guru. But if you’re a glutton for punishment and enjoy disappearing down rabbit holes, then this is for you. But first some clearing of the decks, and air.
Getting the boring bit out of the way first
Depending on where they find themselves, there are people in agencies who call themselves ‘planners’ (and variations thereof) and there are people who call themselves ‘strategists’ (and variations thereof).
Those who suggest that there is a difference between being a ‘planner’ and being a ‘strategist’, have either not read the history of their own profession, or are choosing to ignore it. Which for a discipline that trumpets ‘curiosity’ as being one of its most prized traits and skills is surely more than a little bit odd. So a very quick bit of history, as told by Paul Feldwick (2009), one of the second waves of planning hires at BMP in the 70s:
“The ad agencies into which account planning was born were basically media-buying businesses, making their comfortable and predictable incomes from media commissions. Most other services, creative or strategic, were funded by commissions, and served to attract and keep the accounts.
In the 1950s, agencies had developed market research and strategic services among these added extras but, by the 1960s, advertisers were building their own marketing and research departments. This left the agencies with the choice of either abandoning these functions, or refocusing them.
Stephen King at JWT and Stanley Pollitt at PWP (later BMP) both took the view that the tools of research and strategy should be central to the ad agency's offering. Therefore these resources needed to become more central to the ad development process, and more focused on the goal of making marketing communications more effective.”
The new discipline took a while to catch on, slowly at first and then more quickly, but ‘planning’ as it was called, represented a Copernican shift in the development of advertising.
It was driven by the belief that building consumer understanding (nobody called it ‘insight’ back then) into the development of advertising, focusing on understanding how people consumed advertising (in contrast to the traditional focus on message transmission), thinking about the varied roles that advertising could play (in contrast to the traditional, simplistic awareness and persuasion theories), and seeking emotional responses (in contrast to the prevailing ‘information processing’ model as Feldwick calls it) was a route to more relevant and thus more effective advertising. As Stephen King put it in 1964 in his introduction to the T-Plan:
“I think the main requirement for a new system of setting creative strategy is that it should be more in terms of the consumer. Our objective must be a certain state of mind in the potential buyer, not a certain type of advertisement.”
The second reason the new discipline represented a Copernican shift in both thought and practice was that in introducing a third (and equal) voice and agenda alongside the traditional account management and creatives roles, it represented a radical realignment of power structures with agencies. As Feldwick (2009) has written:
“This high aspiration is just as revolutionary today as it was then – most obviously because it upsets the traditional balance of power in the ad agency between the account director (who owns the client relationship) and the creative director (who owns the product)...
Now a third power needed to be accepted – the account planner, described in the early days both as 'the voice of the consumer' and 'the account manager's conscience'. Pollitt envisaged every account team as based on this triumvirate, who would work together with equal power, though admittedly in a state of 'creative tension'.”
High aspiration notwithstanding, it has to be said that this realignment has been more sincere and more successful in some agencies than others.
As for the name 'account planning’, it was coined by Tony Stead at a JWT awayday in 1968, attended by media planners and account people from the marketing department. He simply merged the two titles together as Stephen's new department was to comprise a hybrid - selected folk from both disciplines.
So the fact is that the title ‘account planner’ was an accident of history, a convenience, a content-free pragmatic solution in the absence of any better ideas that contained no ethical vision or bigger philosophy - nothing more, nothing less.
It also helped helped as Griffiths and Follows note in 99% Pure Potato (2016) their sadly out of print of account of the origins of account planning and its first pioneers, that the name “reflected the high status of planning - aka town planning, corporate planning, scenario planning in the energetic 1960s when the past was being demolished and the future was being built”. So for an emergent discipline that rejected the old inherited assumptions about how advertising worked, and was seeking to build more progressive, more useful research methodologies in the pursuit of more effect creative work, it helped that it also just sounded cool.
Moreover, what is overlooked in the silly, onanistic, ahistorical “planning vs strategy” debates is that the idea of the applying strategy in the conduct of business which we now take for granted was still very much in embryonic form when Pollitt and King were giving shape to the new discipline in the late 60s. It simply was not a part of the discourse of business management in the way that it is today. Roger Martin reminds us that Boston Consulting Group (BCG) had only just been founded in 1963, it was not until 1980 that Michael Porter’s book Competitive Strategy became the first ever best-seller in the business category, and it was not until the 1990s that business schools were formally training students in strategy. So it is not at all surprising that the word ‘strategy’ appears neither in the job title nor features very often in the contemporary accounts of how it all started (including those of King and Pollitt). All of which would seem to demonstrate both our peculiar lack of interest in our own history, as well as the sheer nonsense of suggesting that being a ‘planner’ is somehow different from being a ‘strategist’.
What we can be clear on, however, is that despite its confusing name, Stephen King and Stanley Pollitt, always saw the so-called ‘planning’ function as being devoted to getting to more effective work. In other words they saw it as a strategic role even if they didn’t use the word that much. As David Cowan (one of Stanley Pollitt’s first ever planning hires, in 1966) said, planning was about “Trying to understand causes and effects”.
The problem
From the very beginning, however, the new discipline - one that was both external- and internal-facing, analytical and creative, upstream- and downstream-orientated, consumer- and business-focussed, research- and intuition-applying - was bedevilled by a lack of clarity and precision as to what its role was.
In 1978, Jeremy Bullmore, the Creative Director at J. Walter Thompson London, who worked alongside Stephen King at the agency, was invited to speak at the inaugural meeting of the Account Planning Group (APG). He spoke of the problem of explaining, first to the creative department and later to clients and potential clients, exactly what an account planner does. He closed by challenging the audience “to let me know, with some urgency, just as soon as you’ve agreed a comprehensible definition of what an account planner actually does?”
Twenty years later, in 1998 on the 30th ‘birthday’ of account planning, Martin Boase of BMP (now DDB and the agency that had co-authored planning in the 60s) writing in Campaign magazine reflected that “[Stanley Pollitt] would regret account planning having become a portmanteau term for a confusing array of different approaches.” Nothing that’s happened, written, or been said since then has done anything significant to clarify matters.
This is how the discipline responds when invited to define its role and value:
“What is a planner? It’s a difficult question.”
“What is the role of a planner in planning and a strategist in strategy? It can be such an ambiguous role you can spend half your time working out what it is you do when your job should be helping brands work out what to do.”
“I think it’s hard…”
“Trying to define planning seems to be a nightmare task for any planner.”
Why? Why is this such a difficult question? We’ve had fifty odd years to figure it out. Why are we in the job if we don’t know what it’s about? If it’s ‘hard’ to define how do we know what to do? If it’s ‘hard’ to define how do we know when we are doing it well? If it’s ‘hard’ to define why do we expect to be highly valued? And why are we okay parading our uncertainty in public?
When asked to define their role, strategists/planners quickly and more confidently slide into talking about their method, (unchanged in its principles and fundamentals since 1963):
“At the core of this task, is the need to understand the consumer/customer (interchangeable) and the brand to unearth a key insight for the communication/solution (Relevance)”
“The job of planners is insight”
“In summary, the planner is the agency’s ‘voice of the consumer’”
“Senior Account Planners represent the voice of the consumer in the agency’”
“To me the greatest contribution of account planning [in the last 50 years] has been to help make the work relevant and interesting”
“I think what planning’s always done… is it’s always put a human layer on the machine of marketing”
“For the creative teams, the key benefit of planning is usable research”
“Planning is all about having a consumer focus and through this it adds something to a process – the process of creating outstanding advertising. ”
“A planner’s job is to provide the key decision makers at both the agency and the client with all the information they require to make an intelligent decision. It’s not up to the planner to make that decision for them.”
“Planning is about sparking opportunities for creativity by getting inside people's heads”
But this is not the same as having a clear point of view on the true role and value of planning/strategy.
There are glimpses of (relative) clarity…
“To understand and influence the relationships between people in the real world between brands, and media”
But for the most part there’s more waffle than precision. Small wonder that Paul Feldwick was moved to write:
“The clients don’t know what it is, we don’t know what it is”.
Searching for the S-word
But what is more striking about all these responses is what’s missing from them. For none of these responses are explicitly talking about the practice of strategy. In fact we demonstrate that we are deeply uncomfortable with talking about strategy:
“‘Strategy’ is a concept that is defined in a bewildering number of ways. It’s an elusive and rather slippery subject which makes it difficult to talk about with any clarity or any precision.”
So here we have planners - those steely-eyed clarifiers and reducers of complexity, those ruthless scythe-wielding eliminators of bullshit, those compressors and reconstituters of information and complexity, those unearthers and miners of revelatory fortune-transforming insights, those keen-eyed polishers and sharpeners of precision-engineered propositions - giving up on articulating what strategy is, or worse suggesting that such an articulation is impossible.
The fact is that talk like this limits our ambitions and undersells our value. We fail to articulate the value proposition of planning/strategy for clients - and then complain that strategy is given away for free by agencies. We mumble about the unavoidable vagueness of our role - and then bitch that we can’t get into the client C-suite (or membership of the agency C-suite, for that matter)?
We do all this when the creative canvas and its possibilities are vast like never before, when client companies are seeking help and guidance on a whole plethora of issues and opportunities beyond merely the crafting of ‘messages’ and the production of a TV spot, when the tectonic plates of commerce, culture, and politics are grinding and shifting like never before, and when the marketing machine contains far more complexity and moving parts than the planners of the 60s would have ever encountered.
And we do all this when, as the influential management thinker and author Roger Martin (2021) has argued, those same companies lack robust strategy skills…
“I feel that strategy is becoming a lost art. Over the past half-century, two of the biggest sources of executive management have been MBA graduates and the alumni of the strategy consulting firms. But modern-day business school strategy courses mainly teach a slew of analytical strategy frameworks, and increasingly theoretical ones at that, not how to create a strategy.
And today the large strategy consulting firms, do much more work completely outside the domain of strategy (e.g., post-merger integration, overhead cost reduction, sales force reorganization, logistics optimization, benchmarking, project management, etc.) than in strategy…
Consequently, there is short supply of executives well-schooled in strategy, meaning that many of today’s GMs need support in performing this critical part of their job.”
Lifting our sights
We need to lift our sights if we are to fully realise the promise and potential of strategy (hint: we’re not doing it right now), if we are to truly be high-value partners to our clients, if we are to get a seat at the top tables, and if we are to be rewarded handsomely for our efforts.
What we need if we are to make progress, is a theory of strategy, uncluttered and unencumbered by the baggage of the past and the autopilot assumptions of the present
But where do we look for help? While undoubtedly helpful on a great many other matters, on this specific issue the writings of planners are of little help to us. There are the collected works of Stephen King (A Masterclass in Brand Planning), but while brilliant thy are about a lot more than ‘just’ strategy. There was that book about the art and craft of planning (Truth Lies & Advertising) from 1998 by Jon Steel - which he himself said he wouldn’t have read if he hadn't written it (2016). There are the published winners of the IPA Effectiveness Awards. Though they’re about specific strategies, not the enduring nature of strategy - and their focus is (obviously) on results. There are the APG Creative Strategy Awards, which again are about specific strategies, not the enduring nature of strategy. There’s a pretty good book on how brands grow (How Brands Grow) but it’s not about creative strategy - “reach plus distinctive assets” a strategy does not make.
Alongside these, there is a groaning oversupply of vapid, breezily-written, calorie-free, self-promoting books on business strategy and marketing strategy. There are a much small number of business books that have given us (for better or for worse) some famous concepts or formulas - Bungay’s ‘strategic intent’, Rumelt’s ‘guiding policy’, Martin’s ‘where to play/how to win’, Mintzberg’s ‘strategic perspective’ etc.
This vast and ever-expanding body of literature on traditional strategic management dominates the strategic discourse in general. But never mind the thin (or completely absent) empirical evidence on which their formulas for success are built, or their decision to ignore the human factor and the mess of ego, emotion, vested interest, and cultural bias that bedevils all strategic decision-making and the pretence that rationality and linear logic can and does prevail. The problem - for our purposes at least - is that they are in the words of the then new CEO of General Electric Jack Welch “cookbook” approaches, their focus for the most part being what (in hindsight) the ideal strategic process looks like, not what the role and nature of strategy actually is. As Lawrence Freedman (2013) put it:
“There’s been a problem with business strategy in that it hasn’t really unlike military strategy, had a single compelling model that has shaped all discussion”
We need to look outside for help and inspiration. Happily, while there are vastly more books written on business strategy than military strategy, there are just slightly more great texts on military strategy than there are great texts on business strategy. In the quest to get our heads out of our own asses, these will be our reference point. I know, I know. There are also far too many books (all by men, it seems) that want to tell us that business is like war, and that if you want to be a successful leader or run a successful business then learning from the field of combat is the best thing you can do.
Not for a moment am I going to suggest that the conduct of business and the conduct of war are even remotely similar enterprises. Whatever the business-as-war-bros might spout, the practice of military strategy is profoundly different from business strategy on many levels. War, as Clausewitz wrote, is a trial of moral and physical forces through the medium of physical force. Business it not. War serves politics - business serves customers. Armed forces have enemies. Businesses just have competitors. War operates through destruction, business through competitive advantage. Deception (as opposed to mere secrecy) is key to military conflict in a way that it is not to the practice of business. Business is (pretty) tightly regulated - power politics and military conflict much less so (if at all). Business is governed by economic logic - war is not. The past 194 days of news headlines should have made that abundantly clear to us.
Moreover, there is - contrary to popular wisdom - no straight, continuous line of evolution from ancient warfare to modern business strategy. What came to be known as business strategy emerged not from military strategy but from general management and business planning. In fact the field of business strategy did not properly emerge until Bruce Henderson’s founding of Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in 1963 - so some twenty-five centuries or so after Tzu’s Art of War so beloved by the business-is-like-war contingent - was penned. Business strategy in other words, is to military strategy what Homo Neanderthalensis is to Homo Sapiens. While there might be outwardly common features, they are in fact separate species.
What did happen was that writers about business strategy started rummaging through history to sell their books and theories (and no doubt massage the egos of their readers). Writes Freedman (2013):
“When examples were picked selectively, and carefully extracted out of their context, historical figures and events could be used to illustrate a wide range of business theories. In such books strategy became a collection of aphorisms and analogies, often contradictory, trite, and at most pithy restatements of best practice.”
But borrowing metaphors, concepts and language from warfare, is not the same as having been given birth by it.
However, while the practice of war and military strategy is profoundly different from the practice of business, it does give us a different lens which which to view the practice of strategy, and as I hope to demonstrate, provides us with some much needed clarification and illumination. But do not worry. I am not going to cite a single aphorism or sentence from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, or Miyamoto Musashi’s The Five Rings. Nobody needs any more of that.
I will, however, cite just a little Carl von Clauswitz (1780-1831), the Prussian general, author of On War, and probably the greatest, most influential military theorist of all time.
I will also cite a very great deal of Colin Gray (1943-2020) - perhaps the greatest strategic thinker of the twentieth century. He worked at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Hudson Institute, before founding the National Institute for Public Policy in Washington, D.C. He also served as a defence adviser both to the British and U.S. governments. Gray served from 1982 until 1987 in the Reagan Administration's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament. He taught at the University of Hull, the University of Lancaster, York University, the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia. Gray published some thirty books on military history and strategic studies, as well as a great many articles. I make no apologies for quoting Gray quite as much as I do. The clarity and precision of his language and thinking (as well as his willingness to think beyond the narrow confines of his domain of expertise) provides a much needed respite and antidote to our fluff and obfuscation.
And I’ll cite just a few others along the way. Harry Yarger is Senior Fellow at the Joint Special Operations University, and served as Professor of National Security Policy in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College.
Richard Betts is Professor of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. He’s a former staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the National Security Council, and served on the Military Advisory Panel for three Directors of Central Intelligence in the 1990s.
And Lawrence Freedman is Emeritus Professor of War Studies, King's College London.
It’s important to acknowledge as will quickly become clear, that vast majority of the ideas and words that follow then, are not mine at all. It seemed, frankly, unnecessary to try and gild the lily with too much of my own banal commentary. It felt more useful simply to get out of the way and let others do the talking. My role here is of copier and paster. Though I do conclude with (for what it’s worth) some reflections of my own.
But I know what you’re thinking. Why, one might ask, when it’s already easy for people to regard strategists as head in the clouds, beard-scratching, navel-gazing Powerpoint jockeys mired in the abstract, do we need more theory?
The fact of the matter is that “theory” has been hijacked, reinterpreted, and weaponised by those who want to position themselves as the hard-nosed, reality-facing practical doers, happy to diminish the role and value of those who well, inquire and think. I remember Fred and Farid when asked many years ago in an interview what they hated most about advertising answering “The planners. So political, so theoretical, so useless most of the time”. I used to carry the magazine cutting (now sadly lost) with that quote in my wallet as a reminder to myself not to give the doubters (and dicks) more ammunition.
So let’s in the spirit of thoroughness, begin by addressing the need for theory.
The necessity of theory
While in the world of business (unlike in the world of science) it has a bad reputation, what Gray (2018) makes clear is that theory isn’t about as many would have it, being pretentious and impractical - indeed it’s quite the opposite:
“It is the responsibility of theory to provide usable explanations of what strategy should do.”
Those “usable explanations” are derived from understanding the relationship between things. Gray cites Clausewitz who said it so well:
“Theory should cast a steady light on all phenomena so that we can more easily recognize and eliminate the weeds that always spring from ignorance; it should show how how thing is related to another, and keep the unimportant separate… Theory cannot equip the mind with formulas for solving problems, not can it mark the narrow path on which the sole solution is supposed to lie by planting a hedge of principles on either side. But it can give the mind insight into the great mass of phenomena and of their relationships, then leave it free to rise into the higher realms of action”
Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen (2016) put it even more concisely:
“A theory is a statement of causality. It’s a statement of what causes what and why.”
Theories then, are ideas about how things work - about causality and how to create change. And those who dismiss theory dismiss the practical application and power of ideas. After all, argues Gray (2010), “The world is shaped and even driven by ideas”.
Furthermore Gray argues (2010, since strategy (as we’ll see later) is entirely concerned with causality and consequences, having a theory of strategy is part of being a strategist:
“Strategic theory is an aid to clear, perhaps clearer thinking… In truth, strategic theory is not an optional extra. All practical strategists practice the theory of strategy. They only differ in the quality of their practice.”
In this way contends Yarger (2006), through understanding connections and causality theory helps us be better prepared by encouraging better, more thoughtful, more critical, more perceptive thinking:
“Theory’s value lies not in a prescription for success but in how it helps us expand and discipline our thinking.”
Similarly von Clauswitz (1832) held that understanding connections and causality and thinking about how thing work or could work helps us be better prepared for what life throws at us and the choices and decisions we have to make:
“Theory exists so that one need not start afresh each time sorting out the material and plowing through it but will find it ready to hand and in good order”
So for Gray (1999) theory was not something rigid and stifling, but rather in making us think about connections and causality, it was an approach that encourages us to focus us on the things that matter
“The chief utility of a general theory… of strategy lies in its ability not to point out lessons, but to isolate things that need thinking about. Theory provides insights and questions, not answers.”
By way of a side note, Stephen King was an advocate of theory. In a paper published in 1975 he wrote:
“What we need… is not a wholly comprehensive theory of advertising, but a slightly more advanced theory of advertisements. A framework for thinking how different sorts of advertisement might work, for different people, in different circumstances, at different stages of time. ”
But let’s keep going. Working through Gray’s collected writings, I’ve extracted thirteen of what feel like his most relevant propositions for us to chew on.
Proposition #1: The nature of strategy is unchanging
‘Strategy’ is of course, a word that’s been almost fracked to death. As the British historian and professor of international relations and the University of St. Andrews Hew Strachan (2006) has opined:
“The word ‘strategy’ has acquired a universality which has robbed it of meaning, and left it only with banalities. Governments have strategies to tackle the problems of education, public health, pensions and inner-city housing. Advertising companies have strategies to sell cosmetics or clothes. Strategic studies flourish more verdantly in schools of business studies than in departments of international relations. Airport bookstalls carry serried ranks of paperbacks reworking Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.”
But all the hijacking and bastardization notwithstanding, a simple articulation of the role and value of strategy is possible, even if agency planners /strategists don’t think it is. Gray (2010) reassures us that the articulation need not be perfect:
“The needed definition of strategy has to be ‘right enough’, which is to say it does not have to meet any and every objection, but it must highlight the core of its subject and it must not mislead.”
And he offers up this definition:
“The direction and use made of means by chosen ways in order to achieve desired goals”
It really is that simple. And if this articulation seems (as I am sure it will to some) so achingly familiar, so blindingly and so patently obvious as to offer no hope of any practical progress whatsoever, then one might wonder why we so publicly express our inability to come with one ourselves.
In later writings, Gray (2018) went on to provide more to colour to his articulation and unpacked what he saw as the inner workings of strategy:
“Strategy can be considered a simple machine that consists of just four working parts: Ends, Ways, Means, and Assumptions”
For Gray, Ends were the goals, Ways the actions taken, Means were the resources deployed, and Assumptions were the necessary leaps, imagination, and guesses. We’ll examine these components in more detail later.
Contest and debate these articulations if you must (personally I have zero interest in engaging in the tedium of semantic trench warfare), but they are good enough.
But surely this (insert your phenomenon, trend, fad, prediction or shiny new object of your choice) some might ask, changes this? Umm, no. Nothing that’s happened (or will happen) in commerce, culture (both fast and slow), technology, or politics has changed (or will change) the fundamental nature of strategy.
Inevitably and inescapably, our psychology inclines us to struggle with the truth of strategy’s unchanging nature. Writes Gray (2010):
“The study and practice of strategy has ever been blighted by the presentist fallacy, and by its close associate, indeed its dependent, the fashionable fad of the moment… Because our acquaintance with the past, especially the distant past, is in more or less measure tenuous, our natural inclination is to privilege the present. We tell ourselves that today is a time of exceptional significance.”
For those of us in advertising, that inclination is amplified by our industry bias towards worshipping the new and emergent, whose self-identity is so dependent on rejecting the past, and (more understandably) that services the needs of clients looking for advantage and (less understandably) the occasional silver bullet. But our tendencies misguide us. On this Gray (2010) is emphatic and absolutist:
“Truly there are no new ideas pertaining to strategy, neither the sound nor the unsound.”
Which is why this sort of talk:
“‘Strategy’ is a concept that is defined in a bewildering number of ways. It’s an elusive and rather slippery subject which makes it difficult to talk about with any clarity or any precision.”
Is bullshit.
The application and value of the four-part ‘strategy machine’ is simple…
Proposition #2: Strategy is about consequences
For an industry that peddles in semi-fictional case studies bloated with billions of impressions and that for the most part treats effectiveness as an entirely separate (and tedious) activity done (if we can be bothered) exclusively for garnering EFFIE and IPA awards Gray’s words (2018) might be news:
“Strategy can only be judged responsibly with reference to its consequences.”
It’s about shifting events and outcomes in one’s favour. Strategy in other words, is about creating new futures. As Freedman (2013) put it so memorably, “All strategy is revolution.”
And there’s nothing vague or abstract about this. Consequence and change do not live in the slides of a Powerpoint deck, or in some abstract and ill-defined Elsewhere we call ‘culture’, or in some marketing version of the ‘Upside Down’ whose terrors and tediums we can only see through a glass darkly, and wish we didn’t. Consequence is as real as it is necessary. Gray (2010) put it unequivocally:
“Strategic effect is existential. It is reality, and it is expressed in thought and behaviour.”
In an industry that kissed goodbye to the commission system in the 1980s and chose to structure itself instead upon the number of billable hours it takes to make something, it can be depressingly easy for agency planners/strategists to overlook the fact that the ultimate value of strategy is in direct proportion to the outcomes, i.e. the change it creates. Not how distinctive the output is. The creation of consequences Gray (2010) maintained, is then central to understanding what strategy is:
“When a person appreciates the meaning and implication of the concept of strategic effect [they are] are a good way along the path of achieving understanding of strategy “
And the value of a strategist depends on understanding this:
“It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of our strategists not forgetting that their job is all about consequences.”
Stanley Pollitt (1979) would have vigorously agreed. What mattered to him above all was in his words, “getting it right”, and for him that demanded:
“A total agency management commitment to getting the advertising content right at all costs. Getting it right being more important than maximizing agency profits, more important than keep clients happy, or building an agency shop window for distinctive-looking advertising.”
The centrality of creating meaningful change at scale to the enterprise of strategy is in stark contrast to how many planners articulate what they’re about. I have some thoughts about why this is, but let’s keep going.
Proposition #3: Strategy is about the future
So if strategy is about change, it is unnecessarily and unavoidably about the future. The arrow of time travels in one direction only.
But while strategy is pointed at the future, it begins with an understanding of the here and now, with information, knowledge, understanding, and insight. As Harry Yager (2006) puts it:
“Strategy maintains a holistic perspective. It demands comprehensive consideration. Strategy is developed from a thorough consideration of the strategic situation and knowledge of the nature of the strategic environment. Strategic analysis highlights the internal and external factors in the strategic environment that help define strategic effect and the specific objectives, concepts, and resources of the strategy.”
Yager might be too demanding. We cannot know everything. Indeed we do not need to know everything. We need to identify those elements that matter. Or that matter the most. But his broad point about the necessity of doing one’s homework stands.
However, strategy goes beyond simply understanding the state of things today (or the way they were yesterday, research only ever really being a rearview mirror). It is not a narrow intelligence/research function - I think it was Jane Newman who many moons ago noted that while researchers work in research, planners/strategists work with research. So while strategy works with intelligence of various kinds, it is also very much a subjective process, not a wholly linear, logical, rational one. As Freedman (2013) puts it:
“Strategy starts with an existing state of affairs and only gains meaning by an awareness of how, for better or worse, it could be different.”
The key word here is “could”. For strategy projects and imagines - based on all that it knows (which is never the full picture) - a different future. Of course in a world awash, as the cliché goes, in data (as well as self-styled forcasters and prophets) , it can be find difficult for many to accommodate themselves to the truth that strategy cannot happen without imagination. Gray (2014) skewers the fantasy that the future is knowable:
“We do not have, and will never obtain, evidence from the future about the future.”
But he is careful (2018) not to suggest that strategy is merely wishful, magical thinking fantasy:
“The strategist’s core duty is to develop… plans that are predictions and intentions… The strategist’s plans purport to explain how desired end states will be achieved.”
The operative word here is “explain”. Strategy works not by mere wild prophesying but by providing a coherent argument (or theory) of cause and effect that shows how the predicted end state will (or is likely) to be achieved.
Strikingly, given what failure in military combat can look like, Gray (2018) acknowledges what in many our industry resist, deny, or seek to eradicate, namely:
“Because strategy is all about consequences, the fragility of prediction should never be ignored”.
It’s worth noting here that the central role of imagination to the art of developing strategy suggests that there is only so much that can be done to educate and train strategists. Writes Gray (2012):
“The imagination needed for strategy cannot reliably be taught.”
Recognizing that strategy is fundamentally about (informed) imagination should already have anticipated and made clear this next point.
Proposition #4: Strategy is not a science
Writes Gray (2010):
“Strategy is not a science, it is an art with some scientific features.”
It is not a science he maintained, for a simple reason:
“Strategy is not a search for truth.”
It cannot be a search for the truth because the future is unknowable. It is a range of probabilities, not a fixed destination that with the right technology and equipment we can see. In contrast to the many vendors of predictability our industry finds itself surrounded by, Gray (2014) reminds us that:
“We do not have, and will never obtain, evidence from the future about the future.”
Economies, companies, technologies, societies are vast, complex nonlinear systems. And their complexity and scale means that the outcomes strategy seeks can only ever be (informed) guesses:
“Given the complex mixture of influences upon human thought and behaviour, it should be obvious that the prediction of strategic effect must be guesswork, it has to be an art, it cannot be a science.”
So argued Gray (2010) while strategy might make things simple, it cannot make things certain (just more likely):
“By its nature strategy inherently is an idea linked with doubt and uncertainty. Strategy is always a gamble, though usually we can exercise some control over the scale of the risks we run, and therefore, we hope, over the scale of potential loss should events not develop favourably for our interests. It is sad news for scientists and even social scientists that they are not, indeed cannot be, trained for the purpose of removing, or even reducing seriously the hazards in strategic choice.”
All strategy then, is ultimately a gamble. As Betts (2000) put it:
“Because strategic choices depend on estimates about risks and subjective judgments about the value of the stakes, they are gambles.”
We should not be at all surprised find all of this echoed in the component questions of King’s so-called Planning Cycle that he published in 1977:
Where are we?
Why are we there?
Where could we be?
How could we get there?
Are we getting there?
The future-facing nature of strategy clarifies its essential character. It is not the rational logic that precedes creativity. It is not a linear process that precedes the creative process. Nor is it as some suggest, a con trick designed to make creativity appear complicated and out of reach to anyone but its practitioners and self-appointed experts. And it is not the post-rationalizing packaging up of creativity. Strategy is a creative discipline.
Proposition #5: Strategy cannot be separated from action
Gray (2010) was clear that the role and contribution of the strategist was not a bonus feature ‘nice--to-have’:
“The strategist is not an amusing and possibly erudite adornment to the world of practice.”
These words should provide much comfort and strength (and perhaps a kick in the ass) to all agency planners/strategists, for they remind us that strategy is not an abstraction. As Gray (2010) put it:
“Ideas are vital, but not as ideas. Strategic ideas are vital only as fuel for action.”
(Good) strategy then, is nothing if not practical - indeed it must be practical. For all his many writings about strategic theory, Gray (2006) never lost sight of the need for pragmatism and utility:
“True wisdom in strategy must be practical because strategy is a practical subject. Much of what appears to be wise and indeed is prudent as high theory is unhelpful to the poor warrior who actually has to do strategy, tactically and operationally.”
Feet firmly on reality’s firm earth, Gray (1999) recognized that strategy must be practical because the clients that strategists serve demand that strategy be practical:
“Because strategy is a practical subject, and moreover is a practical subject with implications for society and individuals, those who would advise about it are obliged to answer questions posed by pragmatically minded… clients.”
So contrast to those amongst us who would have strategy kept at arm’s length from execution (or who are simply not interested in it), Gray (2012) maintained that strategy and tactics are fundamentally inseparable:
“Strategy and tactics constitute a unity. Strategy is theory (of desired and intended cause and effect) that has to be practiced not only by tactical behaviour, but also as that behaviour. Theory and practice are one.”
Put differently (2018):
“Strategy is about the purposes of action while tactics are about actually performing the actions in question”
That agency creative presentations often distinguish between what is “strategy” and what is usually referred to as “the work” belies I suspect, a thorough misunderstanding of the nature of strategy. And/or an unconscious or barely disguised belief in the subservient and second class status of strategy within agency power and class structures.
The fact is that the siloing of activities into that which is strategy and that which is action is a confused misconception. As Gray (2012) argues:
“The proposition that one has a strategy, but one does tactics is false. When one does tactics, one also behaves tactically for strategic effect, i.e., one behaves strategically.”
Gray (2012) is clear - strategy cannot live without tactics:
“Strategy and tactics are a gestalt… Strategy can only be practiced tactically.”
But he was also clear (2013) that that tactics cannot live without strategy…
“Superficially, though plausibly, strategy can seem a luxury of little value to the unfortunates who must get… the job done. Those people do indeed do strategy in their tactical behaviour, for without such behaviour there can be no strategy. However it does not follow that tactics has no need of strategic direction, that in practice in can provide its own guidance and, in effect substitute for and therefore function strategically. Despite the popularity of the thesis, it is a categorical error on a major scale to believe that strategy can be ‘tacticized’.”
But he was quick to counsel (2013) that the role of tactical behaviour can be overstated:
“So essential is the tactical enabler of strategy that the role and contribution of the latter is apt to escape notice”
What all this should make abundantly clear (for an industry that loves a false dichotomy) is that the opposite of strategy is not tactics - it’s chaos.
But for strategy to begin its work it must be given purpose.
Proposition #6: Strategy is simple
Strategy needs to be simple because it requires other people to enact it. Things necessarily get complex as one moves into the realm of operations and tactics. Coordinated activities can contain a great many moving parts. But strategy - if it is to render these activities coherent and purposeful - needs to be simple. Richard Betts (2000) puts it well:
“Strategies should be kept simple. Simplicity does not guarantee success, but complexity begs for failure. There is a chain of causes and effects among policy, strategy, and operations, to political outcomes. Because a chain is as strong as its weakest link, the more links in the chain, the higher the odds that something will go wrong.”
It’s worth noting for the self-appointed Creative Brief Police who - seemingly unaware of the the difference between ‘brief’ as noun and ‘brief’ as adjective - insist that “creative briefs must be both brief”, that this is not a demand for brevity. There is a world of difference between a strategy and a briefing.
Proposition #7: Strategy is story
If simplicity in strategy is key to getting other people to enact it, the other mandate (obvious though it may seem) is that it be put into words. The art of communication and persuasion cannot be uncoupled from the art of developing strategy. As Freedman (2013) puts it:
“Strategy is meaningless without [words and communication]. Not only does strategy need to be put into words so that others can follow, but it works through affecting the behaviour of others. Thus it is always about persuasion”
Like Freedman, Gray too (2010) argues for the essential role that narrative plays ion strategy:
“To help focus attention upon what should be the single design of concerted, more or less integrated, certainly cooperating, performances by any and every asset employed and employable, one can borrow profitably from the world of creative writing and the story arc.”
This is not merely about making strategy interesting, engaging or memorable. Just like stories strategies concern themselves with protagonists, desired goals or end states, challenges and obstacles, choices under pressure, consequences and change. In other words strategies cannot exist (let alone persuade) without stories. As Freedman (2013) puts it:
“Not only are stories instruments of strategy, they also give form to strategy.”
It follows then that no amount of curiosity, insight, rigour, listening skills, or creative instinct (all requirements of any planner/strategist) can compensate for an inability to express strategy in a way that is focused, coherent, concise, comprehensible, persuasive, memorable, and inspiring. Good strategists are good with words.
Proposition #8: Strategy is negotiated
The image of the reclusive, socially somewhat inept, solitary agency planner typing their way to strategic brilliance is as enduring as it is unhelpful. The fact is that strategy is not and cannot only ever be a solo sport. Insisting that it is only ever leads to disappointment. Unlike so many other writers about strategy, Gray (2010) did not pretend that strategy development existed in a prejudice-, opinion-, and vested-interest-free zone:
“There have been and will be exceptions to this dictum, but it is a safe, most-case generalisation to claim that strategies are developed in an ongoing process of negotiation and dialogue among potent stakeholders.”
Which means the development of strategy is never straightforward or easy (1999):
“Strategy is an extraordinarily difficult enterprise primarily because it is a bridging function between unlike elements.”
We can pretend that the route to effective strategy is through the diligent and tidy completion of tools, frameworks, the answering of ‘key’ questions, the distillation of everything down to the essential one-pager’, but as Gray (2012) recognised, strategy development is a very human and thus unavoidably messy process:
“One should never discount the sovereign potency of human weakness, folly, incompetence, and sheer ignorance, over a context of strategic decision that must strain the abilities even of those who are sober, capable, and well informed.”
And as Betts (2000) has argued, for this to happen takes patience and empathy from all involved:
“For strategy to bridge… professionals on either side of the divide need more empathy with the priorities and limitations that those on the other side face.”
‘Doing’ strategy therefore, takes patience and resilience. Writes Yarger (2006):
“Strategy formulation is not for the thin of skin of self-serving. Detractors stand ever ready to magnify a strategy’s error or limitations. Even success is open to criticism from pundits who question its role, methods, or continued validity. Furthermore, strategy achieves strategic consequences by the multi-order effects it creates over time - always a point of contention in a time-conscious society that values quick results and lacks patience with the ‘long view’. In the end, it is the destined role of the strategist to be under-appreciated and often demeaned in his own time”
Proposition #9: Strategy is culturally contingent
There is an inescapable truth: That strategy does not happen in isolation - because human beings do not think and behave in isolation from the environments they are born into - or buy into. Gray (1999) puts it thus:
“All strategic behaviour is affected by human beings who cannot help but be cultural agents.”
The practice of strategy - how much it is valued, how it is developed, its assumptions and theories, what it ‘sees’ and does not - is shaped by the cultural context in which it is developed. We’ll come back to this later.
Proposition #10: Strategy cannot escape the realities of logistics
Logistical resources and feasibility argued Gray (2010) cannot be uncoupled from strategy:
“The logistical enabler is to fundamental that it comes close to earning a place in the shortlist of dicta that specify the defining features of strategy”
Strategy and logistics “relate umbilically to each other” wrote Gray in his preface to Thomas Kane’s Military Logistics and Military Performance (2001). And in his book Kane characterised logistics as “the arbiters of opportunity”, arguing that logistics are such a significant factor in military success that to provide the logistics that strategy requires, “logisticians must participate in the making of strategy, not only in the planning phase of a campaign, but every step of the way.”
In the context of developing advertising, the promise that “Think big. If it’s an amazing idea, we’ll find the money” so rarely if ever actually gets delivered on. So understanding that “strategy is logistical” suggests that strategy is developed with the knowledge of the intended media investment, production budget, owned channels, available partnerships and properties, available creative teams (and their talent and particular strengths and inclinations), the available resource to not just build but sustain activity, and - since it is such an enabling factor - client creative ambition, rather than discovering all this only once strategy has been formulated.
Proposition #11: Technology does not change the nature of strategy
Strategists should beware the ‘the changes everything’ brigade. Gray (1999) argues:
“Those who try and mind the store of strategy by keeping faith with the historical school of thought are always targets for assault by the transformational theorists who see in each major technological, or social, change the engine for the reordering of ideas.”
Of course since strategy relies on real world tools and resources to make its effect, technology cannot be separated from strategy, as he puts it (2010):
“Strategy is primarily a human activity in a technological context”
Knowledge of technology’s potential therefore, is expected of the strategist. However, technological evolution and innovation does not change the fundamental nature of strategy (Gray, 1999):
“The changes in tactical forms and operational possibilities enabled by the new technologies… do not transform strategy… The story… is one of growing complexity, but not of the need for the subject of strategy to be rewritten.”
Technology does change the form strategy takes in the tactics and operations it is expressed in, but as Gray (1999) warns us:
“Change in form is ever confused with change in kind.”
Ultimately then, technological knowledge is not a substitute for strategic skill. As Gray (2013) usefully counsels us:
“They do not know strategy who only technology know.”
Proposition #12: Strategy can be avoided, but strategic effects cannot
In an industry in which, as we keep reminding ourselves, advertising can get made without planners/strategists being involved, and in which planners/strategists often have to reconcile themselves to being the unsung heroes and the wind beneath the wings of others, it’s valuable to be reminded that just because we cannot ‘see’ strategy does not mean it does not matter. On this, Gray (2018) wheels out the best metaphor for strategy I have encountered:
“Strategy is rather like love: you cannot see it, but in the future you would notice its absence, if not tomorrow then the day after.”
Whether or not we choose to ‘do’ strategy, there will always be strategic effects, whether they are desirable or undesirable (Gray 1999):
“One can choose to devote more or less time to strategic calculation and speculation. One cannot choose to evade the strategic effects of tactics and operations, no matter how ill-directed those activities may be.”
The only choice then is whether one wishes outcomes to be driven by agency and intent, or not (Gray 1999):
“If the strategy function is lacking, strategic effect will be generated by the casual cumulation of tactical and operational outcomes”
So far we’ve been talking about the unchanging nature of strategy. But the practice of strategy is not (or should not be) a copy-and-paste, cookie cutter exercise. It is always a specific and contingent undertaking. So at this point we need to distinguish between strategy and strategies.
Proposition #13: Strategy is universal and unchanging - but strategies are specific, contingent, and adaptive
So far we’ve been talking about the essential, changing nature of strategy. But there’s a vital distinction to make, lest anyone think we’re advocating a universal template for any and all circumstances and challenges. For Gray (2010) the distinction is important:
“It is of fundamental importance to abide by what ought to be the clear distinction between strategy as general theory, and strategies as plans made and executed to cope with particular contexts. As war has a permanent nature but an ever variable character, so too do strategy and strategies, respectively”
In other words (Gray 2010):
“Strategy can be expressed in strategies”
So argues Gray (2010) while the fundamental nature of strategy does not change, in response to shifting conditions and circumstances in a world where chance, uncertainty, and ambiguity dominate, strategies do change and evolve:
“Strategies are always changing to meet dynamic contexts”
There is nothing inherently ‘fixed’, rigid, and unchanging in the practice and development of strategies. Those who believe otherwise confuse or conflate having strategy with having a plan. As Lawrence Freedman put it in his address to the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (2013):
“A lot of people think of strategies as being synonymous with planning. But it's not. A plan is something where there is a sequence of events leading to a desired outcome. You have to assume that if you start at one point, each move will build on the one before and take you to where you want to be. You only have to say it to realize how unlikely this is going to be in situations involving other willful human beings... A plan isn't a particularly good way to think about strategy.”
So while the nature of strategy is unchanging, Freedman like Gray argues that strategies are adaptive:
“Most of the time with strategy, it's, "What is the problem we face at the moment? How do we diagnose it, and how do we look for ways of getting around it?" Now, obviously, you need to think about the steps after the next step. But actually a lot of strategy is getting to the next step. By the time you've got to the next step and certainly the step after that, the possibilities in the situation will have changed, sometimes for the better - there are more possibilities - sometimes you've got to scale down your aspirations.”
Or as von Moltke put it more succinctly:
“Strategy is… the continued development of the leading thought in accordance with the constantly changing circumstances”.
So where does this get us?
Other people’s wisdom in brief
Stepping outside the confines of marketing and advertising and viewing the practice and value of strategy through the lens of the military strategist puts into focus so much of what we allow to remain obscure:
Strategy’s nature is simple unchanging
Strategy is about ends (goals), ways (actions) means (resources), and assumption
Strategy is about creating new futures
Strategy derives its value in direct proportion to the consequences it createS
Strategy needs knowledge and analysis as its key input
Strategy’s real work behind when assumptions and predictions are made
Strategy looks into the future and takes a view on how to make it a reality
Strategy is necessarily a subjective process
Strategy is a necessarily a creative discipline
Strategy is not a science, but an art with a bit of science
Strategy cannot be separated from action
Strategy is ultimately, simple
Strategy demands persuasiveness
Strategy is given form by stories
Strategy uses stories as its key instrument
Strategy is negotiated
Strategy is messy and hard
Strategy’s essential nature is not changed by technology
Strategy’s forms and actions are shaped and changed by technology
Strategy’s essential nature is universal and unchanging, but strategies are adaptive, contingent and specific
So assuming that you, dear reader, have not got this far and have not already concluded with an exasperated (or exhausted) sigh or eye-roll that this really has been nothing more than a very long walk for a rather stale ham sandwich, I will end with some brief personal reflections on the practice of creative strategy that my nerd-out journey has prompted.
Reflections
We’ve been chuckling away for sixty years at how confusing and unhelpful the title ‘account planner’ really is. It might connect us to our past (and the radical nature of the innovation) but we cannot afford to be sentimental or walk into the future only ever looking backwards into some vaguely seen past. If we don’t already, we should probably call ourselves what we are - strategists. For while ‘planning’ focuses us on everything and nothing (and invites all manner of bullshit) - ‘strategy’ anchors us in both practice and value.
The nature of strategy is simple and unchanging - despite our best efforts to complicate, obscure, or avoid it. The point of strategy is not to get to an ‘insight’, or a brief, or to ‘inspire’ creatives, or to get to interesting work (though it does involve all of this) - it’s to make change happen in the real world.
The stimulation and development of ‘the work’ and the successful shipping of exciting, entertaining, attention-drawing, conversation-igniting creative assets while part of the job, is not the ultimate measure of a strategist’s contribution and worth. The strategic effect it creates is.
Strategy then, doesn’t exist to smooth things over, or to find consensus, or to post-rationlise, or just to simplify, or to package up incrementalism, or to provide a warm up act, or (God forbid) to write ‘setups’. All strategy (if it is to legitimately call itself that) disrupts the status quo.
The role of creative strategists/‘planners’ is to apply strategic thinking grounded in consumer understanding to the development of effective creative solutions. There’s your “good enough” definition.
The starting point for strategy is still an understanding of the business, marketplace, consumer, and cultural environment - as well as an understanding of how advertising works - at both a general and at a specific level - to create change.
But strategy proper begins where the process of rigorous analysis and deduction leaves off. It is by its very nature, the exercise of imagination.
Strategy is a creative discipline.
Strategy is a creative discipline. Strategy is a creative discipline. Strategy is a creative discipline. Strategy is a creative discipline. Strategy is a creative discipline. Strategy is a creative discipline. Strategy is a creative discipline. Strategy is a creative discipline. Strategy is a creative discipline. Strategy is a creative discipline. Strategy is a creative discipline.
Efforts to narrow its role to merely finding ‘insights’ or channeling the “voice of the consumer” domesticate and hamstring the ability of strategy to do its job.
The insistence on creating silos and distinguishing between strategy and what we call ‘the work’ either simply (and troublingly) misunderstands what strategy is, or worse, reveals a prejudice and a desire to keep it at the lower levels of class, prestige and power structures.
If strategists are not interested in ideas, not talking about ideas, not in the conversations where ideas are being shared and discussed, or are not contributing to the development of ideas they’re not ‘doing’ strategy.
If agencies don’t like strategists having opinions about ideas, don’t let them into the conversations where ideas get shared and discussed, and don’t allow them to contribute to the development of ideas they’re not ‘doing’ strategy - and their strategists should quit.
All strategy involves getting other people do to something. As such, a finely-tuned capacity for words and the crafting of stories is a foundational skill for all strategists.
‘Planning’ was in part born of a deep frustration at off-the-peg research methodologies that assumed the development of advertising could be turned into a ‘science’. One that could, reliably and repeatedly, see into the future. But there is no technique that can bring facts about the future into the present. Strategy is an art with a bit of science. Efforts to turn it into a science will always fail and should continue to be resisted.
The quality (and nature) of strategic delivery cannot be separated from agency culture. All debates and agonizing introspection therefore about how planning can better contribute and do its job should as Feldwick has argued, be faced by the agency as a whole since they are questions about the collective interest in and/or ability to produce effective advertising.
Our journey into the heart of the practice of strategy helps clarify the skills required: The Rigour to diagnose and identify the key challenge; the Decisiveness to identify, simplify and focus on what really matters; the Imagination to identify a way overcome it; the Communication skills to articulate it in a way that brings others along; the Collaborative skills to execute and deliver a plan of action; and the Curiosity to be an eternal student of how advertising and people ‘work’.
Mark Earls recalls that the first time he met Stephen King - at the 30th anniversary of Planning - he mentioned how surprised (and disappointed) he was “that no-one had since come up with a better idea (than planning)”. King needn’t have worried. Strategy is both an excellent idea and its fundamental nature impervious to time. What he should have worried about are the limitations that the discipline itself - and others - place on its possibilities.
***
Postscript: The urgency and thrill of imagination
I had planned on stopping there. But I found myself returning again and again to Gray’s (2018) words and his conviction that strategy was at heart, an imaginative discipline:
“The strategist’s core duty is to develop… plans that are predictions and intentions… The strategist’s plans purport to explain how desired end states will be achieved.”
In both its clarity and insight it felt at odds with much of the discourse both within the practice of creative/communications strategy and beyond it. Far from strategy being a linear process of analysis and deduction, or being an interesting springboard to help inspire or stimulate other (more interesting) people to make something (even more) interesting, or being nothing more than in Richard Turley’s words, a ‘suss tactic’ designed to maintain an air of impenetrable expertise and meddling hands out of the kitchen, or simply being overthinking deployed as smoke and mirrors in order to get the gullible or the risk-averse to buy ‘brave’ work, it reminds us that core to the practice of strategy is the exercise of imagination in order to change the future.
Strategy doesn’t simply dedicate itself to understanding how the world as we know it works today. It isn’t just a pipeline of research and ‘insight’. As Roger Martin (2021) has said: “Great analysis does not produce great strategy”.
Instead, Martin (2012) argues that - just as we have seen Gray do - that strategy imagines what the future could look like - and then works out what we’d need to do to make it happen. It starts with a desired, imagined future and works back from that to a plan of action that will make it a reality.
The challenge today is we are suffering from an imagination deficit. In his book Another World is Possible, Geoff Mulgan Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College argues that we are experiencing a “closing down” of the imagination”. And in What Should the Left Propose? the Brazilian politician and philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, writes: “The world suffers under a dictatorship of no alternatives. Although ideas all by themselves are powerless to overthrow this dictatorship, we cannot overthrow it without ideas.”
I don’t believe that this is just clickbait handwringing. Writes Mulgan (2020) :
“If imagination means ‘the faculty of forming images or concepts of objects or situations not existent or not directly experienced’ we might expect it to have been greatly expanded by mass education and by upward trends in IQ (the ‘Flynn effect’) that are particularly marked for abstract and conceptual reasoning. But if this is happening, it is not feeding into confidence about the future.”
Consider just how difficult it seems to imagine The Future - the idea that the future will be different and better than the present, and how elusive the notion of ‘progress’ seems to be. In After the Future, the Italian communist philosopher, theorist and activist Franco Berardi characterised this phenomenon as the “Slow cancellation of the future [that] got underway in the 1970s and 1980s”. This wasn’t about the mere passing of time, he maintained:
“I am thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilisation, reaching a peak after the Second World War. These expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever progressing development.”
That sense (and promise) of development feels less in evidence, despite the incessant hosepipe of novelty we find ourselves on the receiving end of. “The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone”, observed William Gibson (2012), “Ahead of us, there is merely … more stuff … events”. And as the music critic, political and cultural theorist, philosopher Mark Fisher (2014) contended, this “slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations.”
Consider for example, as Geoff Mulgan (2020) notes, the widening gulf between what people think is possible or probable and what they think is preferable. According to research conducted by Nesta in 2020, two thirds (66 per cent) of the UK public feel there is little to no agreement in the UK around a long-term vision for the country; only 40 per cent of the public feel positive about the long-term future of the UK. Not only do people feeling uncertain about the future they feel disempowered 62 per cent say they have little to no opportunity to shape the long-term future of the country.
Berardi’s idea of the future as being one that promised “an ever progressing development” stands in stark contrast to the situation in the US, where the proportion of children with higher inflation-adjusted incomes than their parents did at the same age has declined from around 90 percent for children born in 1940 to just 50 percent for those born in 1984 (Chetty et al, 2017). It’s hard to imagine a better future when the prosperity escalator seems to have been flung into reverse.
Fisher’s “deflation of expectations” finds evidence in the erosion between 1995 and 2020 of people’s faith in democracy , with the proportion of people who are “dissatisfied with democracy” having risen by around +10% points, from 47.9 to 57.5% (Center for the Future of Democracy 2020).
Unger’s argument that “the world suffers under a dictatorship of no alternatives” finds echo in the work of Mark Fisher who in Capitalist Realism (2009) argued that we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After all, we seem to be fundamentally unable (or unwilling) to imagine a solution to climate disaster that doesn’t involve the marketplace and doesn’t involve us abandoning the idea of citizenship and instead doubling down on consumerism and buying things. Thus Richard Edelman writes in ‘The Next Giant Step’, an essay he wrote to accompany the release of the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report:
“My purchase of products each week makes more of a difference than my vote every four years in the broader debate on issues such as tolerance, environment and education”
As the political theorist and First Chair of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley Wendy Brown (2006) puts it:
“In letting markets decide our present and future, neoliberalism wholly abandons the project of individual or collective mastery of existence. The neoliberal solution to problems is always more markets, more complete markets, more perfect markets, more financialization, new technologies, new ways to monetize. Anything but collaborative and contestatory human decision making, control over the conditions of existence, planning for the future; anything but deliberate constructions of existence through democratic discussion, law, policy. Anything but the human knowledge, deliberation, judgment, and action classically associated with homo politicus.”
But wait, there’s more.
Consider the failure of imagination that is represented by the roughly $3.8 trillion in liquid assets alone (a mere 38% of their total wealth) that the world’s 3,204 or so billionaires squat Smaug-like upon (Wealth X, 2021).
Consider the state of California where it has not occurred to the tech billionaires (186 of them, to be precise) to direct their brainpower and resources to solve the scourge of homelessness that plagues the state’s cities. Other than advocating for legislation banning the unhoused (a population estimated to be at least 161,548) from camping in the streets.
Consider how politics in many parts of the world has degenerated into a hollow exercise in cosplay nostalgia or cultish nihilism (or a planet-busting toxic cocktail of both).
Consider how in early 2020, 44 percent of companies didn’t have any kind of plan to deal with the kind of disruption that the pandemic inflicted on global supply chains (Atlantic, 2020).
Consider how entire species of the natural world were declared ‘illegal’ in a spasm of political hysteria - and research into the therapeutic and medicinal benefits of LSD and psilocybin was stopped dead in its tracks for more than seventy years.
Consider, as David Wallace-Wells (2019) observes, how our TV and film entertainments refuses to imagine what a 2-, 3-, or 4-plus degree world of our own making:
“The premise of Interstellar is an environmental scourge, but the scourge is a crop blight. Children of Men depicts civilization in semi-collapse, but collapsed by a fertility menace. Mad Max: Fury Road unfurls like a global-warming panorama, a scrolling saga of a world made desert, but its political crisis comes, in fact, from an oil shortage. The protagonist of The Last Man on Earth is made that way by a sweeping virus, the family of A Quiet Place is hushed by giant insect predators lurking in the wilderness” Billionaires
Consider the dearth of imagination in mainstream cinema and how in the US six of the top seven films in 2021 were part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the top nine films were in franchises (Lamare 2022).
Consider how as the entrepreneur, writer, and Professor of Practice at the University of Bath School of Management Margaret Heffernan (2020) has suggested, we cede autonomy and imagination to the algorithm:
“The more we surrender to the authority of devices, the less independent and imaginative our minds become, just when we need them most… In a complex world, replete with contingency and uncertainty, nothing could be more dangerous than to constrain imagination, freedom, and creativity”
Imagination famine indeed. So what’s happening here? Geoff Mulgan (2020) suggests a broad array of possible causes for the decline in what he calls ‘social imagination’ - our collective picture a plausible and desirable society:
“The turn away from social imagination can be seen as a natural response to the sheer complexity of the world which leaves us each with less sense of agency; or as the inevitable result of the failures of the great utopian dreams of Marxism-Leninism which fatally undermined confidence in grand social projects; or as the consequence of shifts in power which have tended to weaken the vehicles of collective action.”
He also points to “the ever-stronger pull of rationality and science which may push out the space for imagination and intuition”. Similarly, the cultural critic Henry Giroux (2016) argues that ours has become a culture that is drowning, “in a new love affair with empiricism and data collecting”.
Certainly in the US, the number of college students graduating with a humanities major has fallen for the eighth straight year to under 200,000 degrees in 2020, according to federal data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (Hechinger 2021). Or put another way, fewer than one in 10 college graduates obtained humanities degrees in 2020 - down 25 percent since 2012. That’s using a broad definition of humanities that includes “communications,”which makes up more than a quarter of all humanities graduates. (Hechinger 2021). In sharp contrast, since 2008 the number of STEM majors in bachelor’s degree-and-above programs has increased 43% from 388,000 graduates in 2009-10 to 550,000 in 2015-16 (EMSI, 2016).
In the UK the so-called Browne Report of 2010 on the funding of higher education (‘Securing a sustainable future for higher education’) showed the future direction of travel stating that “a degree is of benefit both to the holder, through higher levels of social contribution and higher lifetime earnings, and to the nation, through higher economic growth rates and the improved health of society”
In the UK Sheffield Hallam University announced this year that it would drop its English Literature course from 2023, citing “a lack of demand” and that its graduates “struggle to get highly paid jobs”. Similarly, Roehampton University confirmed year that it would firing and re-hiring half its academic staff and focusing on new “career-focussed courses” across all departments.
That same cultural turn towards rationality, empiricism, analysis, and science is found in the world of business - a world which Roger Martin (29th August, 2022) has recently characterised as being dominated by science- and analysis-obsessed technocrats who “[favour] analysis of the known over any other kind of thought or work”. The educational background of many of those who influence and even dominate our daily lives shines a light on the Zeitgeist. Reed Hastings studied mathematics and computer science; Elon Musk physics and economics; Larry Page computer engineering and computer science; Sergey Brin mathematics and computer science; Jeff Bezos electrical engineering and computer science; Sundar Pichai metallurgical engineering material sciences and engineering; Pierre Omidyar computer science. Closer to home, marketing’s obsession with optimising the present, the suspicion of what cannot be measured, the distrust of anything that was not built through analysing what we know today will be familiar to many.
And yet - the Zeitgeist notwithstanding - as Stephen Asma (2022) Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Scholar at Columbia College Chicago reminds us:
“The literal, logical, scientific mind is the outlier – the weird, exceptional mode of cognition. It is not, I would argue, the dominant paradigm of human sense-making activity and yet it remains the exemplar of cognition itself and finds pride of place in our educational systems.”
But as Giroux (2016) warns, in a culture that undervalues or denies this and puts data, empiricism, and logic on a pedestal, imagination (along with a good many unmeasurable but necessary things) withers. Yet the fact is that we need more imagination not less of it, And we need more of it as a matter of urgency. As Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt (2021) warn:
“The stakes have never been higher. The difficulties before us are profound.: from climate change to conflict; racial inequality to economic inequity, pandemics to populism and algorithmic authoritarianism. For some, the past half century has been a time of certainty, stability, and relative comfort. Yet in the arc of human history, that period is over… On the near horizon is a dark period when the pathologies that our progress has produced must be addressed, else they risk eradicating us. As we face the gravity of the challenges - as societies and as a species - we can no longer be guided by our past but must fix our vision on our potentialities”
Simply analysing and understanding how the world works today will not be enough. We must time travel and imagine a future we wish to inhabit - and then build a bridge of action back to where we find ourselves today. As Roger Martin (2022) has written:
“That is why I ask management teams to imagine any possibilities that would involve creating an attractive future for the company, and I refuse to allow any immediate opinions on whether it would work or not — i.e., is it true? I insist on giving each possibility a chance. Instead of opining on what is true, I have the team ask WWHTBT [what would have to be true] so that the team can consider whether it can make true the key things that would have to be true. It turns the management dialogue from arguing about evaluating today to imagining winning futures.”
It’s an approach that Kenneth Cukier et al (2021) characterise as ‘counterfactual thinking’ - starting with potential end states and working back, building a bridge to the current state of things - rather than the other way around:
“Counterfactual thinking… is not intellectual buffoonery. Unlike random stream-of-consciousness thoughts and free associations, counterfactuals are focused and goal-orientated. We use them to understand the world and prepare for action… [Counterfactuals] expose and express our notion of action and agency. Looking at a particular causal connection helps his understand why things happened, but imaging an alternative reality helps us act because it creates a choice… [counterfactuals] shift our focus from understanding to acting. from comprehending to deciding”
Similarly Asma (2017) rejects the notion that imagination is something that just happens in the mind, emphasising the action-oriented nature of imagination:
“If we treat the imagination as merely a faculty of the mind, then we will miss the dynamic action-oriented aspect: it is part of the organism’s pragmatic attempt to get maximum grip on its changing environment.”
Surely the need to exercise a “firmer grip” on our fast-changing cultural, social, political, technological, and biological environment is greater than at any point in our human history. Such is the opportunity and the necessity for strategy’s imagination. For as the educational philosopher Maxine Greene (2000) writes in her wonderful volume of essays Releasing the Imagination:
“To call for imaginative capacity is to work for the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise… to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished, objectively and independently real.”
Indeed one could, I’d argue, easily substitute the word ‘strategy’ for ‘imaginative capacity’ and the mission and its value remains unchanged:
“To call for [strategy] is to work for the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise… to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished, objectively and independently real.”
Here is the clarity and the inspiration I believe we need. Look now how small, how timid, how pusillanimous, how domesticated and de-clawed, how full of narcissistic hot air, how demoted to nothing more than a cabaret warmup act so much of what passes for ‘strategy’ appears to be, when set against its true nature, its true possibilities, and - irrespective of the size and nature of the canvas - the true, the urgent, and the thrilling need for it.
After all, as Matt Colquhoun (Mark Fisher, 2021) has written:
“There are alternatives and there are tomorrows. There is a world to be transformed”.
That’s it. It is that simple. Transformation is strategy’s mission.
***
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