6 pieces of advice for strategists, based on advice for writers
Every now and then, i spot something which makes me think of something else. It’s part of my strategy process (if you can call it that).
Analogies are a fundamental source of knowledge and perspective for me. And one thing that strikes me is that a lot of advice for writers is actually also disguised as damn good advice for strategists. Clear writing yields clear thinking. Clear thinking yields effective strategy. Ergo, if you read about clear writing, you eventually get clear strategy!
So, here are 6 pieces of advice for writers i recently spotted in my bookmarks, which could well double up as advice for strategists.
1/ Competence
“To go from being a competent writer to being a great writer, I think you have to risk being – or risk being seen as – a bad writer. Competence is deadly because it prevents the writer risking the humiliation that they will need to risk before they pass beyond competence. To write competently is to do a few magic tricks for friends and family; to write well is to run away to join the circus. Your friends and family will love your tricks, because they love you. But try busking those tricks on the street. Try busking them alongside a magician who has been doing it for 10 years, earning their living. When they are watching a magician, people don’t want to say, “Well done.” They want to say, “Wow.”” Toby Litt
I see this in the depths of the strategic development process, where frankly we all look a bit like fools. We bring up weird references. We formulate half-thought theories about an emotional benefit. We say loads of dumb shit, and over time we collectively make it less dumb.
The trick is letting the dumbness happen, so that other more useful things can happen after that. It’s risky, but it’s what gets you beyond simply saying the ‘competent’ or ‘correct’ but quite expected thing.
2/ Knowledge
“Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.” Michael Michalko
I would add to this paradox a few other instances that affect our jobs. We need to think how we evidence things without being bound by over-rationalisation, we need to think about culture while also thinking about commerce, we need to consider what people want to hear as well as what a business wants to say, we need to facilitate a conversation but also protect time for silence for things to settle, and we need to think like an editor but also a marketer but also a creative.
3/ Process
“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.” George R. R. Martin
I was recently speaking to a junior strategist about how to prepare for a new job as the sole strategist in a new agency, and frankly i can’t offer advice that is squarely applicable as it really depends. However, there are simple starting points that help you diagnose your situation.
One of them is the idea that you need to know what your style is, as well as your colleagues’ style, as well as your clients’ style. And you need to find a way to make the styles co-exist and thrive together.
If you’re a gardener-type person in a world of architects, you will struggle. If you and your colleagues are architect-style people and your client wants to do things like a gardener, you will struggle. So more than having a point of view on the work, it’s wise to cultivate a point of view on useful ways of working around strategy as well.
4/ Awareness
“Anything a novelist (or any other artist) says about his own work should be regarded with suspicion. It will depend, at least partly, on his mood, the reception of his latest book, whether the one he is working on at the moment is coming well or badly (actually my own always come well, i.e. slowly but—so far—surely). And a novelist is far from being his own best critic, if only because, as Christopher Isherwood once remarked (in effect), no writer is aware of more than about two-thirds of what he is actually doing and saying. Nor should he be.” Kingsley Amis
And similarly, we are not the best critics of our own strategy if we’re going to be honest with our own ego. Simply put, we can’t critique our work because the single best critique is how the market responds.
And that, of course, takes time. This isn’t to say we can’t have a point of view, but we should regard it with suspicion every step of the way.
“I like this” is not as useful as “i think the audience will like this and the brand will benefit from this, and here’s why”. Even then, all we have are educated guesses until performance or testing data comes in.
5/ Reality
“The writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth…and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences. It is the job of the writer to depict the realities: the foul realities, the realities of rapture. It is the essence of the wisdom furnished by literature…to help us to understand that, whatever is happening, something else is always going on.” Susan Sontag
When clients hire us, there is a strange stage where we’re absorbing what they’re telling us and we feel the need to directly play it back. This is useful as 2% of the conversation, but we need to then quickly move on to bring an outside perspective that helps frame the problem in a way that makes it feel solvable with the resources they have.
For that, we need truth. Evidence. Customer orientation. I recently ran a content workshop with clients where 90% of the time was dedicated to Category Entry Points, not channel strategies or content themes. And wouldn’t you know it, based on those conversations around CEPs the content themes flowed with much more ease.
Whatever’s happening in the business, something else is always going on outside of the business. Bring that in at every change you get.
6/ Discovery
“Write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.” Gertrude Stein
Every time i re-write a strategy argument, i make it stronger. Even if it’s through the process of elimination. Even if in the end i go back to the very first draft i had and conclude it was the best one. Thinking of our job as facilitating discovery, and then facilitating decisions, feels more useful than thinking we need to ‘crack’ a problem like that.
My experience? The more you write, the more you get to discover how you truly think about something. And then there’s value in reading what you wrote, switching contexts, in order to truly stress test whether it’s something that works on paper, or just might work in the real world too. The more reps you put in, the stronger the muscle gets. And strong muscles help you carry an argument much more potently.
Inspired by the always amazingly useful Advice To Writers.
