Synthesis-as-a-Service
One of the great myths behind why clients hire strategists? Because we’re that much smarter and can look at problems in a different way. And sure, sometimes that’s true. But not all the time.
There are other use cases. Workload. Headspace. External perspective. But one of my favourite ones, that i notice is happening more?
Synthesis.
That’s right, sometimes clients may not be hiring you because your brain has ideas theirs don’t. They might be hiring you because you’re much more able to summarise loads of things into a simple narrative.
I witnessed this just the other week, where part of my scope was to help clients make sense of dozens of their own internal documentation. When i asked the Salmon Crew about this, they confirmed indeed they’d seen this too. Happens a lot in big organisations, for example.
There is a useful reframe we could do here. Our job isn’t always to offer Smarts-as-a-Service, although this use case makes our ego feel special. But we should be equally comfortable saying the value we bring to a project is to be able to summarise things like few other people could.
Synthesis-as-a-Service, if you will. Which for some reason we seem to shun as a lesser form of strategy (or an inferior use case for AI, IMO a basic take). And yet, a big part of the job is to weave narratives based on numbers and anecdotes others shared, so we can make real choices.
So that’s the gig. One of the gigs, anyway. Summarise things before trying to get smart about them. And this isn’t going to decrease in importance, because often the problem clients have isn’t that they don’t have enough data. It’s that they have too much.
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