August 3, 2024

How the work really gets done

Stuck in reverse

I’ve been stuck in reverse for much of my career.

That’s because creative work, and I include strategy work in that, involves a lot of working backwards.

I wouldn’t start from here

The processes for creating advertising and for developing strategy are quite similar, in that they’re similarly messy.

Both processes start reassuringly enough on the solid ground of logic and analysis. The work starts in a forwards direction. You do your discovery work as a strategist. You write your brief as a planner. But then things come gloriously off the rails. If you’re doing it right they do.

At some point a strategist will have a revelation. At some point a creative team will blow your mind with an idea that no one saw coming and which changes everything.

In either case, the big idea is not another small logical step on the journey. It’s a giant imaginative leap. The big idea transports you to somewhere else entirely. You know you’ve landed in a good place, but it’s not where you expected to end up when you set off. It’s exciting. It feels right. But you’re not entirely sure how you got here.

So you need to get your bearings. You need to find a way back from the answer to the question. You’re working backwards.

It’s time to use logic to backfill the space between this compelling vision of the future and the status quo.

Sometimes this means joining the dots (in reverse order) from where you’ve found yourself back to where you started.

But often the answer reveals a better question, a better framing of the problem than the one you set out to solve. So you’re working backwards from the destination to a different point of departure. You’re reshaping the beginning of the story to fit the ending.

It’s the strategy equivalent of that joke about asking a yokel for directions from the middle of nowhere to the city. “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here,” they say.

This is an uncomfortable truth. Retrofitting the beginning to fit the ending sounds like cheating (which it isn’t.) It sounds a bit chaotic (which it is.) It’s not something we speak about in public. It’s not an easy process to sell. It’s creative and intellectual alchemy.

Coherence wins

Coherence wins pitches and sells strategies. Any winning pitch and every compelling strategy is a tight and gripping story. You need short, straight lines between the problem, the insight, and the idea. Done well, the result is irresistible and irrefutable. You’ve made sense of the business or you’ve made sense of the brand.

A coherent story presents as a linear progression from the beginning, through the middle, to the end.

When you consult, you tell the story forwards from the problem to the strategy.

When you pitch, you present forwards from the brief to the idea.

This gives the impression that the work behind the scenes was done in the same, logical order. It wasn’t.

Developing a coherent strategy or writing a coherent pitch is an iterative process of forward lurches and reverse engineering.

I often return to this passage by Booker Prize winner George Saunders, in which he describes the role of revision (working backwards) in writing a coherent story. The discipline he applies to a short story is entirely relevant to a strategy or a pitch.

A good short story is, among other things, a highly organised system.  Its parts feel in connection with one another.  There’s very little waste or randomness.  Many decisions have been made along the way, by different means, some conscious, some not.  It feels fraught with intention, full of direction. It doesn’t necessarily know what it is, but it won’t settle for being, well…less coherent (organised) than it could be.

Now, this is different from saying it was all planned out.  On the contrary – a good story also feels spontaneous, wild, unscripted.  It seems to be arising in front of the writer as she works. We feel the writer surprising herself, being educated and guided by her own work of art. And yet, when we look closely we can’t help but notice some mysterious quality that feels a lot like intelligence coursing through it.

Revising, then, might be thought of as a system for getting more organisation into the little system that is our story.

George Saunders, Story Club newsletter, 1st May 2022

Like George, we work backwards to get more organisation into the little system that is our strategy or our pitch.

Ideas are data

In an article in the Autumn 2005 edition of Market Leader, Charles Kirchner makes the distinction between creative marketing magic and operational marketing logic. He describes the magic as “generally ad hoc and not very data driven.”

He’s wrong. Or rather he’s right, but with a narrow definition of data. The data that drive marketing efficiency are numbers. To be data-driven is to be number-driven. Data is quantitative.

Only it isn’t. Data can be qualitative too. Insights from qualitative research are data. And ideas are data too.

I found a dictionary definition of “datum” that describes it as “something used as a basis for reasoning.”

Ideas are exactly that, a basis for reasoning. An idea is a datum. It’s the basis for reasoning a superior alternative future for your business or your brand.

This makes ideas the most valuable kind of data for strategy development. They make a desirable future state feel tangible and within reach.

Roger Martin describes strategy as the art of inventing the future. And he repeatedly warns against using historical data to extrapolate the past into the future.

Great strategy is about creating a future that does not now exist.

Roger L Martin, What makes for a great strategist?, 15th August 2022

Martin’s favourite strategy question is, “What would have to be true? (WWHTBT)” WWHTBT is a future facing question. And it’s a working backwards question. You’ve made the intuitive leap. You’ve had the strategic idea. You’ve seen the future. Now, logically, what would have to be true to make that possible future a reality?

The fine art of post-rationalisation

For all the reasons above, post-rationalisation is a strategy craft skill. Post-rationalisation is a strategy superpower.

Great strategy isn’t about working forwards from backward-looking data in the form of numbers. It’s about working backwards from forward-looking data in the form of ideas.

This is why, for all their faults, agencies are good at nurturing strategists. Agency strategists are adept at working with ideas. And they’re comfortable with post-rationalising leaps of imagination.

Anyone who’s worked in advertising or design, particularly anyone who’s worked on a pitch, knows that creative informs strategy as much as strategy informs creative.

How the work really gets done.

From the outside, this “process” of imagination and post-rationalisation appears to be chaotic, uncontrollable, and unquantifiable. To be fair, it feels like that on the inside at times.

Nonetheless, it’s how the work gets done.

And it’s precisely because this way of working is so alien to most client organisations that it’s worth a lot more than most agencies charge for it.

Can you handle the truth?

With the help of a coach I’m making the transition from time-based charging to value-based pricing. It leads to conversations like this:

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ME: My price for the job is £X.

THEM: How many days does that equate to?

ME: It doesn’t.

THEM: What’s it based on then?

ME: One way of looking at it is that it’s based on what you’ve told me about the commercial value of the outcome you’re asking me to deliver, and the fact that you can afford it. It’s based on the nature of the work - the research and the analysis - and the fact that I have the scarce skills needed to do it.

THEM: Hmm. If that’s one way of looking at it, what’s another?

ME: It’s the rent you pay to occupy space in my brain until this problem is nailed to your satisfaction. Sometimes I’ll do focused, dedicated work on the task. At other times I’ll let my brain do its subconscious thing, a looser more associative form of thinking. I’ll be thinking about it at some level on every dog walk and every bus journey. Eventually I’ll have the idea that makes sense of everything. I’ve no idea how many or how few days it will take. But the price is fixed and I’ll do whatever it takes to leave you feeling happy with the result.

THEM: Ok. Let’s do it.

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Value-based pricing sometimes requires you to tell the messy truth about how the work really gets done. The good thing is that the messy truth commands a premium and there are trusting and enlightened clients out there who are prepared to pay it.