Huddle 001:
Is Strategy Sick?

Matthew Knight (00:46.439) I'm Matthew Knight, welcome to Outside Perspective and I'm honoured to be joined with a number of three brilliant individuals today who are let introduce themselves, but we're to be talking about the topic of is strategy sick? Many of you may well have read the WARC future of strategy report in in recent weeks, which paints a rather damning picture of strategy in agencies, but strategy doesn't just exist in agencies, certainly doesn't exist in isolation. So what I wanted to do was bring together a handful of people who have probably a set of varying perspectives on what strategy is, what it really means, how it's delivered, and a bit of an open debate about really the role of strategy currently and see if we can come with some different takes of different perspectives and different kind of takes on things. I'm gonna start as you probably should by introducing my guests. I'll let you introduce yourselves because you can read your LinkedIn bio far better than I can. Matthew Hook. Matthew (01:49.206) That's me. I'm Matthew Hook. I've spent 20 odd years as a kind of strategist and general manager. Did 18 years in agencies as chief strategy officer and managing director and different things. But I've been working for myself for five years. I do two things mainly. I'm co-founder of Look Up, which is a kind of storytelling inspiration and learning business. And that's been running for just over a year now. It's going quite well so far, and I'm also an independent strategic consultant. I tend to particularly focus on organisational story, of organisational design at the high not to HRE level and kind of growth strategy, growth planning, running lots of workshops, having a lovely time. Matthew Knight (02:40.297) Thanks for joining us. Tash, can I hand over to you? Tash (02:43.586) Absolutely, really nice to see you guys. My name is Tash Walker. I'm the founder of an insight agency called The Mix. We are a global insight agency and we have offices in London and New York. We operate predominantly in two worlds. One is CPG, so all things food and drink, which is a personal passion of mine. If there is an alcohol drink to be had and some food to be eaten, I'm there. So that's what we spend lots of our time doing. The other half of our time we spend in the world of sports. So we work with people like Nike and New Balance alongside people like Diageo, Nomad Food, Birdseye, those kinds of people. Prior to running the mix, I was also a strategist and planner in branding and advertising. I worked at agencies like Future Brand and JKR. And so I've got a kind of, I guess, probably quite rounded viewpoint of the roles of strategists in different types of businesses. And certainly half our team at the mix are strategists. And what that is and what that means is a constant source of inquiry for me, I guess. So I'm hoping to have lots of conversations about that. Matthew Knight (03:44.911) Thanks Tash and Lucy, how are you? Lucy (03:47.996) Thanks, really well. Excited to be with such a brilliant group. I am Lucy Barbor. I am the founder of a strategy consultancy called We Are Masterplan, launched all of two and a half weeks ago. The first product is built on teaching people not only the process of strategy, but also trying to unpick what is it that drives strategic thinking. So looking past inherent aptitude and trying to build a practice of behaviors that help people do better in terms of critical thinking, pattern recognition, the subliminal skills that underpin what makes great strategic thinkers think and act. Built on 20 years of working on agency side across Omnicom, Dentsu, WPP, IPG, and so on. Really excited about how it's going and super looking forward to this talk today. No doubt we'll be stealing some quotes to put into future decks. So thank you so much for inviting me, Nite. Matthew Knight (04:43.017) Thanks for everybody for your time and thoughts today. And I hope this is not going to be one of those conversations where we all agree with each other because there's nothing worse than a panel where everybody's just nodding along and advertising is amazing. So I want to turn to you first, Tash, because you just wrote an article said that all strategies bullshit. Do you think strategy as a discipline has lost its way a little bit? Or is there, you know, is it just an image problem or is there something deeper at play here? Tash (05:14.626) Yeah, I think it's great question. Yes, I do. I did write an article called strategy is bullshit and it's based on a training program that we run with our strategists internally in the mix. And I do think there are some really fundamental problems with the world of strategy and it's not in isolation either, by the way. I think one of the most challenging aspects of strategy is how many hats strategists now often end up wearing. So the sort of multidisciplinary nature of the industry has really, I think, without a sense of understanding of what that really starts to look like and what that means at a job role level. I think also, just like marketing, know, people like Mark Ritson about this all the time in the world of marketing, strategists are fundamentally a relatively untrained profession. And so people learn on the job, there are hugely varying ways of people learning and adapting to the world around them. And so as a consequence, think probably for me, really why I talked about the idea of strategy being bullshit is because people rock up to interviews, calling themselves strategists. You meet people from other businesses, other agencies calling themselves strategists. And it's a lie, quite frankly. It's an absolute, you know, untruth to say that lots of what people do is strategy. may be other things, but it's certainly not what I would describe as strategy. And so I think the challenge for me is that with the word strategy comes a level of heroism, like a sense of perceived greatness, that chance to be the main man, the guy, you know, that sort of legacy piece that strategy has sort of handed down generation to generation. So people want to be strategists, like, you know, it is a heroic profession to have if you're in a creative industry and you're not a creative. But I think the problem of that is that without definition, without good training, people are generally speaking, would say poorly trained and therefore not as competent as they should be. YYes, it's an image problem, but I think it's more fundamental than that. I just think as an industry, strategies aren't good enough, quite frankly. And so some of the problems that we face are of our own making as a kind of community, because we don't have the level of competency and comprehensive training. That means that people can show up and be genuinely brilliant in the room, deserve the title, deserve the money that we often, you know, are so disappointed not to receive because people don't want to pay for it and lots of that is over making. So yeah, I stand by my comments and I believe them wholeheartedly. And I think we could do a lot worse than stripping back some of the ego, some of the sort of sense of self congratulatory praise that strategists get and just be a bit more real about the fact that actually maybe lots of people who describe themselves as strategists maybe aren't and shouldn't be called that. Lucy (08:11.004) I'm wildly agreeing in fact, in as much as particularly, I think there is an extra problem which is added when you don't train people how to do this, which is that you create almost imperceptible, but very, very much tangible barrier. So what you say is, if we're not going to train you and therefore not create a clear path into strategy, there are only then two routes into strategy. Self-selection, which takes a level of confidence and often privilege, which just is self-determinism, which says, I think to your point about Tash, I'm going to rock up and assume that I can do this. Or I can't tell if it's better or worse, the tap on the shoulder, which often means like begets like within the strategy department. You seem like me or that other person I recognize is good at strategy. So we'll have more of you. And I Hookie, because he said it me so many times, there's a broad church of what great strategy and great strategists can look like. But by not creating a really obvious educationally led path into strategy, we're putting up a block against anybody who would be either selected or self-selected. And that creates this horrible problem of often great amounts of homogeneity within the department. In the department that is supposed to be there to say, these are the white spaces in consumer territories. These are the edges of culture that we should be looking at. These are the open goal opportunities within communities that we should be speaking to. If we don't put those people into our strategy department, we end up not just with shit work, we end up with really samey work. you know, there's so much stuff which says that's the death of creativity and the death of productivity. So I could not agree with you more, Tash. And I think the problem goes deeper into then what we see as strategists look like. Matthew Knight (09:57.607) It feels like there's a massive gap around, not just... the definition of strategist, but also strategy itself. I mean, is there a big challenge around what even strategy means? It felt like the Watt Report was really in its own right, not clearly defining what strategy meant as a discipline or it's talked about the fracturing of strategy, different types that I know there was, you know, mentioned Mark Ritson already, but there was a post he put earlier saying about creative strategy and the kind of tension around how strategy shouldn't be creative. And it's like, no, that's, it's not a, description of the strategist it's the product. I mean you've led strategy teams for years, does strategy mean different things to different people? Matthew (10:42.582) I mean, definitely yes, and I have to make sure I don't get drawn into an endless attempt to define the undefinable, but I think this is, to an extent, this is a part of the problem. This is where strategists live their lives, because they're often working within one very specific discipline, but within that discipline, they're the people who are asked to think most expansively about the whole world and how everything else fits together. But there's so much no-man's land in between. You know, I would... I would argue strategy doesn't have any intrinsic purpose. A strategy isn't really a thing. A strategy is a way of achieving something you're trying to achieve. And in the biggest, biggest picture, strategy, let's say we're talking for a business, just to narrow things a little bit down. Strategy is just like the set of choices by which you achieve the thing the business is trying to achieve. So on the basic level, that is super, super macro. When we talk about strategy in this context in a discipline, we're talking about the different kinds of strategists that exist in the world of advertising, which means often we're talking about people who are, in the big picture are, a tactic inside a tactic inside a tactic. So you're like the social content strategist inside the content strategy, inside the advertising strategy, inside the marketing strategy, that's somewhere inside the business strategy. So what we're doing, we're using the same language to describe these two things what are the big three, four, five decisions a business might make to achieve its goals? And for me, a strategist should always be trying to either get inside those things or define those things in some way. But we're also talking about how are you the person who helps on any given day to write a better, sharper brief for a piece of social content? And this is just the inadequacy of language, I guess. We're using one word to describe these mega things. But I think a lot of people are lost in this. Like, what is my job here? Is it to sharpen the brief for that piece of output, is it to connect together these three, four, five outputs better, or is it somehow to be sitting at the CEO's shoulder going, do know what, you need to change your business model? It's not really adequate to use one very broad term to describe all of those things. Tash (12:53.282) One thing I was going to add to that is one of the things in the Wark report, which I think is problematic is, you know, I think maybe to the point I was making earlier, which I would absolutely agree with you, it feels like in some ways what strategy really want is to be the end point, right? They want the outcome to be the heroism of what they deliver and to be celebrated and lauded for thinking terribly clever thoughts about things. And I think the realism of just being like, it's a means to an end. It's not the outcome. It's simply a vehicle to get to smarter business decisions as far as I'm concerned. I think that sort of level of comfort with that I don't think has been fully acknowledged by the industry, and as a consequence I think a lot of what we do gets hidden or masked by complex language frameworks you know playbooks coming out your ears in order to try and package up something and productize it and sell it but I think if you recognize that it's it's a means to an end I think you start off in a better space and can train people in a more equitable fashion to be more useful for business. Matthew (14:07.946) I totally agree, Tash. I think there's a part of reason this muddle happens is if you spend lots of time in agencies, then your experience as a strategist is often, I'm the person who opens the meeting or has to pull the rabbit out of a hat, or I'm in a pitch and I'm the person who stands up after the boring bit of the middle and before all the detail at the end. So you get a sense that that is your job is to be the person who kind of takes the center stage and says the smart thing and then everything. Whereas I think about it much more like a you know, like a conciliary role, like you're the person sitting behind the person who's making the really important decision or the person who's creating the value and your job is to provide the context of the information. But that's not how it feels when you're in an agency. You feel like you're expected to be this kind of, you know, shaky hands person who's there to warm up the room or to pull a rabbit out the hat. But that's not really what strategy is. Like strategists historically were kind of interesting, kind of a bit weird introvert-y people who kind of went around after the general or the CEO or the creative going, just something you might want to think about. But yeah, we've turned them into show ponies, which I don't think is really what strategy is at all. Matthew Knight (15:24.785) Is that part of the problem that when you put strategy in an agency, the role of the agency is ultimately to sell something, Whether it be a TV ad or a media plan or whatever, and the strategist or the strategy is so often there to justify the thing which they're actually making their money off, and subsequently, organizations have tried to make strategy commercially valuable for them. That's not the role of the strategist or a strategy. The role there is to say, should we be doing to create the best impact? Almost agnostic of what the outcome should be. it a problem that fundamentally there's an inherent bias in having a strategist inside the organisation that also has the solution? Lucy (16:12.752) Yeah, I think it's that it's, you both kind of said it, it's Amy Keen and I talked about this a lot recently, which is it's the cleverest person in the room syndrome, which is just that, that it's not even, it is about selling, but it's also managing the client relationship and being the point person that they can go to and say, now, what do you think? Tell me the clever thing to think here. And I think that that it's not just a problem in terms of, you know, how and what we create as the role of the strategist. I think it also puts an inordinate amount of pressure on the strategist. Lucy (16:42.608) When I talked about this point around homogeneity, I don't just mean demographic homogeneity. I mean also probably in terms of neurodiversity homogeneity and the type of people that we end up with as a result. And I will put myself squarely in one of these two boxes, which is the person who stands on stages and presents things and is the kind of extroverted mate of the client friend who also happens to be able to unpick a problem very quickly so that, you you turn up to a meeting, you've read the brief, quick, say some smart stuff as it comes up and package it up. I would say the flip side of that, but very much their companion is the lean back and think. The slightly more, as you put it, introverted, although I'm not a hundred percent sure about that, about that classification, but the slightly lean back more and think and then wait at the end and say something really smart as a digest. But they're sitting there the whole meeting thinking, crikey, I've got to say something really clever at the end of this to justify my position in the room. And I think there's the song and dance person and the writing down person, but no less the pressure of what that creates. I believe what we're talking about much more is if you can say, is it helpful is a question you asked, Nity. I'm not sure if it's helpful on behalf of the agency, probably yes, because we are there as the front people of some form. I don't, know, our job is to sell stuff. So I'm not going to divide that as a function of what an agency strategist needs to be. A, I think we can teach doing that stuff better. How do you read a client? How do you use everything from digging into the brief more effectively to neuro-linguistic programming of the person in front of you and just getting to know them and getting their phone number and getting closer to them and understanding what drives them. Is it fear? Is it fame? Do they just want a quiet life? know, do they want to be a celebrity CMO? These are all factors that I think it's useful to have a grasp of. But do I think this is potentially deriding the discipline? Yes, because actually if we were all able to be much more collaborative, and not put all of the strategic thinking on the strategist to not assume that's the only person who can do the job of, as you said, like Hooky, picking apart the problem and coming up with something clever. No, go and dig into the brief collaboratively, give yourselves a common language as a team to understand how to identify the challenges, create really clear process for unpacking the solution. I don't mean paint by numbers, I just mean techniques and tools that will help you go: "What do we think the answer is?" and be as inviting to every level within the room, every discipline in the room, and every part of the business that you can be to get to a better answer. Without that strategist thinking, crikey, I've got to stand on stage and do a dog and pony show, which isn't really a great part of strategy. Unless you're me, who's a big show off, which I love this, that's fine. Tash (19:30.944) Yeah, I think it's a really good point, Lucy. I think one of the things that I would add to that, again, if you go back to that sort of WARC report, which I thought again was kind of a bit, I don't know, when you read it in sort of the cold light of day, you look at it you're like, Christ, is that what we're really saying that we're at? But two of the three solutions that they were recommending is basically market research. Like those were two of the three solutions. And so for me, that sort of, again, goes back to that point of as an industry are we doing a great job at creating really effective work? If we're taking a step back and thinking about marketing services in particular, no. There's lots of evidence to suggest that effectiveness of, generally speaking, marketing services, it's not great. Like actually, figures suggest that it's getting worse and worse. And so as a consequence, I think really thinking about what the role then of strategy has in pursuit of effectiveness and in excellence. Clearly suggest that we're not doing a very good job of that So again going back to that point of really training through that basics of what are the skills and the tools that we need to do a good job of that You're absolutely right Lucy. It's not about showing up and being clever in the room. It's about really interrogating What is going to make for a brilliant brief? What is going to make for a nuanced interesting viewpoint that really seeks out audiences and people in ways that perhaps haven't been done before because if we just keep on relying on people showing up and saying something smart then you're absolutely right we just get the same old same old and effectiveness gets worse and worse. I think given that what they're saying in the work report is that people basically should just spend some more time thinking about market research then you know I'm a market research agency so hey great I'm here for that but I think also it points to that sense that the industry has maybe lost its mind in that we have lost touch with reality so much so that we're suggesting that predominantly what strategists should really be doing is going to do to market research. Matthew Knight (21:36.229) It seemed crazy that one of the primary recommendations was get to know your audience. And for me, that almost reflected just the lack of appreciation of what strategy is and the craft and the talent of people who are doing that work or the responsibility of people doing that work. And that perhaps actually as a discipline, and I'm not talking about strategists now, I'm talking about strategy and probably planning to a certain extent, but like that as a task that needs to be done has been shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and the amount of time and care and love and respect and value it's been given, that we're at a point now where we're saying it's probably a good idea to know your audience or get closer to the business, to the client, to understand what the business needs are. Have we got to such a state where we're going, it would be a really great idea if we had a team within a business that knew its audience, knew what the objectives were and kind of stitched them all together. What could we call that? How when did it go away? Lucy (22:32.272) From my perspective, so much of this is about, you know, kind of unforeseen consequences of pitching. I don't want to always put the problem at the door of pitching, but I do think that this is one of them. The sprints that we do in pitching to get to a hypothesis answer that will work in a pitch have undermined the amount of time I think it takes to do a proper deep dive into a challenge. So by that I mean, an insurance company comes to you and it says, people don't seem to be buying car insurance or home insurance for us anymore. Now, you have, instead of having three weeks, six weeks potentially, to really dig into the category, to read category reports, go through an insurance buying process yourself, set up a QOL group, go and look at car dealerships and see how insurance is being sold alongside the car itself. Do the really deep research that I think that we absolutely should be doing and immersing ourselves in, I actually prefer McCann's 60s to the kind of classic 40s, because I think it's much more encompassing, but really get into all of those different factors. Instead, when it's a pitch, go, okay, we don't have that time. In three days, as the strategist, I've got to come back with a skeleton of the story, and they don't mean skeleton, they mean the full story. So you've got to have a hook which says, everybody's aging out of buying a house and a car. So probably what's happened is the entry point into insurance is with lower cost packages like travel and pet, and we need to think much more about how we translate to a better, to an older demographic who actually have these products whilst finding a new point of market entry solution. And everybody in the room goes, yeah, that sounds all right. The unforeseen effect is you think that's how all strategy can be done. So instead of going deep into research, you create a hypothesis based on kind of a skeleton deep dive that you've probably done. And then everybody thinks that because it sounded competent, because you're a good storyteller who can do this dog and pony show at a level that is bought by everyone in the room. The timeframes that are given for the proper project are squashed and squeezed, knocked on by things like, of course, FTE challenges, other client demands, covering for the planners who have been stripped out of the business, covering, as you talked about, for senior staff who've been stripped out of the business, until such a point where it's not that strategists don't know that they should be doing this, but they simply don't have the capacity and the norm is shrunk to a point where the deep research becomes the skeleton research and we think that that's fine. Matthew Knight (25:05.697) Matthew, you've led, been in and led and run and designed strategy teams in different shapes and sizes of organizations over period of time. Have you seen that curve that we have ended up in being this strategy compressor? has it always been that? What has been the kind of shift that you've seen of the value or the appreciation of the craft? Matthew (25:32.18) Yeah, it's interesting. guess there's layers of different things. guess the first one I'd say go to the client side and the kind of the business strategy side and what's going on over there. I don't think I would honestly say overall that business has become any less or more strategic than it was before. I think you see the same human problems that you see everywhere of people more distracted by more different forms of notification and forms of communication and more chaos in business decision processes. But overall, in the big world of strategy, think overall it's pretty similar to what it was before. At the moment it's mercifully free of any crazy trend that says, you know, everyone in the world must become a digital retail business or all this kind of random stuff. But I think in the big world of strategy, I think it's alive and kicking. I think in the world of advertising specifically, we have an issue where it's fragmented. The workload of agency is fragmented into many, small pieces. And then the business model of each of those pieces is massively under pressure. So therefore it is difficult to fuck difficult, but not impossible to find places in the agency world where that discipline just isn't hugely under pressure. Just like, you know, in every place, it's about 30 % below the manpower. It's supposed to be, you know, an undue amount of time has been given away for free, et cetera. Like, so almost everywhere that exists because all the places where those people exist have a business model problem. And every now and again, you find an agency or a world where that isn't true, where someone's thriving. And lo and behold, it's not like that in strategy. Like, people are invested in strategists and the team is growing and the strategists have time to go to a gallery and have a think and do all the things that make the strategy. Because those businesses are on the up and have thriving business models. But it so happens that at the moment in about 70 to 80 % of the advertising industry, where people would learn how to lead those teams. So it would always be, if you were a CSO or a head of strategy or whatever you are, you'd always have like three or four people below you that you're going, you know what, that person could probably do the job better than me already. And there's another three really different styles that will come through now. And most of the places I work, that ladder has just like disappeared. It's become at best like a column where that person might go, God, there's one person who might be able to do my job if I get hit by a bus. But very often there's just this huge gap between these very senior people who are a like, God, I'm not sure I've got it in me anymore. And then a bunch of younger people going, I love this, but I've got no idea how to run this team. I've worked out how to do what Lucy said. And I have to do the magic trick of putting out a of smart thinking. So I think in the bigger world, strategy is not in crisis. But in the place where lots of people are advertising and doing it, they are in business model crisis. And then I think that, yeah, the leadership is pretty patchy I would say. It's not easy to find really well led strategy teams. Tash (28:59.094) I think the barometer of awesome being being able to visit a gallery is quite nice one. And I think what you say is true. think the the truth of the matter is that, you know, through the late 90s, early 2000s into sort of the last decade, there's been a huge sense of sort of amalgamation of businesses under the big networks. And that's clearly being hugely disrupted. Like it clearly is, isn't it? You know, anyone who speaks to anyone who works at Omnicom, how awful is that experience for them? You know, it's, it's a dreadful state of affairs. And I think that does speak much more to the business model than it speaks to strategy in particular. But I think also, we operate in a new reality now. And think one of the things that comes up all the time is that question mark over how long, like how long do we get to do this? And I do think at certain level, there's a moment in time where you have to accept the realities of what you're dealing with. And so if it's not fit for purpose, then maybe we need to change the ways in which we deliver strategy the ways in which we arrive at strategy, even what we call it, because I think just labeling it the same thing that it's always been and yet only spending 10 seconds thinking about it, again, perhaps that's not strategy, perhaps that's something different. I think there's a sort of cognitive dissonance almost at play where we're sort of operating in that sort of lag time of what used to be the good old days and what now feels like this kind of trench warfare where you're fighting against kind of the money guys and clients and time and it feels as though none of it particularly works. And so I think as a consequence, it does feel like it's all under threat and under question when perhaps the reality is that at some level, businesses, both agency side and client side need to adapt to this new reality and stop calling things what they used to be called when actually the reality is that maybe they're not that now and maybe they're something entirely different. And I think, you know, it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation because I think until there's genuine leadership around that. Then we constantly go around in circles having these kind of existential crises about the industry when the reality is that we just haven't really adapted that well to these new sets of circumstances that exist around us. I think the ultimate truth for me always is that, and maybe this has always been true, the kind of days where strategists get to spend time on things may have gone, but the need is the same. Like we must understand people better. We must understand more of what's going on in the world because I think so often and I like today, know, like every single week as a person who operates in the sort of research industry, we have conflict conversations with people who operate in creative businesses who don't have no interest in understanding of what it's like to be a person in the world today and operate in these very ivory towers and from very, very small pools of influence who all go through the same school system and have the same kinds of ways of thinking about things. And so there's a kind of lag situation going on there, which is just a lack of recognition of what it's like to be a person, the reflected experiences of different kinds of people. That again, I think until we show genuine leadership on that, we don't really deserve to call ourselves strategists if we're not prepared to do the work to get there. So I think it's challenging. I think the leadership question I think is really important because I think there's business models at play that ultimately, if you don't adapt, then we're not really moving forwards. Matthew Knight (32:24.135) It's all very linear, isn't it? I think like the idea of, you know, the fact that we have planning process and it doesn't matter whether it's a straight line or a figure of eight on its side or whatever. It's like the idea of you start with some audience insight or a problem, start, you get to a strategy, you do some execution, you learn from it. And the idea that strategy happens just once at the start as opposed to just this constant curiosity and desire to understand and to spot new things and if you take it away from the discipline of strategy and just like applied curiosity almost and this is why I think insight and strategy have always worked really well hand in hand but they haven't necessarily needed to be different disciplines they're different skill sets and they have different applications but I think that partnership has always been really strong in teams where I've been closest to it. But I don't think the labels need to apply then, right? It's it's understanding and applying as opposed to strategy and insight. And I know that I've worked, you now I'm not in an agency context and I work directly with clients. It's far harder for me to sell in a strategy project than if I describe it as, we just get some real clarity around what we wanna do next? No, yeah, of course, fine. And it's like the big S has got this, God, no, that's gonna take weeks to do and it's gonna be horrific. But if you say this is what we're gonna do and this is how we're gonna get there and it's gonna be built on these things or hey, you've got these big gaps here, we really need to understand them, then there's very few businesses which will go, no, no, no, it's fine, we'll just crack on. Tash (34:03.052) That's such a good point, I think it's such a great point and I think the amount of business now that gets done on the basis of, in a very Donald Rumsfeldian way where there's the known knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, most businesses have very little clue about what the left hand and the right hand are doing. So I think that role for understanding, appreciating where you're at, what you've got. Like people have data coming out of their ears. They have no idea what to do with it. So the role of clarity and simplification, I think, is at the heart of what a modern strategist basically has to do and deal with constantly. But again, I think perhaps we dress it up in ways that make it feel much more important than it is. But the reality is that you're giving people a really clear picture. Lucy (34:48.028) I think, yeah, absolutely Tash. I also just, one of the things I always try to imbue in any of the team that I work with, is just be obsessed with the business that you're working on and the client that you're working with. As I say, both the drive of what's going to serve the end consumer on behalf of the brand and the person sitting in front of you that you're selling it to. Like what do they really want? And that's why when I think you have that level of, I know I call it obsession, that's probably unhealthy because that speaks a lot to why I used to go and tell Hooky that I couldn't sleep at night but what I was thinking about work too much. But I do think that if you have this kind of constant reappreciation of how you're going to reach your goals, it stops it being this kind of one and done process because you always see ways in which you go, my goodness, that's really fascinating. We should go and try and apply that. Or I think it's really interesting what you were saying, Nitey, about the joining between the strategy and the insights team. Insights as research, yes. I think what we really mean now is kind of epiphanies I'm less interested in. I sometimes think that brilliant ideas... What I do mean, I suppose, is just seeing a really interesting thing and knowing how it immediately connects to what the ultimate goal is. know, be it like, gosh, that product has got sunflowers in the mix. Maybe you could grow your own advert. Where would that take us to? Does that link to their ESG thing? What if we always grow our own adverts? Where does that take us? You know, and just going kind of off on a loop, but because you are really, really clear on what the core goal is of the brand and of your client and what they want to achieve. Thank you for stopping the rabbit hole. Matthew (36:32.082) In the danger of going down another rabbit hole, can I pick up something else you said? I think there's almost no cases I can think of where the thing that anyone wants is a strategy. There are some, I have found the odd exception, like the odd exception, what people want, sometimes they want a plan, like, God, we've got all these millions of things we're thinking about doing, but we've got no idea how they're related to them, what order we should do, we've got to tell people what to do, we've got no idea, so people might want a plan. They might want a tangible thing like, I need a brand positioning so that I can get some new adverts, build a new website. Or they might want something super, super specific. Like at the moment, all our content is ignored by the entire world and we need someone to come in and tell us how we say and do things that people find interesting. But in none of those cases, anyone sitting there going, what I really want is a strategy and I'm going to be really specific. The person I want that to be produced by is a really good strategist. So I think we get hung up on the idea that strategies that I've done probably like 200 projects in the last five years, in probably one or two of them, the headline on of it says somewhere, a strategy for something like it's always a something else. like strategy is a means to an end to solving another problem. In the abstract, it is almost entirely useless. And the skills that are required to do it, there are definitely are, you key skills and it's great that you're working on that Lucy, but the point you make is also really important. That doesn't mean that can only be done by a strategist. I remember a MD of many of our mutual acquaintance saying to me, what you're really good at is, you know, I could never be a strategist, you're really good at that thing. All I'm good at is working out what needs to be done and how to do it. If it's not that, it's not anything. That's what it is. The goal is not to produce strategies but to make some other thing happen. And the way to think that is to think strategically, not to be a strategist and to incorporate the manner and title of a strategist, but to think in a well-contextualized way at the right time. Lucy (38:26.628) Exactly that. It's exactly why I wanted to build a program that wasn't just how to teach strategy to strategists, but about unlocking. I had this great argument with myself for the last two years when I was building it, which was, it just aptitude or can it be learned? And I come to the conclusion, of course it can be, and that's why it should be taught because there are so many different capabilities that should fit into strategic thinking. It's really interesting what you were saying, Hickey, know, nobody ever asked for strategy, they want an end goal. What you hear a lot of, however, is people in performance reviews when they're bitching about their team saying, I just wish they were a more strategic, but what they mean is I just wish they were performing better or I just wish they were a bit cleverer or I just wish they were a bit better at X or Y. And so I thought really deeply about, okay, well, what is it that makes people good strategic thinkers beyond just kind of being good strategists? And it was all about stuff like pattern recognition. You know, if I say to you, go and look at this piece of data and tell me what's interesting about it. What's anomalous about it? What's consistent about it? What does that tell you about what's going on in the category? Or some critical thinking, you what will help you really unpack a brief, an email from a client, something that will tell you what the actual dynamics are going on underneath what they're telling you that they are. And all sorts of other things about how to become much more actively observant of the world around you, and draw that into some kind of implications that may get you into a more interesting place. And I think that kind of going back to what we were saying about the beginning, because I think so often we assume that skills like that are down to aptitude and to your point, Hakee, about I can just work out what I want to, we've assumed it's a finite set of skills that create what we're determined to be a strategist. We disregard the opportunity to build a practice of improving all of these things all the time, which not only helps the business perform better, but means that you can WARC into your performance review and say, this has been my personal contribution to the overall performance of the team because I have delivered X, Y, Z that's ladded up to here. I want everybody in the business to be able to do that and for that not to be limited to the select few that we've ordained as strategists. And it can be taught. Tash (40:55.488) I think there's also a reality factor here which is that most strategy resides in a commercial based business and I live in America now, so you've got to follow the money. Always you've got to follow the money. And I think one of the things that feels true, going back to that sort of conversation about not just the practice of strategy, but the ecosystem that it operates in, is until we rethink some of the business models, and undoubtedly there's some flocks going on, right? mean, how many times do we hear about the big networked agencies going through some sort of crisis, amalgamating between the VMLs of the world? They're constantly in these kind of of flux at the moment. I think the net result is that often clients are looking for smaller sized businesses, less of the big network stuff, more of the, just want some good people on this. Do you know what I mean? That sense of, I don't care if it's a strategist, an MD, an account director, I just want a person I know is on it and who's thinking about it. And I think what that really says to me is that. Let's get rid of the job titles in some ways. I think actually what we need is as a discipline for people to be actively engaged in the idea of business, of how businesses work, of understanding the numbers behind some of that, spotting the opportunities, because so many of the problems that we've talked to are the result of incredibly reactive, tactical-based decision-making that happens at the last hour and therefore no one has time, no one has space, everyone gets incredibly stressed. I think if we could reimagine those kinds of relationships where Businesses were in bed in a much more meaningful way with their partners and so what they had was some really good people who can spot opportunities, who can be working on actively how the business operates in a much more maintenance way rather than a more reactive way. But I think we'd get to some better outcomes both for those people involved agency side but also for clients as well where you're driving forward momentum, you're changing things, you're providing thought leadership, you're leading categories, you're not just reacting to the next series of that have happened. And there are businesses that do that and those are the ones that we tend to look to and hold up and wish that we all got to operate in that kind of way. But the truth is that they've made those active choices to behave in those kinds of ways. So think we need to sort of model of if all of the big networks were in crisis and therefore all of those retained relationships are under question. Okay clients, how are we operating with those smaller businesses to make sure that you've got those really sort of invested relationships that means you get people who want to work on your business and who do think more clearly and can look up not just look down at what's in front of them and I think that would transform the relationships that we have but also the practical outcomes for those kinds of clients but also those kinds of agencies as well. Matthew Knight (43:45.969) I think that's an amazing place to leave it. I'd just like to ask all of you for one thought. If, because we've just removed the discipline of strategists and consigned them to the bin of history, which I think is very good idea, but strategy is very much well in life. If there was one thing which you were suggesting to somebody who wants to step into being more strategic or playing that sort of a role - what would you encourage them to be doing in their professional practice to really embody that discipline? Hooky, maybe you first? Matthew (44:22.676) I think I'll probably start by stealing something from what Lucy was saying, which I think, think about strategy not as an output or as a job title, but as a practice. Like it's a way of thinking and a way of doing, which has incredible diversity within it, like all different kinds of ways of doing that, but it's something that you can easily become better at every single day as you do it. And I think, if I'm a person coming into the discipline now, you've got to really strive to have that connected understanding of everything that's going on. And that's not an easy thing to get. So I think it's a harder and harder thing to get. And you can do that by swimming upstream. So making sure you spend a lot of time really understanding this business that I'm talking to, how does it actually work? Like, what is it? How does it make money? All of that kind of stuff. But I think also by being prepared to have a path that's quite wiggly. I don't think a good route for a strategist now is to go, I'm going to become a junior strategist, then a senior strategist, then a head of strategy, then a chief strategy officer, then I'll maybe launch my own strategy company. And like, I think maybe that was a kind of assumed path at some point, maybe 10, 15 years ago. I think you've got to spend a lot of time exploring all kinds of random different bits of the train set, different places to be, so that at some point you can say, Actually I do now have an overview of quite a lot of things and I can see how they fit together. I would not take, absolutely no way would I take the linear path. I'd be prepared to go around the houses a little bit so that once you've been around the houses you're on the mountaintop or something. Tash (46:10.018) Well, I love what Matthew said. think that's, I 100 % agree with that. I think the only thing I would add is that if you consider yourself to be a aspiring strategist, then I think you also have to be a person that just loves and thrives the idea of getting under the hood of a business. And so the more you can lean into learning and education around how businesses run, how they operate, how the money works, all of that contextual information will help to make you a much more proficient commercial strategist. And that's the stuff that I really look for in my team is like how do clients operate? Like how does the factory run? Like understand all of the nuts and bolts of how business works. And I think ultimately if you enjoy strategy then that should be something that you, you you want to do and you love to do. And I think always that can make you much better at spotting opportunities, being less reactive, being more understanding of the opportunities that businesses might have and therefore the commercial imperative which will make us all better so I think that will be the one for me. Matthew Knight (47:11.312) Lucy, final word to you. Lucy (47:14.65) Don't be too cool. Just the deeper you can go, the more nerdy you can go, the more you lean into, I really like crocheting or I used to be a bookie or gosh, I wonder if I took up kayaking on the weekends, what that would look like. Do it. It will make you more interesting person, which is something we've all said is one of the kind of key characteristics. And learn, come speak to me, please. I would happily teach you some of the practices and processes that I've learned over time. I've built the course I always wish had existed for me, but really don't assume that you've kind of got to a point or that anybody's got to a point in this industry where there are sort of complete picture. Like just keep growing, reading and not just agreeing with something because a so-called ordained rock star planner says that it's the right thing. You're perfectly able to question the likes of Scott Galloway and Mark Ritson and so on and say, actually I call bullshit on this. I think it might be different, but just have some proof and some reasons why you think that could be. So yeah, just don't be too cool, keep learning. Matthew Knight (48:14.761) Tash, Matthew, Lucy, thank you so much for your time. It's been a brilliant conversation and until next time, see you soon.