Organize your strategy work around narrative, not activities and artifacts
Think of how everything contributes to the story you want to tell, not the SOW you need to complete.
Hi strategists-
This Friday (3/7) it’s Free First Friday again, the day each month where I open my calendar for free trial strategy sessions. Sign up for half an hour if you want some help shaping your career narrative for your next move, or if you want a collaborator on a thorny project, or if you’d like to talk about how to grow and develop your strategy team. These usually fully book up so reserve a slot for yourself before telling your friends and colleagues.
I believe a good strategist knows what to do when they don’t know what to do. The most common moment that strategists find themselves completely mystified is right at project kickoff, when they’re trying to figure out how to get started. Today’s newsletter helps with that.
-Mike
Organize your strategy work around narrative, not activities and artifacts
A reality of strategy work is that we need to work off the Scope of Work. The client signs off on a number of deliverables, as well as defined activities that theoretically should contribute to them.
But the strategy itself is not just evidence that you’ve completed those activities as represented in your deliverables. It’s not checking activities off a list - it’s telling a story that inspires a client with the confidence to act.
You’re not done when you’ve finished your activities. You’re done when your story is clear and persuasive.
So next time try this:
Once you’ve finished your discovery (the phase that marks the end of your learning and the beginning of your synthesis) switch immediately to narrative mode and use this as a starter for the outline you write before building slides:
Define the current situation
Pinpoint the desired outcome for the business or brand
Determine who needs to take action to achieve this outcome
Understand why they haven’t done this already / why they’re not doing it now / what will inhibit them from doing it in the future
Identify what asset(s) the business or brand possesses that is relevant to the situation described
Explain what the business or brand needs to do in order overcome the obstacles preventing the people from doing the thing
Translate this work to be done into guidelines and inspiration that will drive downstream work purpose-built to encourage the people to do the thing the business needs
This is the outline of a complete strategy. 1-5 is your core narrative, that includes the key insights about the competition and general landscape, cultural factors, unmet customer needs, and the business and brand attributes and capabilities you can bring to bear on the problem.
6 is your strategy statement - a tidy declaration of intent that ties all your key insights together.
And 7 is the brief that translates your strategy into something kinetic to guide and inspire the downstream work.
Following this outline helps ensure that the points you want to make all contribute to your story, and that your story is consistent and logical. If it’s not, it will show up here and you’ll know you either need to learn more or think more.
Strategy in brief
Strategy is knowing what not to do. So a good strategist is a relentless editor - of facts that aren’t relevant, data that isn’t interesting, ideas that are distracting and of anything else that doesn’t drive clarity and persuasion.
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About The Strategy Coach Company
I’m Mike May and I founded the Strategy Coach Company to help brand and agency strategists get better at their job while doing their job. I provide 1:1 coaching, collaboration, real-time feedback and thought partnership on actual work in progress, because I know that’s the best way to get better at doing strategy, and at being a strategist. You can learn more at StrategyCoach.co, connect with me on LinkedIn, or just reply to this newsletter.