Strategy Archives — Kevin Rothermel

Dogma is comforting, and in this business it goes by many names.

So says Erika Hall of Mule Design in her recent Medium piece: Design Sprints Are Snake Oil.

What promised to be a vicious takedown of the institution of agile methods like design thinking, was really a takedown of the idea of design sprints as the One True God.

Agile processes can be useful. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have taken hold in business to the extent that they have.

The problem is that not all problems can be solved by the same silver-bullet process:

… many methods start out as legitimate tools to promote better, clearer thinking faster and end up as activities substituted for thinking.

Yes, sprints can be useful. As can Design Thinking and agile processes and all of the rest.

We teach them at the Brandcenter because they are useful and students need to have an understanding of how it all works.

But they are only one arrow in the quiver.

Let’s use them that way.

Strategists Have to be Creative.

One of the ways I like to see strategy students improve at the Brandcenter is in their willingness to think creatively. There’s a lot written about how we are all born creative, only to have it beaten out of us in school.

We see the results of this first-hand.

Students often arrive for their first year programmed to fill Word documents, as many as possible, with fancy words, as over-written as possible.

The hard work is deprogramming that behavior. Getting them to think again isn’t easy, especially in the context of students who are learning to be art directors and copywriters — the traditional creatives of advertising.

It becomes a zero sum game.

They are creative. We are strategists.

They have ideas. We write documents.

They have been anointed. We do research.

All of which is nonsense. It becomes a comparison mindset fueled by job title and output. And that becomes self-reinforcing, as per Kathryn P. Haydon:

When you’re in a comparison mindset, you inadvertently diminish your own creative ability. You envision Picasso and your highly divergent friends on a pedestal that you cannot possibly ascend. All you can see is yourself standing in the shadows on the lowest rung of your tiny ladder. Creativity looks so far off, so unattainable.

Society has perpetuated the myth that creativity has to be comparative, and if comparative, mutually exclusive: “If Picasso is creative then I am not.” This reasoning is incorrect.

Traditional creatives might be more creative. Some of them won’t be. Either way, it doesn’t matter.

The point is this:

Strategy isn’t about research. It’s about solving problems.

Solving problems, by it’s very nature, is about creativity. It’s about having ideas.

Yes, research should inform those ideas.

But so should observations and movies and culture and life and the world.

Yes, strategic ideas need to be grounded, but they also have to be good enough to to inspire further actions, behaviors or other outputs.

This is where the best strategy comes from, and ultimately, it’s how the best strategists help to make great creative work.

So stop hedging. Pull your head out of your PowerPoint deck, and start having some ideas.

The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

This article from HBR gets a little life-hacky for my comfort, but I thought this bit was smart:

Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.