Clear thinking doesn’t need complicated language
Strategy has gotten really good at making simple things sound complicated.
We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that complicated language makes us sound smarter. We turn people into audiences, problems into tensions, ideas into territories and straightforward thoughts into 60-page strategy decks filled with words nobody would ever use in an actual conversation.
And now we have AI, which can produce even more of it, even faster.
I like AI. I use it every day. It can tear through research, analyse competitors, find patterns and help you understand a category in a fraction of the time it used to take. That’s incredible.
But none of that, on its own, is strategy. Strategy starts when you stop gathering information and decide what you actually think.
Your words are the strategy
I’ve always believed strategy can be complicated to get to, but once you get there, it should be simple.
You can spend weeks researching a category. You can interview customers, pull apart the competition, analyse behaviour and fill a wall with Post-it notes. But eventually someone has to walk into a room and explain what all of it means.
Preferably without saying “multi-dimensional consumer ecosystem.”
For strategists, words aren’t the packaging around the thinking. They are the thinking.
If you need three paragraphs to explain your strategic idea, I’d argue you don’t have one yet. Keep going.
The best strategies often sound almost stupidly obvious when you finally hear them. That’s the point. Simplicity isn’t evidence that there wasn’t enough thinking. Usually it’s evidence that there was a shitload of it.
Stop trying to sound like a strategist
Somewhere along the way, strategy developed its own language. I think it’s hurting us.
We say things like “unlock,” “reframe,” “intersection,” “ecosystem,” “authenticity” and “cultural relevance” so often they barely mean anything anymore. Worse, we’re increasingly asking AI to write strategy using the language of every strategy deck it has ever seen.
The result can sound incredibly intelligent while saying absolutely nothing.
Plain language forces you to have an opinion.
A client should be able to repeat the strategy when we’re not in the room. An account person should be able to defend it. Most importantly, a creative person should read it and immediately start having ideas.
If they need us there to translate it, we haven’t done our job.
Strategy should make creatives dangerous
This is the part we lose sight of.
Strategy isn’t supposed to be admired. It’s supposed to make everything that comes after it better.
Our job isn’t to show everyone how clever we are. It’s to give creative people something clear, interesting and provocative enough that they can take it somewhere we never would have.
That requires restraint.
A great strategy creates a boundary without filling in the picture. It gives you a sharp thought and then gets the hell out of the way.
The more we explain, prescribe and rationalise, the smaller the creative opportunity becomes.
AI makes taste more important, not less
AI is going to make research faster. It’s going to make information cheaper. And producing a competent-looking strategy deck is going to become ridiculously easy.
Good.
Maybe that finally kills the idea that the deck itself is where the value lives. It isn’t. The value is the thought.
What do you believe? What matters? What doesn’t? What are you willing to remove? And can you say it in a way another human being might actually remember?
AI can help you find the haystack faster.
Your job is still to find the fucking needle.
That’s strategy.