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Killer waves

There’s no more common trope than marketers currently want to be ‘data driven story- tellers’.

Q: How does strategy help contribute to creative product?

While I think that there may as many definitions of strategy as there are strategists, it will aways help you if you can define where your skills and interests lie and how you can best help a team.

One of my favourite frames for understanding is to find where a strategist sits on the spectrum from Numbers to Narrative.

For many years the notion of ‘t-shaped talent’ which has broader skills and knowledge and learns by linking up different perspectives from different specialties, was a profile we all sought. You wanted to have a wide lens of expertise and a deep specialisation.

If you think in a linear fashion, you’d start at one end of the spectrum, where at one end you have data and at the other end the strategic narrative, to find where you might sit and then focus on developing your strength.

True Data Strategists that can identify both patterns in the noise and identify the human insight driving it are quite rare. I think we’re all discovering the growing and evolving value of data in crafting creative solutions. It won’t do you any harm to refine or build your ability to both build and read a spread sheet and design an information to be accessible and powerful.

Creative Strategists, or Comms Planners structure a messaging house to get stuff done. They carve up confusion and create clarity. They stand in the shoes of their audiences and babel- fish translate corporate propaganda so it has heart and meaning. They are word smiths, the architects of distributed sense and driven to find the compelling and the engaging and the cut through. Again- it’s super important to be able to have the skill to construct communication in a way that people want to listen, what to know what’s next and actually want to take action on what’s being said.

In between and aligned to these areas of expertise are the researchers, analysts, consultants, specialists, brand planners and the media planners and all the other job descriptions allocated to our roles.

In a t-shaped universe you only get one specialisation.

What may add depth to the metaphor is if you understand a spectrum as a wave and not a line:

Then you can explore the notion of how the disciplines might amplify each other, and how they generate more momentum when you put them together, how you can cover more ground if you have more than one….

My thoughts are that you don’t have to choose, that specialisation is for insects, that the better the base the stronger the building and so on.

But it is a good idea to know what skills you have, and where you have gaps and ensure you’re bringing rigour and research to whatever you do.

Just don’t forget that if you want people to do anything with what you find, you’ll need a good story.

PS:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.