Smashing the Fabergé Hammer

Strategy is uniquely prone to a degree of lofty fart-sniffing pontification that no other business function comes remotely close to.

Strategists create strategy, but we also write about creating strategy, we write about the various strategies to get to strategy, we write complaining about strategists writing about strategy, and lets not forget about the strategists writing complaints about strategists complaining about strategy.

We probably engage in all of this pompous tiresome whiff-waff because in reality the only thing that matters about strategy is impact.

Which creates a problem.

Impact is very hard to quantify and measure, it's usually triangulated through a series of stakeholders, and it is only ultimately revealed after executing and measuring something out in the real world.

Writing about strategy has none of those inconveniences. I don’t need to convince creatives to develop creative ideas that execute a strategic platform, I don’t need to persuade clients to deploy it in the right way, and what I write doesn’t have to stimulate any preferred response in consumers. I simply sit down with a cup of tea and an hour later we have about 1500 words of acceptably coherent waffle.

In this instance it’s ironic that I’m waffling about impact, but here we are.?

Impact is of essential importance to strategy, yet notably absent from the miasma of pontification that surrounds strategy. Perhaps because the waffle is itself motivated by a desire to obfuscate away from impact, perhaps because the waffle rarely has much impact, or perhaps because the idea that impact matters is just blindingly obvious.

A more disturbing thought is that discussion of impact is avoided because so much of what we strategists do has remarkably little impact beyond the numbers inputted into our timesheets.?

It’s worth saying that many strategists aren’t naturally great at impact, especially the kind of academically gifted ones who did very well at university - which is - well, its most strategists.

Education, where most strategists excelled before embarking into adland,? is designed to cultivate highly intellectual, nuanced, measured thinking that is anathema to making things actually happen. Hence impact usually being a bit of a learning curve for us planners.

My disdain for the increasingly pervasive notion that strategy exists primarily as a billable upsell - the $2 guacamole added into the agency burrito - motivates me here just as much as any sense of altruistic mentorship. Nevertheless, both of these ends can benefit from a set of heuristics and a more considered way of thinking about impact.

This is something I believe is critically important. Strategy as a function is in real danger of becoming a sort of fabergé porcelain hammer, far removed from creating any impact and instead a quite charming but ultimately useless ornament.

How should strategists think about impact?

Effectiveness defines our roles as strategists; our job is to make sure that the ideas we create for our clients are effective. Impact is a way of looking at how well we do that, we can think of it as our ability to actually create effectiveness in the work.

This might seem like nuance, but it’s an important distinction that recognizes the indirect and limited control strategists have over the tangible outputs of an agency. Strategists don’t make the adverts, but they do have to make sure the adverts are effective. To cross that bridge you need impact.

There are a plethora of different ways to influence the work, but I consider there to be three principal points of impact for strategy:

I. Impact on the work.

Setting a clear strategic direction for creativity and having a hand in shaping the creative development is the most immediate and tangible point of impact for strategy.

II. Impact for the work

Influencing clients is almost as important as influencing the work itself.?

Creating the right conditions for creativity to flourish isn’t easy - you have to manage client expectations, rationalize creative leaps, and be the champion for effectiveness in the work.

III. Impact of the work

The holy grail of impact, the effectiveness of ideas in the real world. This is the endgame where everything comes to fruition, it’s a direct function of the other two aspects of impact? as much as it’s a measure of the quality of the strategy.

Of course, actually doing any of that is far harder than simply waffling about it… But maybe this bit of waffle can help move impact up the agenda?