When it come to choosing work, I select projects by their capacity to appeal to my heart more than my head. This means that I’ve been lucky enough to do a really exciting variety of projects, and I’ve been able to create a work life that’s shaped around my skills and enthusiasms. But there’s a flip side. I’ve spent an awful lot of time trying to answer, or find an answer, to the question:
“What exactly is it that you do?”
Wanting to be a free spirit that defies categorisation is great (I’m particularly fond of the phrase “the thing you’re most likely to find in a pigeonhole is pigeon shit”) but that can make it difficult for others to frame you, explain your value to others, and hence pass work your way.
In an ongoing quest to clarify how to explain what it is that I do, I went through a phase of asking clients and friends what it is they thought I did. The best answer came from Feargal Sharkey. Over a coffee in Muswell Hill he told me,
“You’re a provocative strategist, Andrew”
Yep. That felt close. So for a while I toyed with this idea. I’m a strategist. I research stuff, I come up with insights and then I develop strategy for my client (be it business development or campaigns) that they can act on.
The only problem is strategy hardly ever sticks.
Friends and clients like Feargal get what I do and how I add value because they’ve known and worked with me, charging me to explore their businesses and develop innovative ways to add value to what they do. The trouble comes when I have to sell my smartarsery past my client to the organisations they lead. Too often I’ve found resistance to the strategy I’ve written, accompanied by a slightly chippy “we could have told you that” and the sotto voce question “now where’s that wastepaper basket?”
But who can blame them? Most businesses not only have clever people in them, they also inbuilt reasons why change is difficult. Running a small company of my own back at the beginning of the millennium I was shocked at how easily a dynamic business could bureaucratise, with employees looking inside at the politricks more often than outside at the customers. If that’s what it’s like for a little company in London with barely ten employees, imagine what it’s like for a corporation with thousands of employees spread over six continents.
I realised that I was focussing on the wrong word of Feargal’s description: I should have been focussed on provocation. If you want strategy to stick, often it’s better to explore, notice dissonance or challenge or opportunity and then show this to the client, provoking them to think anew. Provocation can be used as the key that unlocks strategy. If what you’ve noticed is founded in reality, the client will often look for directed activity (strategy) that responds to the challenges your provocation uncovers. This is best co-created with the client.
So that’s what I really do.
My path doesn’t go: research, insight then strategy.
It goes research, insight then provocation.
With this direction of travel, and provocation as my destination, I get more interesting responses. My clients and their people are more likely to ask questions, explore what my provocation means to their businesses, then (if I’m lucky) look to co-create strategy. Sometimes with me, sometimes with others, but much more often in a direction which is going to lead to lasting, broadly adopted change.
So that’s what I am. A provocative strategist. Emphasis on provocative.
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