At some point the news will make its way out to the wider advertising public. Or maybe it won’t, because, like, who am I really even? But after four flat-out months of people, pitches, and presentations, I’ve stepped out of full-time life and back to being a freelance strategist at large.
Sometimes you have to walk into the fire to find out whether something is meant to be. Turned out the fire had other plans for me.
At moments like these, probably trained into me across 15 years of swimming, you either forget it ever happened and move on, or you sit with it and let it teach you the lesson you probably needed to learn.
As a wise-beyond-her-years, 12-year-old, future basketball superstar in the Philippines once told me: “The only L’s I take are Lessons.” Frankie, your words still ring in my ears, especially at moments like this.
The lesson, in the end, was clarity. Clarity on something I’ve been feeling for a couple of years now, from a few different chairs, in a few different countries.
Playing defence
We have become an industry that plays defence. Every press release, every point of view, every corner cut and cost cut. None of it looks like an industry that expects to win.
It’s in full retreat, consolidating and pulling in its horns. And in that crouch, the one thing nobody wants to talk about is problems. Not internally, not externally. A fear of problems, because we’re already up to our necks in them, has frozen an industry that used to be obsessed with them.
The language of reinvention and change and future-fitting is everywhere. But the real actions, the root causes underneath all of it, go untouched. And you can see why so many great strategic thinkers are heading for the exits.
Because as a profession, strategists are obsessed with problems. With finding the root cause of something, defining it, and then finding a novel way to crack it. The good ones, at least, in my pov.
There are strategists who traffic in reassurance, of course, and they tend to sail up the org chart, because tension is the last thing a company in retreat wants to invite in. Enough problems of our own here, thank you very much.
Real problem is facing problems
And all of this is very normal, of course. Normal people hide from problems. Because a problem can show you the ugliest version of something.
But it’s a real problem, how afraid we’ve become of facing problems.
Because a well-defined problem, you see, is worth a hundred confident answers. Chase one all the way down to the root and it does what nothing else can inside a frightened company. It points everyone the same way at last, rowing toward the same shore, and hands you direction, purpose, clarity, confidence, the very things we are so desperately short of right now.
A problem, well defined, holds far more answers than people realise.
It’s about time we learnt to love them again. I’ve only just started to tug at the edge of this one.
More soon.
Ducky.
This story was first published in the Not Normal newsletter on LinkedIn.
