A Manifesto for Agile Strategy: oxymoron or innovation?

yea it’s like deer hunting, innit?

great post. here are a few unrelated thoughts:

- it took advertising a long time (and Stanley Pollitt / Steven King) to figure out what account planning was and how it could make advertising more effective. Since then, planning / strategy has been codified into a discipline that helps brands create differentiation amongst lots of competition with a limited set of communications tools. Instead of the dancing on the head of a pin that this limited toolset resulted in however, strategists can now expand their horizons much further – which calls for a different sort of strategy. (and incidentally is exactly why I got into digital strategy – the wide open prairies were quite enticing).

- the single insight, the pre-testing, the quarterly tracking – all grew up in response to the exigencies of the media we were communicating in. ’strategy’ in the new world operates under completely different constraints, and so requires a different set of tools.

- content (and planning?) in any new medium adopts the conventions of what has gone before until we figure out what we ought to be doing. It’s taken us a while as marketing services is pretty conservative by and large, but your excellent post points us towards what the conventions for new planning / strategy might be.

‘Just do stuff’ sounds a pretty good start point to me.

Totally agree with the points you make Justin, but can’t help feel that the idea of an Agile Strategy can only be fully implemented when we live in a culture that accepts (and even encourages) mistakes as positive outcome of creation.

As a battle-scarred planner….Justin, you make some excellent points and it’s a great provocation. I’m fascinated by the idea of Agile Planning and what it means but, perhaps predictably, I don’t think all old school planning skills are dead. It’s a question I struggle with too, when so many core planning skill seem geared towards reductionism- What is the single thing we want to say? What is this brand’s singular essence?-in a world that is increasingly pluralist and co-created. But I think there’s probably a managed tension here-a clarity about what a brand believes in and wants to achieve combined with a flexibility about how it gets there, a working model for how we think communications should work married to early real-world indicators that let us know whether it is working as planned.

There are too many projects in hand-in digital as well as traditional channels-that don’t answer some fundamental strategic questions-

-What is the business problem?
-How is this activity going to help?
-What do we want people to do as a result of this activity?

-and for me this is where rigour and analysis still have a huge role to play.

Rigidly clinging to a set view of how the activity should address these problems however, does feel unnecessarily rigid. As does the tyranny of the consumer insight-that said, I know very few planners today who believe that consumer insight is the only, or even the primary source of inspiration today. A creative solution is as likely to come from a clear articulation of the problem as from a consumer insight.

A few responses here.

To William Owen, I would agree that “Businesses are used to signing off large amounts of money in return for a well-crafted fiction about returns”. But I would also add that one element that Agile requires to work, is trust, and specifically the trust between a client and their agile partner to deliver the goods.

In a traditional BDUF world of TV and Print, this trust has traditionally been built on well-crafted plans, which have in turn been built on a mature production model with a relatively tried and tested way of working (like a feature film based on a true story, not complete blather).

In the world we work in, where even the traditional production models are changing, and the world of digital looks like a desert of constantly shifting sands, this BDUF approach can waste a lot of time and money, which could otherwise be focused on producing something of value.

But in this uncertain world, and especially in an Agile one, the trust to deliver a return on investment is still absolutely necessary for clients to part with their cash. This trust often requires an existing relationship, and will always require some well-crafted fiction, albeit delivered in a factual agile way (eg. “we can deliver this set of experiences with 90% certainty, this set with 75% certainty etc”).

To Justin. Strategists and planners spend the most time surveying the landscape and their clients to understand how the business terrain is shifting, so they are probably best placed to parachute these clients into the metaphorical high ground further down the line.

Following on from that point then, Strategy is then all about having a set of good ideas that can help lead the way at the start of a project, a sort of raison d’etre for clients parting with the cash, and then it acts as a useful set of guidelines as you get closer to the point of no return, the memory as William calls it of what you’re trying to achieve.

But, Planners aren’t the only folk who can dig out insights, in fact I’m a firm believer that a good idea can come from anyone, and can happen at any time. The main enemy here is time and cost. If you could get everyone’s insights from start to finish, you might consider it. if you could change the idea at any time, you would and should consider it. But more often than not, it’s not an option. You need to act responsibly to achieve the best results.

As far as budgets will allow, I think that Agile teams should be more blended from start to finish, so that “thinkers” are “doing” more later on the project, and “doers” can “think” earlier in the project. it’s a surefire way to ensure that

-you’re agreed as a team on what your overall objectives are
-that you’re using a common language of how to achieve said objectives
-that you understand how to embrace any change when the opportunity arises to actually change

agree with william that start-ups are an interesting place to look for inspiration.

early on in the life of a company, is more about exploration – i.e. what works vs what doesnt. how quickly can you find a working model. in my experience the best investors look more at the team and less at the plan. early on the plan seems to provide an education of sorts and a demonstration of thinking about the road ahead and what could happen.

later stage investments in more “mature” companies seems to be about exploitation – things like scaling and ramping and things that make financial analysts excited. at this point, there is much more focus on the plan and projections, because well, there is more that appears predictable because its about upping resources to get more output from the system discovered in the early stage. the team is still important but the details of the plan matter much more.

I think the hardest part, as some have pointed out, is selling like an early stage company to people used to buying later stage more predictable outcomes.

perhaps another post and discussion on how folks people are succeeding selling a more agile approach.

Wow – I really enjoyed reading your insightful post and the exiting debate around it. I agree with Nico Westermann, that the linear workflow in agencies is the core obstacle to agilility. Thinking linear is a relict from times less complicated :-)

Nevertheless I’am doubtfully to proclaim the “age of doing” after the “age of planning”.
Sure doing thing is great. And you can easily “over-strategise” a problem and block yourself and a company in a perfectionist search for the ultimate answer.

But agility is also risky:
1. Without a basic strategy or research there are no parameters for measuring success or failure. Clients hate that.
2. Complete agility can be a perfect excuse for being to lazy or unable to plan.

I think the problem is not strategy but the misconception of it in agencies. A strategy is not a magical roadmap free from failure, never to be touched again. It is a prediction into the future and it has to be open for tactical change and feedback all the time. Planning and doing are in a constant loop.

But before the rise of social media direct consumer feedback and context complexity was a very rare thing in the marketing world. So perhaps marketing executives started to believe in the magical power of strategies – simply because the feedback was not so visible.

I have written some more detailed thoughts on my posterous: http://creativeglasses.posterous.com/agile-strategy-tactics-and-the-story-of-a-dj

Provocative post and thoughtful commentary! Thanks Justin.

When you wrote “What I think would be more helpful is a simpler (broader) statement of purpose that acts as a guiding philosophy to help the team develop and judge their thinking”, I was reminded of a post I made about team decision-making based on “Commander’s Intent” http://www.bobtuse.com/2009/08/team-decisions-commanders-intent.html. I think what you might be looking for is sometimes referred to as Commander’s Intent.

Also, your excellent post sparked a few of the ideas in my new post “A Strategy for New Products” http://www.bobtuse.com/2010/03/product-development-spawning-testable.html.

Cheers,
Bob

Great blog post Justin prompting many fascinating responses here. I want to try this out:

“From a business’ point of view strategy is about providing the frameworks required to deliver the business goals.

For a project, strategy is about providing the best framework to deliver the clients’ outcomes.

Strategy is content-free, idea-free.

Agile is a methodology to deliver strategy.”

Talking about stuff for ages and ages is often a way to avoid taking responsibility. Agile as a methodology encourages individual and group responsibility which is why I love it.