Warning - regular people might want to avoid this one. It's a rather pompous and oblique post about 'planning'.
One of the smartest things Richard ever said was that he didn't read all the books planners normally read, your Gladwells etc. 'There's no competitive advantage in it', he'd say. And he's completely right because planning isn't a body of knowledge to be absorbed, it's more like a act to be developed, like a comedian. You don't want to be doing the same jokes as everyone else. Even if you do them really well.
So, with the second IPA Fast Strategy conference happening tomorrow, and Fast Strategy starting to become an orthodoxy. Maybe it's time to examine the wisdom of all this speed. It's often good to be kicking against the orthodox.
Firstly, whenever you hear mention of speed, it's worth remembering the eternal Project Triangle. That would suggest that if you're going to be quick then you're also going to either bad or expensive.
That might be worth worrying about. And does that seem true? Well, yes. A fast strategy is likely to explore fewer possibilities, will consider fewer contingencies. It will gravitate towards the obvious. This might work out well. But it is less likely to uncover the unexpectedly brilliant solution. Or the cheaper, less obvious one.
Secondly, going fast will tend to reduce the amount of collaboration you do. Fast strategy is perfectly possible, but it's best done in the head of a single person, or the heads of a really tight team. Not necessarily a bad thing. But not always the right thing. Sometimes strategy needs to be mulled over by an organisation. Nike used to describe it as 'socialising' an idea. It needs to be walked round the corridors, knocked around a bit in meetings, examined by different disciplines. Fast strategy might yield a big idea, but a slow strategy, a socialised strategy is maybe more likely to yield a rich one.
Thirdly, are we sure this isn't all just a cost-saving thing anyway? I'm convinced that planning was mostly invented because it was cheaper to have a planner thinking about something for half the process rather than having the creatives thinking about it the whole time. Are we sure that Fast Strategy isn't just a way of selling a process to a client as an innovation when it's really just a way to eat up less agency resources. Do Fast Strategies cost the client less?
Fourthly, and I know this is a bit tedious, it might be worth wondering whether we really want Fast Strategy or Fast Tactics. I'd argue that strategy should be a slow, evolving, socialised, collaborative, gradualist process. It should grow out of business decisions, the purpose, the values, the conversations of an organisation. Warren Buffett should be your strategy role-model. Tactics might be the place where speed is valuable. The smaller, more frequent, more granular manifestations of your strategy are when the risks of doing something expensive or bad are mitigated by the opportunity to do something timely and appropriate.
And maybe that's where advertising's tendency to elevate it's own importance is allowing me to poke these holes. Because planners don't really do strategy do we? We do tactics. And maybe admitting that will make it easier for us to do it well.
Fifthly, should we even be talking about stuff in this linear way anyway? Wouldn't the best way to do this stuff be to evolve your strategy slowly but punctuate it with regular, informative bits of execution?
Sixthly (?) we should acknowledge that this is all a bit silly anyway. It's just an excuse for a conference and a blog-post. We tend to advocate the processes that suit us personally. When I was in agency life I was all about the fast strategy. Loved it. Couldn't get enough. Because it meant that I could get stuff off my plate really quickly and get back to blogging and sleeping. Now I'm more responsible for delivering actual projects I like the idea of 'slow projects' because it helps to rationalise my failure to deliver. (And, should you wish, you can see video of me and Matt rationalising failure like crazy at the Do Lectures here.)
I guess the real answer, as always, is the shoddy compromise; make sure that you can think and do both quickly and slowly. And then work out which suits you and your circumstances more. Because doing strategy happily is probably more important than doing it quickly or slowly.
