'Fast Strategy' or 'Fail Faster'?

The IPA does so many good things - the IPA Effectiveness Awards, the industry-wide training programmes, the retirement funds - but on this occasion, I think they're steering us in the wrong direction.

The IPA is sponsoring their second Fast Strategy Conference on Wednesday, making it one of the few things they're running twice in 2008. There's no denying that the pace in our industry is quicker than ever; my question is whether greater speed should be celebrated and encouraged. Guy Murphy is quoted on the IPA website:

The most important skill that strategists need to learn in this era is speed. The quality of a strategic answer is now partly determined by the time taken to create it. Slow-baked strategy, no matter how good, can never be great.

I have my doubts about this statement. There's no proof offered that off-the-cuff, instinctual decisions are better than considered ones. I think that too many of us have read Malcolm Gladwell's 'Blink' and have fallen in love with the idea of fast thinking. In our search for the new we're celebrating an idea that has generally led to bad things. Fast thinking leads to mistakes. Shooting the wrong man. Assembling the bloodthirsty mob. Pressing the wrong button. Starting the inadvisable war. Betting the entirety of your company's future on collateralised debt obligations. You get the idea.

As a department, I'd like to think that we're rather good at delivering things quickly when we have to, but let's not celebrate this fact. Let's not hide the fact that settling on the first answer is a bit lazy and often leads to wrong thinking. The writing in the plannersphere would lead you to believe that it's more important to be interesting than right. Bollocks. I'd hope that Russell Davies meant nothing more than we should be interesting and right when possible. Obviously, we should avoid being boring and wrong; let's go a step further to say that it's a foolish goal to be interesting and wrong.

We get paid - our jobs exist - because more time needs to go into thinking. I've been going back to the origins of planning here at BMP (now DDB) and the beginning of the planning role is rooted in having someone thoughtful who could concentrate on the problems and opportunities at hand. If speed is what you're after, why not have the account managers write the strategies? There's nothing wrong with this approach; many agencies globally run just fine without planners. But if you have planners the point is to give them time and space to think.

Five years ago, I helped organise an 'Iron Planner' competition onstage at the AAAA's planning conference modelled on the popular television programme 'Iron Chef'. The idea was almost identical to the one we have at the IPA event, but the goals were different. Our goal was to give younger planners a chance to work directly with notable strategy directors. We also wanted to give less experienced planners watching the event a window into the pitching process.

An explicit warning was attached to the proceedings. Doing things in such a compressed time frame would result in less than ideal thinking. Working too quickly should be avoided, given alternatives. Perhaps this is why I can't believe that we are holding a festival of fast thinking. It's like holding a rain festival for kite-flyers, or a cloud festival for sunbathers. Why are we celebrating an industry constraint when we should be finding ways to break free?

I'm not against faster cycles of thinking and more iterative 'design thinking'. Nor am I against diverse, collaborative thinking, which we call 'open planning' at DDB UK. The more times we go around, and the more people are involved, the better the ideas get. As an industry, we are mistaking mere speed as the primary benefit of working collaboratively and iteratively. It's the quality of ideas that improve, not just the speed.

So, with apologies to friends onstage at the event and after much careful consideration, we're not sponsoring anyone to go to the fast strategy conference. See you at the IPA Effectiveness Awards!

Comments

[Amelia]

Interesting post - wanted to add some thoughts to the conversation because it really got me thinking.

Is faster better?

Obviously not.

Has our working life sped up?
Has culture generally sped up?
Does the world generally seem to be moving at a faster pace than ever before?

The answer, for good or bad, has to be yes.

So I think that the duty of the IPA Strategy Group has to be to address that issue and work out how to help the planning community deal with that fact.

I was asked to be a team-leader and was terrified:
http://ameliatorode.typepad.com/life_moves_pretty_fast/2008/09/fast-strategy-scares-me.html
But then I actually thought back to Iron Planner which I had seen all those years ago and took a deep breath and said yes.

And it was actually a really great experience.

It was kind of like doing a morning of sprint training, not something that you want to do all the time but incredibly rewarding.

In the discussion afterwards one of the things that I said that our team had found was that while it certainly do-able to produce a piece of Fast Strategy what we couldn't do quickly was apply much thinking or stress-testing to the insights or ideas (the Sleep Test as I like to call it) We also didn't have time to debate our thinking we just had to trust our gut and go.

While I share your concerns, I do think that the IPA does have a duty to do events like this. And I hope that it was helpful to juniors who attended. Guess I will have to check back with the IPA and see what the feedback has been!

Good post Dan - thanks!

[Dan]

Congratulations!

Having seen the inside of the Volkswagen version of that brief in real life, the Honda task wasn't an easy one to win. It took a team here a few months to come up with a solution, which returns us to our ongoing ping-pong conversation. Should we be having these sorts of events in the first place?

When we did 'Iron Planner' in the US, it felt like it made more sense because departments are smaller and there are few IPA, APG, or grad training programmes, as you know from working Stateside. I was lucky enough to begin my career in a large department at TBWA, but most agencies in the US have one or two planners of varying experience.

It's a lot better over here; the planners in the UK with three or four years of experience are better prepared than many of the ten year planners over in the States. We have larger departments where knowledge can be transmitted both formally and informally.

The experience at work is rounded out by five years of IPA courses and APG skills courses, which mix didactic and socratic learning. So do we need a Fast Strategy Conference?

I'm still not convinced. My suspicion is that it was entertaining and provided a masterclass for those in the audience who don't work with strategy as much as they would like. You probably could learn to cook from 'Iron Chef' but maybe you shouldn't.

I did get one request for a ticket for the April Fast Strategy event and I denied it, and no one asked this time around, though I think someone paid their own way and went anyway. I just figure that in a big department with lots of training, a variety of planning mentors, and many new business pitches that seeing three rushed examples might be fun but not a good use of £150 per person.

This takes nothing away from your victory. It sounds like you were a bit unsure going into the event, but obviously you ran a tight ship and came up with a compelling strategy. I am curious to see what the other teams came up with.

If we are serious about promoting strategy as an industry, perhaps we should hold a strategy conference where the IPA pays agencies for access to their year-old submissions to a big new business pitch. Seeing what was done by rival agencies would be far more instructive and useful, as it would be work developed over weeks rather than hours. But the myth of proprietary thinking pervades, and I don't think anyone would ever agree to it. Let's see if a brave brand owner might help arrange it; it would benefit clients and agencies alike.

[Amelia]

Thanks Dan - food for thought. So with that as a frame of reference lets stick with food and cooking...

You are right you can't learn HOW to cook from Iron Chef, but what you can get is a bit of inspiration, a "f*ck it, let's give it a go" kind of approach and an insight into how chefs go about creating new dishes.

Now apply that to something like Iron Planner or Fast Strategy and surely that's a good thing? Yes, you shouldn't use something like this to learn your planning fundamentals but it adds a certain something to the mix.

Whereas Iron Planner was all about the competition, Fast Strategy was a morning of talks and advice and case studies as well as the three teams taking part.

(on a side-note I love the idea of agencies sharing pitch presentations from the past, but I doubt that we will see that anytime soon...)