Ideas We Love: Feral Strategy
Issue Number 61: Richard Huntington's polemic against 'tame & domesticated' strategic thinking
Hi there. How are you?
Having said we might be too busy to write in the coming weeks (Matt should be somewhere in New Zealand right now), a few hours on a flight to and from Vienna this week gave me the opportunity to plough through Richard Huntington’s Feral Strategy.
I’m sure many of you will have read Richard’s writing in Campaign or via his own Adliterate blog, which has been a mainstay of my RSS feed since the days of the ‘Plannersphere’. Feral is a short and sweet read. Coming in at around 120 pages, it brings together in one neat package a heap of Richard’s beliefs on where strategy is headed and how and why it might need to carve a path back to a more productive future.
It was a perfect companion on my travels this week. If you’re involved in communications or brand planning or are perhaps just curious about how different people approach the job of brand strategy, then try and get your hands on a copy. You should be able to pick one up here.
Armed with a packet of post-it sticky tabs and a red Uni-ball, I scribbled and annotated and underlined vigorously from the very first page to the last. So, in a slight change to regular programming - here are some of the ideas in Feral Strategy that were particularly resonant in this thought provoking read.
#1. Three Big Questions ❓
Huntington describes his love of stakeholder interviews as a means of ‘getting to grips with the soul’ of any organisation he is working with. Three questions are the foundation of his conversations with new clients:
What is your business world class at?
What are the people in your business passionate aboout right now?
What are the sincerest beliefs of the organisation?
Firstly, what good questions. But, perhaps more importantly, as Generative AI based tools become more prevalent in our work we find ourselves in an information economy where answers are comparitively cheaper than they have been at any time in history.
As a result of this dynamic, perhaps it is the questions (or the prompts) we ask of the problems, clients and briefs we work on that will create competitive advantage in the future rather than being in possession of all the answers.
#2. Logic & Magic 🪄
Huntington talks about two functional components of his trade craft - the development of the strategic spine and the strategic idea. In tandem, they represent what he calls a 'kind of primitive duality’ - or the equivalent of asking a strategist to be both ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. The strategic spine is constructed through a brutal series of logical and consequential questions. Black and white, binary, ‘this or that’ style questions are posed until eventually a way forward is defined. The spine, rooted in logic and fact, sets the scene for a strategic idea to flourish.
Where the idea is concerned; big, lateral and creative leaps are the order of the day. The Strategic idea is the thing which will give any subsequent work it’s vitality. The more lateral the inputs a strategist uses, the better the quality of the thinking will be. Whilst I’ve never used terms like ‘spine’ when thinking about my own work, I recognise both the Jekyll and Hyde components in the output I’m proudest of: logical, rational understanding of the situation that is married to a big, creative jump that animates everything that will come after.
#3. Lumpers & Splitters 🗻 ⚛️
Logic and magic is not the only duality that Huntington mentions. He also talks about Karl Rove’s notion of ‘lumpers and splitters’. These are the two types of people who exist in our world. People who like to ‘lump’ everyone together, arriving at big, cohesive ideas. And those who like to ‘split’ - the people who want to sub-divide and sub-divide and sub-divide: adding more messages, and more segments to the plans and campaigns we develop.
Undoubtedly, in the ‘old world’ of advertising where most brand building efforts were delivered via broadcast channels, the lumpers were dominant. In a digital and data driven world which is increasingly fragmented, ‘splitters’ are ascendent. However, as with so many false binaries that exist in advertising discourse, the reality of modern marketing is we need both types of people and they have to both understand and admire one another.
#4. Choosing the Tools of Your Trade 🛠️ 🧰
A not insignificant chunk of the book is given over to detailing the tools of Richard’s craft: the exact model of pen, the shade of ink he uses and the paperstock he chooses to take notes on. These things take on a sacred, ritualistic capacity in his work. They help create the conditions for his work to flourish. The work committed to his note books may remain private, but represents a form of rehearsal - a space to develop and work on ideas, a place for them to grow before he has to share them with his team or with clients.
How we work - and the tools which we use - is sometimes overlooked. So much of modern advertising is about process; what an agency will do when, which tools and systems it will use and how it guarentees consistency. Individuals rarely apply the same level of scrutiny to their own materials though.
It’s a good provocation: How much thought do you give to your own ‘workflow’ - how do you source and sort inspiration, how does this get translated into structured thinking?
#5. The Danger of Distance and Dogma 🐶
Dogma - “a belief held definitively and without the possibility of reform or change” - and distance from the reality of the consumer - are held up by Huntington as the two biggest sins a strategist can commit. Amen.
#6. On the difference between being right and being interesting
As Feral Strategy concludes, Huntington includes a quote from architect Renzo Piano: “Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity”. He continues by saying “In settling for right you stop searching for better”.
I’ve lost count of the amount of times either I - or our colleagues - have regurgitated the works of Sharp, Binet and Field in the development of a strategic argument. In Huntinton’s frame: this is the stuff we know to be right. Stephen King (of JWT, not of Carrie) talked about strategy as a form of imagination. A key stage in his famous planning cycle was ‘where could we be’. To come back to the Piano quote: An architect does not sell a concept for a building by first explaining how gravity works. They will talk about the way people need to use the space, the materials, the way light will be let in.
Perhaps too often we default to what we know is right, rather than imagining a more interesting future for our clients and their brands.
If you like this, you’ll love…. 💕
If you get round to reading Feral Strategy and want some other bits and bobs in a similar style, here are some things worth checking out…
#1. A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger 😍
A book all about the power of brilliant questions. And one of the things I’ve enjoyed reading the most in the last 12 months on the work-book-related-front. He was a guest on Adam Morgan’s podcast recently, which is well worth a listen.
#2. Feral by George Monbiot 🐺
A book about rewilding nature and ourselves. One of the pieces that directly inspired Richard’s book. The idea of ‘trophic cascades’ in nature are an interesting analogy for the need for greater cohesion between disciplines and suggests why we might make better work when we are able to establish broader, more diverse teams around projects.
#3. Tom Morton’s ‘Appreciative Enquiry’ ☎️
You can find the post here for the full context, but just as Huntington loves stakeholder interviews, so does Narratory Capital’s Tom Morton. Here is a set of questions you can ask your clients next time you start a project. As with Berger and indeed, the point we raise above, more and more having a well developed ‘arsenal’ of powerful questions to ask of any given product, project or client, feels like a powerful thing for strategists to develop. In a VUCA world that is powered by AI - don’t feel you need the answers to every problem. Do feel like you have the tools to bring people along to the answer with you.
Until Next Time 💕
Cheerio.
Tom & Matt xx