The future of strategy – is it a case of all hands on deck?

Strategy Leaders

Collaboration is needed more now than it has ever been before.

When I first started out in a media strategy role, keen to prove myself in my new discipline, I would spend hours agonising over whether my strategy was ‘right’. I felt the responsibility of finding the ‘perfect’ answer to a client brief. I would lock myself away submerging myself in insight and data, making sure I was accounting for everything I needed to consider. The mistake I made was thinking that I firstly needed to do this alone and secondly believing that I needed to find the ‘perfect’ answer.

Over the years, it has become very clear that there is no strategy or thinking that I have done, that hasn’t been improved by any kind of collaboration. Be that a chat with a colleague, a group discussion or with people outside the industry. Other people build and stretch ideas and thinking, creating something stronger than the sum of its parts.

As I continue to ponder the future of my discipline, I believe this idea of collaboration is needed more now than it has ever been before. I’ve previously explored the issues of complexity and diversity in media strategy, and collaboration is key to unlocking both of these.

At the heart of the issue, is the divergent path between an agency’s strategy team and its broader strategic function. The headwinds we increasingly face require a cross functional approach to solving clients’ business and communications challenges. Gone are the days where the ‘strategy’ was written by a strategy team and handed over to planning & activation to implement in media.

Coupled with this, is the trend towards connected freelance networks, which have been around for a while, and which the pandemic, with its impact on working patterns, has arguably fuelled.

We are seeing more and more strategists working collaboratively in a freelance capacity than ever before. Not only do they represent what will be a growing sector of the industry, they are in effect, competitors. An alternative option for clients versus their media agency.

I’m convinced more flexible and collaborative working is the way forward, and that media agencies should be exploring these models. I think there are broadly two ways this can be done.

There are some easy wins that can be made internally within an agency and indeed, its wider network. Creating cross functional groups of people, designed specifically to answer the increasingly new and varied challenges our clients present us with. We might work this way on pitches, but we rarely apply it to our existing clients. Strategy teams will be an important part of this process, working with more specialist talent to find new creative and effective solutions. This is what I mean by an agency’s strategic function.

The other way, which will take more effort but will arguably be of greater value, is to tap into external talent pools. There will always be areas of knowledge gaps in agencies, and rather than embark on costly permanent hires, collaboration with freelancers offers great benefit to both parties.

There are lots of ways this can be approached, and as such, there will be varying degrees of success. Those models which are proactively built will be more successful than those that are reactively driven.

Key to success will be finding and working with people that bring a unique perspective relative to the task at hand. In addition to this, these working relationships have to be 100% action orientated, focused on specific challenges, projects and products. Ultimately, it’s about income and value to clients, not looking clever.

Utilising external talent pools will allow us to bring in more diverse views and specific experience than we currently have, bringing in a wealth of knowledge we can learn from. In the same way that I learned the benefit of collaboration to the work that I do, agencies can do the same.

We shouldn’t see it as a point of weakness, rather a point of pride, that we bring in independent, highly capable talent to our business as and when we need it. As a strategist this prospect excites me greatly and brings with it a new sense of energy for the future.

Eva Grimmett is chief strategy officer at Havas Media Group

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