“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” as boxer Mike Tyson famously said.
The word strategy has the power to intimidate. It gets wrapped up in war metaphors, chess analogies and books like The Art of War. People get promoted into “strategic roles” with no training, and are then quietly expected to just… know how to do it.
That was true for me, and it was true for my guest on the Now Go Create podcast, Julian Cole.
Julian is a strategy consultant who’s worked with brands like Uber, Apple, Facebook and Disney, and runs the brilliant Strategy Finishing School. In our wide ranging and illuminating conversation we talked about:
- What strategy actually is (without the jargon)
- Why insights need to be emotional, not just clever data points
- How to use AI as a strategic sparring partner
- The soft skills and office politics no one talks about – but everyone needs
- Practical ways to build your own strategic confidence
This blog pulls out the key ideas for anyone who wants to get better at strategic thinking in their creative or communications work.
So… what is strategy, really?
Let’s start by stripping it back.
Julian’s definition:
Strategy is a plan that uses limited resources to get you to your goal.
Inside that, there are four core pieces:
- Goal – where do we want to get to?
- Problem – what’s in the way of that goal?
- Insight – a revelatory truth that makes us see the problem differently
- Solution – how we’ll get around the problem
If the way forward is already obvious – for example, “we just need to build this app” – then you don’t really need a strategy. You just need to do the thing.
Strategy becomes useful when:
- things are confusing or complex
- more people are involved
- nobody is quite sure why you’re doing what you’re doing
That’s when you need a clear, shared story: here’s the goal, here’s the real problem, here’s the insight and here’s the plan.
A much quoted example (with great reason)
To make this more concrete, Julian used the classic Snickers campaign example.
- goal (consumer) – young guys want to feel part of the group
- problem – when they’re hungry, they act out and push their friends away
- insight – “you’re not yourself when you’re hungry” – that moment of being hangry is the real issue
- solution – eat a snickers, the most filling chocolate bar, and you go back to being “you”
Once you see it through that lens, the whole campaign clicks into place. PS I know that getting to this is a lot easier in hindsight but it’s a text book example.
Why insights aren’t just data points
The word “insight” gets thrown around a lot. Most of us (me included) have probably slapped “insight” above a line that’s really just a fact.
Julian’s definition is more demanding:
an insight is a revelatory truth that makes you look at the problem in a new way.
How do you know when you’ve got one?
- if people just nod – it’s probably a truth or a stat
- if people raise their eyebrows, laugh, or say “oh wow, I’d never thought of it like that” – you’re closer to a real insight
It should land emotionally first, and then you can back it up rationally with data.
He gave a lovely example from a project on robot vacuums. His junior strategist had gone through Amazon reviews and found a line that said:
“Roomba is like your drunk roommate trying to clean.”
Instant reaction: of course it is. It’s irrational, bumps into things, does its own chaotic route. That line has feeling and freshness – and therefore, potential as an insight.
Using AI as a strategic sparring partner
We also talked about something lots of us are experimenting with right now: using AI tools to help with strategy.
Julian’s line, which I love:
“AI is like salt in cooking – use it at the start and the end, never all the way through.”
In practice that means:
- use ai early to open up territories, dig up clichés, stereotypes and category truisms
- then you step in as the human in the loop – to judge, shape, validate and sense-check
- you might use ai again at the end to help polish, summarise or generate alternatives
A few prompts and angles he likes:
- “what are the clichés about this category / consumer / problem?”
- “flip each cliché and tell me what the opposite might be.”
- “what emotional contradictions sit inside this situation?”
But – and it’s a big but – the feeling of an insight still has to come from you. Ai will happily give you neat-sounding lines; only you can tell which ones actually shift how you see the problem.
Your next strategic step
If strategy has always felt like a mysterious dark art reserved for people with “director” in their title, I hope this conversation with Julian makes it feel:
- more human
- more emotional
- and much more learnable (spetoiler, this is something we teach at Now Go Create!)
Start small:
- frame your next piece of work as goal–problem–insight–solution
- notice which lines hit you in the gut, not just the head
- use AI sparingly as a curious collaborator, not the whole answer
- and pay attention to how ideas actually move through your organisation
You don’t need to wait to be “given” a strategic role. You can start thinking and working more strategically from where you are, with the briefs already on your desk. Get in touch to find out how we can help you to develop your critical thinking and strategic skills.
Listen to the full episode here to help sharpen up your critical thinking and strategy skills.