Emergent mindset
For the first several years of my strategy life I was fortunate to go deep on the ways things should be done. I made and slowly fixed mistakes around research, brief writing, presenting, reviewing work, selling work, measuring effectiveness, and growing teams. I spent long and/ or meaningful time at Conill, Innocean, and Deutsch.
The past four years have felt like a slow deviation from strategy orthodoxy. My time at Condé Nast was pitch-output heavy, doing multiple briefs each week. Mattel was at the far other end; doing communications planning at a company with high diversity of functions is as much playing therapist or moderator as strategist. My time as a freelancer has let me sit in on 14 (I just counted) agency and brand teams.
No two orgs use strategy exactly the same way. So rather than feeling like I needed to jettison my old religion for a new one, a new perspective has started to emerge. How would a strategist work across a system rather than at a few defined points within it?
I started Wild Garden as an exploration of how plans and unplanned events interact. It’s related to the concepts of deliberate and emergent strategy. As the late Clayton Christensen defines them: “Compared to a deliberate strategy, an emergent strategy is often more flexible. Though the organization still has goals that it’s working toward, there’s flexibility to adjust those goals and pursue other opportunities or priorities as they emerge.”
My shift has been more in the direction of emergent strategy as default mode. Three brands come to mind as excellent examples of creative ideas emerging over time. It’s almost as if they’re said: What if we started here → Oh cool! What if we did this next → Yes, I’ve noticing this so what if we tried this!
Airbnb’s gradual and public shift from product to brand has been the result of experimentation in terms of product, medium, and message. The latest iteration of this (and definitely not its last) gives a flavor of the variety of places people can belong — reinforcing its positioning area.
I’ve been a big fan of McDonald’s work over the past couple years. They’ve taken a challenging constraint — putting product at the center — and turned it into culturally visible creative, using an insight around everyone having their own unique McDonald’s order. Two of the latest versions have been its LTO celebrity meals and highlighting films where McDonald’s meals have played a role of supporting character.
Mastercard is one of my favorite examples of emergent discipline. They launched their Priceless brand idea with a beautiful, simple spot featuring a kid and his dad at a baseball game. That spot introduced the memetic “x: $price, y: $price, z: priceless.” That was 25 years ago.
But the most impressive part is how they’re treated Priceless like a marriage rather than a fling. What if we stuck with this forever?
We’ve transformed the Priceless ad campaign into a long-lasting, multi-dimensional marketing platform that reflects our ongoing company evolution and the changing world around us. We went from celebrating priceless moments to curating priceless moments to sparking priceless movements, actively connecting people to their passions and to each other. We do it across channels, around the world and, yes, even in the metaverse, bringing Priceless to more people than previously possible.
An embrace of emergent strategy is an embrace of the unknown. As James Carse writes in Finite and Infinite Games, “Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness.”
Deliberate strategy assumes we know all the rules of the game and can map a victory. Emergent strategy assumes we don’t know all the rules and must continually reimagine our way toward victory. We’re software engineers rather than structural engineers, constantly building something for still-emerging tomorrows.
I finished Robert McLean and Charles Conn’s The Imperfectionists over the weekend. It’s a wonderfully-tidy 159 pages full of ways to think about embracing an unknown future, bucking against revisionist history that makes this all look easy and pre-planned.
As they cite Amazon CEO Andy Jassy from a recent investor letter: “One of the lesser known facts about innovative companies like Amazon is that they are relentlessly debating, re-defining, tinkering, iterating, and experimenting to take the seed of a big idea and make it into something that resonates with customers and meaningfully changes their customer experience over a long period of time.”
The authors make their case that “The best problem solving organizations are humble about their ability to predict the future, but clever about what moves they can make to get more information, develop capabilities, add assets, lay off risk, and build competitive position without betting the farm.”
That’s where we’re all going. The way there isn’t a map, but a emergent mindset.
