shawn | planner | veteran

Untangling the complex in service of
purpose-driven organizations.

My Approach to Strategy

The problem is not the problem.

I don’t trust the first version of the problem. “People don’t care.” “We need awareness.” “The campaign isn’t working.” Those might be true, but they’re rarely where the interesting work starts. I like pulling at the thread until I find the tension underneath the business problem, the human problem, and the thing keeping the two apart. Finding the problem is only the beginning.

Be brutally useful.

I don’t believe strategy exists to make a presentation smarter or give everyone something nice to put on a slide. It needs to do something. Change the question. Sharpen the brief. Challenge an assumption. Give creative somewhere interesting to go. If the thinking doesn’t make the work better, what’s it for?

Find the possibility.

I’m naturally drawn to what something could become. A limitation can become a proposition. A weakness can become an advantage. A constraint can give an idea its shape. I’m less interested in asking how we fix what’s wrong than asking what becomes possible when we look at it differently.