Reassembling the Strategist

Can we at least stop pretending the world is as tidy as our deliverables make it look? A strategy that cleans too early often creates a distorted picture that feels clear in the room but collapses in contact with the real. Cartography accepts that things wobble, and it uses that wobble as data. False certainty and failed outcomes greatly slow us do... See more

The Strategist is no longer a diagnostician offering a coherent intervention. The Strategist is the Stalker inside the Zone: feeling, watching, hesitating, acting. They’ve developed a skillset of how to notice what no longer fits , what doesn’t sound right , what wasn’t supposed to repeat and now won’t stop. They are quick to notice that the path t... See more

The humble PowerPoint deck is the first black box that needs the most reassessment. Over time, it has become one of the most powerful actors in the agency network. Before strategy speaks, PowerPoint has already decided on its form. In her ethnographic study of strategy departments, Kaplan (2011) argues that the deck does not merely capture ideas bu... See more

Cast in this role, the canon is a black box. Strategists drop these readymade, plug-and-play rigour nuggets into decks shaped entirely from other black boxes. At that level of abstraction, these concepts offer little strategic value. They are no longer useful for cracking a brief or sparking an idea; they just give the illusion that everything is u... See more

Today's Strategist has never been at higher risk of becoming an agency NPC. They are always present and always speaking, but only within the limits of a predefined script. Their dialogue is modular, and movement is bounded by deliverables, mostly tethered to the screen. They may introduce the quest for the main character (creative director), but th... See more

Can we at least stop pretending the world is as tidy as our deliverables make it look? A strategy that cleans too early often creates a distorted picture that feels clear in the room but collapses in contact with the real. Cartography accepts that things wobble, and it uses that wobble as data. False certainty and failed outcomes greatly slow us do... See more

What if the demand for insight has taught us to leap too quickly to summarize before we've done the work of observing how things hold together? Cultural Cartography treats clarity as a fragile achievement.

Cartographer: Not quite. A trend report tends to name a moment and explain its appeal. Cartography doesn't stop there but asks how that moment came into being, who worked to stabilize it, what tools helped amplify it, and which elements might already be slipping. As cartographers, we are not interested in isolating a phenomenon but in tracing its d... See more

Strategy becomes the tracing of effects , a process of watching how meaning is assembled by human and nonhuman actors alike. Strategy, in this light, does not seek to name “culture” or “emotion” as if they were causes but instead just asks how those terms get produced and by what configuration of systems and constraints they come to matter at all.