The bigger room
Strategy is the craft of making ideas livable.
The other day I got the worst feedback I’ve had to date. It’s really good, they told me. It’s pretty. And I thought: shit. Not because it was a cruel thing to say — quite the opposite: it was kind, sincere, even grateful. But “pretty” meant I had failed.
For a while I thought my job was about finding better ideas, about getting to the one idea that ordered everything sooner and further than anyone else.
Today I think it’s about something far less glamorous and far harder: creating the conditions under which someone can choose them.
Because there’s a part of strategy that never shows up on the invoice, that doesn’t get billed as a line item, and that, even so, decides whether everything else was worth anything at all.
It isn’t research, it isn’t writing, it isn’t building a concept. It’s moving a mind.
Moving a mind is the slowest thing you do in the whole process, because the best decisions almost never stall for lack of information. They stall from an excess of vertigo.
The client, nearly always, already knows.
Knows what brand they want to build, knows what tone speaks for them, knows what they should leave behind.
They recognise it the moment it's in front of them. What they don’t know — and this changes everything — is whether they’ll be able to live there.
That’s why I believe less and less in convincing.
Convincing implies the other person is wrong, and that isn’t where I start: I start from the fact that most of my clients already know the answer the moment they see it — they just can't see it yet on their own. And that the only thing they’re missing isn’t a better argument, but enough ground under their feet to take the step.
So I talk more about mindset than typefaces. I dismantle fears more often than I present work. And I spend more time asking what would have to happen for this to stop scaring them than defending the idea itself.
Because a brilliant strategy handed to a mind still living in “maybe” is, quite simply, a dead strategy.
“Maybe” is a curious place, because it’s almost never a real doubt. It’s usually a yes that hasn’t grown legs yet.
The job isn’t to push that yes — pushing it only frightens it more — but to build the road to it: to widen the frame the client is looking through, to shift the axis, to change the place they’re seeing the problem from.
Only then does a decision appear that no longer needs defending, because all of a sudden it looks like the only one that ever made sense. It looks inevitable.
That’s why I’ll take a “fuck” over a “how lovely” any day. Every time.
“How lovely” usually means everything still fit, comfortably, inside the same head the client walked into the meeting with. “Fuck” means that head just moved into a bigger room.
Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com