I’ve been reading Joe Burns for a couple of years.
I know because LinkedIn reminded me of our anniversary a few days ago.
A sentimental algorithm.
Like your assistant. Or so some people say.
Anyway.
Joe is the influence I deserve.
I like his edge. He makes my neurons do CrossFit before breakfast.
And, above all, he doesn’t chew things up for me so I can swallow a great revelation and integrate it into my life.
I get plenty of aha moments, don’t get me wrong.
But since I’ve known him, he always seems to take me to the next thread.
A few weeks ago, he published a small work of art: Your Job Is a Lagging Indicator.
If you read me, you know I’m a fan—or rather, a hater—of labels.
His piece was partly about that.
As Joe puts it: the job you have describes the past.
Markets move first. Organisations second. Duties next. Roles last.
By the time a title exists, the work that needed it has already changed clothes.
I answered him there:
We tend to think people fail to fit categories. Maybe categories simply expire before people do.
That’s why so many spend years believing they’re too broad, too curious, too inconsistent, when they were just working inside a present that didn’t have a category yet.
We don’t build the future by imagining it. We build it by noticing which assumptions have already stopped being true.
The future is the brief. The naming comes after.
So.
What’s the point of making a thousand calculations, reading the context, doing the fucking benchmarking and everything else?
I'm not saying you shouldn't do any of it.
But notice that you keep building for a market, a target, a client that is no longer the same one you had when the pitch started.
We try to predict.
We justify every decision.
And we forget two things.
To look at the real client. To see who the fuck they actually are. And align that with the gap we've found — and with what they're able to hold.
And to trust our instinct more often.
Labels arrive late.
They stigmatise. They become self-fulfilling prophecies.
And, if you let them, they jibarize you.
This is what jibarizing means: taking a full-sized human head and turning it into a skull the size of a keyring.
A Labubu from the Amazon rainforest.
Another kind of merchandising.
Polarisation. Scroll. Bots. Prompts.
And the bland taste of bread without salt.
Fatigue. Boredom.
Nothing new.
Only now, instead of getting it compressed into the evening news, we get it optimised into a carousel.
Maybe that’s why I still think anthropology has more to tell us about what’s coming than the marketing of what’s next.
The future is the brief.
So is the present.
Think about it the next time you write your questions down.
The best influence is punk: Joe Burns
Your Job Is a Lagging Indicator
Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com