Strategic influence and how we can get it back

Wind back to last December. 

I was worried. The mood I sensed from the planning community was one of declining influence. 

That all sorts of forces are conspiring to make the job harder and more complicated. 

And narrower. 

It felt like we were being pushed further down the strategy food chain to coalesce, at worst, around just making and tweaking.

Not influencing at the level of our clients’ business.

We’re a thoughtful bunch and it’s easy sometimes to over-think. 

To be inward-looking rather than future-facing when we should be seeking real clarity about what we’re good at and what we need to be concentrating on. 

These are not new concerns. But we are at an inflexion point and it’s time to act.

So I enlisted the help of Craig Mawdsley and Bridget Angear, long time strategic leaders of AMV BBDO, now running their own hugely successful strategic consultancy and helping to devise and convene strategy leadership courses for the APG.

A whole new way of training started to take shape where senior strategists reimagine and reinstate their ability to be properly influential.

I spend most of my time working with every flavour of planner and strategist, at all levels. 

And I see them at their best: Hugely interesting, inspiring and incredibly generous with their thinking. 

I strongly believe they have the ability, if only they had a clearer sense of what they are at work to do.

Could focus on that more rigorously, and exercise agency in the way they behave – internally and with clients.

But there is a collective loss of confidence that stalks us.

And it’s sapping the will and discouraging us from getting on the front foot. 

We have the skills and talents that clients need and want. We just need to marshal ourselves for the challenge and re-build our confidence.

Confidence is an elusive thing but I’m convinced we can get it back. 

I watch senior people regaining belief in their ability, in real time, often as a result of training they get from brilliant practitioners, through the APG.

This new idea was to take a group of senior people and work with them to re-define what strategic influence is.

And get them to figure out how to climb back up the ladder of influence and change the way they work.

We decided to call it: ‘Strategic Leadership: Influence and how to build it’. 

The course would be based on provocations, not teaching.  Provocations that stimulate collective thought and bring about change.

The delegates would learn by doing and working together to shape something tangible.  Not just for them but for the whole community.

I’d be lying if I said this vision for training didn’t sometimes keep me awake at night. 

It was actually mildly terrifying. 

But I have utter belief in Craig and Bridget who set the scene and the expectation, and brought everyone with them.

There were 11 senior delegates representing the diversity of roles and ‘flavours’ of strategy that you would expect, from media to PR to brand to ‘creative’ agency people. They were fantastic. 

They signed up to the ambition (nebulous though it might have seemed) and committed to creating what we grandly styled ‘The artefact’.

We covered some history, looking at the competing forces that have always assailed the industry to give context to now. 

We heard from APG Co-Chairs Jo Arden and Tom Roach about how to deliver influential strategy in a modern agency. 

Richard Huntington of Feral was electric about models of strategy and how to influence clients’ business.

Sandie Dilger (client turned planner, turned client) gave a deeply practical and helpful talk on what clients want and how to deliver it. 

Nick Hirst, Executive Strategy Director at adam&eve\​TBWA, presented alternative future scenarios through the lens of AI to make sure that the output was genuinely future-facing.

A practical manifesto for increasing strategic influence across the industry.

Over the course of 4 modules, in a room working together, the delegates re-defined precisely what strategic influence means: 

How and where it is directed and how we should be shaping the discipline in practical ways for the future.

They did it as a collective, to re-imagine the point of what we do and the way we behave.

They created a clear and inspiring vision and behaviours that offer a way forward we can all sign up to.

As one of the delegates said: 

‘This is a genuinely novel approach to training and a successful one! Everyone came out of this course clearer on their role, more excited about what they do every day, and with a new community. We work in a creative business and learning through doing is, I believe, the best way to find new ways of doing this job’. 

They will be sharing this thinking and the steps that go with it, with the whole community - and soon. 

I think it will make a huge difference to the way we think about ourselves and the way we work. 

And there was a palpable change in the people in the room. 

That nascent sense of confidence and hope for the future returned and grew. It was hopeful and inspiring. As one of the delegates said afterwards:

‘What felt unavoidable (declining influence) now feels surmountable’.

I am a fundamental believer in action and practical plans. 

I think that this point in our industry is one where we can take all the ‘hot mess’ of change and turn it to our advantage.

We have the tools to do it. We just need to have the confidence to act. And a clear plan of what to do.

Thanks to the amazing guest speakers, incredible delegates and most of all, Craig and Bridget, who give up their time and their passion (and all that prep time) for free, to help the community. 

I salute you all. 

Sarah Newman

APG Director