Ideas are forward-looking data that give you a glimpse of the future.
Hello, I'm Neil Perkin, the host of Think with Google Firestarters.And Firestarters is a series of insightful conversations with the interested and interesting of the marketing, advertising, and innovation communities.
And today, I'm speaking with Phil Adams.So Phil is someone who's thinking I've long admired.So he's an independent brand strategy consultant.
Prior to that, he was the MD of the Leith Agency and also worked as strategy director at agencies like Cello Signal, Blonde, and account director at BBH as well. Phil, welcome to Firestarters.
Can I begin by asking what is your provocation for the Firestarters audience, please?
Indeed, and if I may, I'll begin with thanking you for having me on the podcast.I think you know how important Firestarters has been to me, both professionally and personally, when it used to be a live event in London.
learned a lot, but also I've made some really good friends from Firestarters.So it's a cliche to say it's a pleasure and a privilege, but it is both of those things.So thank you.Anyway, provocation.The short version is just that ideas are data.
And then the slightly expanded version of that would be that ideas are data that tell you what the future could look like.
OK, so lots to explore, I think, there.So I'm going to start, if I may, just by asking about why you think ideas are so important to strategy then.What's the kind of link here between ideas and strategy?
Okay, well, borrowing from Roger Martin, strategy guru, he talks about strategy as being, strategy is inventing the future.And that's why I think ideas are so important.Ideas are forward-looking data that give you a glimpse of the future.
which makes them really useful if what you're all about is inventing the future.You need those kind of forward-looking data.Whereas, you know, typical data-driven strategy is looking at data as numbers.
And data as numbers is backward-looking data that is based in the past.So data-driven strategy, data-driven in inverted commas, tries to work forward from backward-looking data in the form of numbers.
I think it's better to work backwards from forward-looking data in the form of ideas, and that's why ideas are so important to strategy, because they take you forward into the future.
Yeah, that's that's such an interesting concept.So I'd like to begin perhaps with this idea of some of the issues that might arise around backwards looking data.
So things that have happened before, that you might have tracked, you got some good data on that.Why do you think it can be problematic to base your forward looking thinking on things that have happened in the past?
Because strategy is about doing things differently to try and achieve superior outcomes.And I don't think backward looking data, they can tell you what's happened.
And they can tell you what is going to happen if you're using data to predict what times the sun's going to rise or when high tide is going to be things that are predictable and fixed.
But I don't think backward-looking data in the realm of business and advertising and brands can tell you what's going to happen in the future with the same level of certainty.
So trying to extrapolate the future from the past, the past as represented by numerical data is, I wouldn't go as far as impossible, but it's probably not the best approach.
So in terms of this kind of link that we're talking about here, you say the past is obviously no guarantee what's going to happen in the future.So I'm curious, though, because the past can also perhaps inspire us to think differently, perhaps.
And it can actually spark entirely new ideas, perhaps.So is there perhaps a way in which past data can be used to inspire a different future?
Yes, I think it can.I mean, if you look at someone like the author Michael Lewis, who wrote Moneyball and The Big Short, that's exactly what happened.
So the coach of whatever the baseball team was in Moneyball was using data, past data, to show how you could identify players in the draft who'd been really undervalued.
And that allowed this baseball team that didn't have the resources of the big players to identify those undervalued players. and recruit really smartly.
So that's using past data to inspire a radically different strategy, which allowed them to go on a record-breaking winning streak in baseball.And in the big shorts, they used past data to show that the financial markets
We're on the verge of collapse because of the whole subprime mortgage market.And then if you've seen the film, they go down to Florida and they knock on people's doors and they find that, oh yeah, all these people are defaulting on their mortgages.
So they combine the data with empirical observation. And then they use that to formulate a strategy to make an absolute killing as the financial markets collapse.
So Michael Lewis has made a fortune as an author out of telling stories about using past data to inspire really interesting strategies.So it can be done, obviously.
Yeah.But it seems what you're saying there is that it might inspire perhaps a different future or an inspiring vision, but you still need a kind of creative thought or a creative idea to set that compelling vision, right?
So creativity is part of the strategic process.Is that fair to say?
I think so.I think what it's about is using that past data Rather than expecting it to hand you the answer on a plate, it's using that data to get a really strong understanding of what's going on.
And then, yes, you combine that with creativity or intuition or otherwise known as entrepreneurial flair, and you make those big leaps based on your understanding of what's happening right now.
Richard Rummel, in his book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, he says that strategy has got three components.There's a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and a series of coherent actions.
So what he's arguing for is you use data-driven rigor as part of your diagnosis.You can't do the intuitive leaps of strategy without having a thorough understanding of the situation you're currently in.So the two work together like that.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.So talk to me a bit about the idea of how you can set a creative kind of direction.So in other words, I guess what I'm saying here is a new possible future that hasn't been there before.
You're inspired by what's happened in the past, perhaps.But actually, this is really about setting a new course, a new direction, something which hasn't existed before.
What are the ways in which you can really come up with those breakthrough ideas or directions?
How do you have ideas?That's a really tough one.I've been brought up in an advertising industry where that's what you do, but it's really difficult to unpack what's actually happening. Ah, you stumped me on that one a bit, Neil.
I guess what I'm driving at is how can you come up with genuinely different ideas?
So, you know, not necessarily something which is an extrapolation out from where you are now, but something which is taking you into a different direction or a different course of action.So you need to think differently, perhaps.
You need to kind of come up with something which wasn't there before.
The moment of having an idea, I'm not sure how it happens.I was writing a post the other day about the messy truth of how the work gets done.And yes, you do your discovery work.You look at the data about what's going on.
You do everything you can to understand the context for the business or the brand, their target audiences, their culture, everything.And you kind of feed that into your head in a sort of giant figurative hopper.
And then sometimes you're sort of working in a focused way trying to solve the problem.
very rarely in my experience does that yield to the answer and then you walk away from it and you take the dog for a walk or you whatever you do or you work on something else i think one of the best strategies for having an idea is to work on something else entirely yeah so many times
you have that kind of cliched eureka moment.And where that comes from, I'm not entirely sure.
But it would not have happened unless you'd done, you know, you'd done the hard yards of feeding that hopper in through, you know, the discovery hopper in your head of all the ingredients you need and all the stimuli you need.And then for me,
age 58, it's about trusting my brain to percolate all those influences, trusting my subconscious to do what it does when I either walk away or I focus on something else, and it will happen.
And it's very hard to sell that to a client, but that's how it works. the creativity kind of happens.And that's why I struggled to answer the question, because I don't know how.I think it's a good answer.
Really?It's a good answer, because how do ideas happen?But I love your thought about the discovery hopper, just the inputs determining the outputs, I suppose.You're just having all of that stuff in your head.
And I also love your thought about maybe working on something else.And it's whilst you're actually your mind is on something else that the idea about that thing over there actually happens.
And there's definitely something I think about giving yourself space, you know, the unconscious space to really kind of have an idea float up.
but also maybe thinking about a spark happening from something else that you're working on or from a different situation or even something non-advertising or strategy related.
Something, you know, sparks a thought which means that you can actually come up with an idea that relates to that original strategy.I mean, does that make sense to you?
Yes, it does because it happens all the time.You know, I love it when I'm working on two or three things at the same time because so many times I'll crack one thing while I'm working on another.
And I think it's because so much of creativity, or a lot of creativity, is working with analogy and metaphor.
And you see a lot of these startup pitch decks saying, we're going to be the Uber of this, or we're going to be the Tesla of that, or the Airbnb of this category.And that's analogous thinking.So I don't think it's any surprise if I'm working on
client X in category Y, that it gives me an analogy that I can port over into client A in category B. Happens all the time.
And just to sort of build on that, just to plug in a bit more, there's a brilliant book on innovation, Stephen Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From, I think is one of my favorite books on innovation, and he talks a lot about the idea of the collision of half ideas.
So basically, you kind of have a hunch about something, you're not quite sure exactly what it looks like,
but through discussion or conversation or just you know talking to somebody else about it you're able to kind of come up with a really breakthrough idea because you're bringing together two kind of half ideas which is a really interesting thought.
So what's your thought about how conversation or discussion or you know just maybe conversing online and just talking through something can actually really help you to come up with a different idea.
It's one of the biggest challenges of being an independent consultant and leaving agency world, as I did, is you lose an awful lot of that discursive, serendipitous collision of ideas that happen in agencies.
And I guess for agencies as well, it's one of the things they're having to wrestle with now about coming out of COVID and what you do with hybrid working and what your policy is about having people in the office.It's quite a tough one.
Personally, I think agencies work, maybe not just at their best, but agencies work when you've got people in the same place for all the reasons you just described.And yet people have obviously discovered during COVID the attractions of a hybrid
lifestyle working from home.So I don't envy the managing directors of agencies who've got a
work that one through, because I think it's really hard to recreate those conditions of, you know, recombination of our half ideas from different places, the collision of ideas, the serendipitous conversations, people working on different projects, cross-fertilizing.
You know, I do think an agency is like a, it's like a large hadron collider for ideas. That's how it works.That's a big part of the culture of agencies.
How you recreate that or how you compensate for the potential loss of that when you're working online is a tough one.It's a tough one for me.It's a tough one for me working on my own.
And one of the ways I sort of have to work around that is I always put my foot down on any project, Nina, no matter what the deadline is, to get it in draft form very early and then walk away and come back to it two, three days later, because then I come back to it as a different person.
And then I can sort of say, that's the closest I can get to recreating that discursive element, is do the work, walk away, and then come back almost as a different person and see it with different eyes.
But yeah, it's tough, and it's really important, what you just described.
And if I can move on to just thinking a bit more about this idea of ideas as data, so the idea of working backwards, I guess, from the idea.And I suppose you need to, I think you've said before, you need to kind of get good at post-rationalisation.
as part of that because you're kind of really looking to kind of put is is there a risk with that though that you of confirmation bias that you're actually looking for the research the data the insights that will maybe prove that idea to be right um so what are the risks involved with something like that do you think
Um, that's an interesting question.I think there is a danger clearly, um, of confirmation bias.Um, I mean, I've seen that happen.You know, you, you've worked together as a team, um, particularly in advertising.
And then this idea comes out at the end and you all love it and you want it to be right.There's no doubt about that.Um, so that you, that confirmation bias is definitely at play.Um, but I also think.
You want it to be right because you intuitively feel that it is right.And you wouldn't be so attached to that idea if it didn't intuitively feel right.So, there's a sort of, there's a quality control mechanism in there that guards against that.
I don't think I don't think agency, I've never seen it happen where you're trying to post-rationalize an idea that you don't genuinely believe is right.And then obviously, I think this thing about working backwards.It's scientific method, basically.
In science, you observe the world, and then you develop a hypothesis for how the world works.That's your intuitive leap.And then you backfill that. with experiments and proof.And the experiments either prove your hypothesis or they disprove it.
So the scientific process mitigates against that confirmation bias.As a scientist, you want your hypothesis to be true.But if the evidence says it's not, then you start again.And I think it's the same in strategy or creativity.
you intuitively feel this is right, but then when you backfill with the logic and you construct an argument for why this strategy is right or why this creative idea is right, that process of backfilling will either be easy-ish, because the idea is right, or it won't, because it's wrong.
So for example, In advertising, pre-testing sounds like it comes first, but it doesn't.Pre-testing is working backwards from an idea.Is this idea working against the brief? And how is this idea working?
So again, pretesting is working backwards in my book, but it also is guarding against that kind of confirmation bias, if you see what I mean.
So it is an issue, but I think the way these things work and the process of backfilling and retrofitting the argument does guard against it.
Yeah, I love your thought there about, you know, how a strategy feels, whether it actually feels right.
I mean, Sam Conniff, actually, in his episode talks about when we talk about navigating uncertainty and complexity, and he was talking a lot about, you know, emotional decision making, as well as more rational decision making.
which I think is an interesting sort of parallel there.So this idea of perhaps getting comfortable with post-rationalization and backfilling, if you like.
So effectively, what you're saying there is that you set a course and a direction, but then what you're actually doing in the execution of that strategy is that you're testing your hypothesis.Is that right?
Absolutely.Absolutely. What you want to end up with, I think, is strategy is an exercise in sense-making.So you're presented with this ambiguous situation, and strategy imposes sense on that system.And you impose sense with
with ideas, but also with a really strong logical argument, which can be based on data.And if your strategy is going to work, you have to take people along with you.So I think a good strategy has to be a gripping story.
And again, a gripping story is a combination of rational and emotional, what the IPA or the Marketing Society would call magic and logic.And you need to work.In order to make sense and in order to have a gripping story,
You've got to be working on the beginning and the middle and the end all the time.And working with those three components as a system.
And George Saunders, the Booker Prize winning author, he's got this amazing story club newsletter where he sort of analyzes stories and breaks them down and how they work and how you get good at storytelling.And he was asked a question about,
How do you sort out if your ending isn't quite working?And one of the things he said is, if you think you've got an ending problem, you don't.You've probably got a beginning and middle problem.
And you have to work on all three of those things together to get this thing really tight so that it makes sense, so it's a gripping story.So I think you're working on all three of those things all the time.
And again, going back to Roger Martin, his strategy framework, the core of it is a decision on where to play and then a decision on how to win. And he kind of works on those two things at the same time.
But his favorite question, his favorite strategy question is, what would have to be true?So he's kind of working backwards.I've had this idea about where to play and how to win.What would have to be true for that to work?
And it either kind of gets tighter under that line of questioning, or it falls apart, and then you start again.So it's working forwards, backwards, and sideways all at once, I think, is to get this thing really tight.
Yeah, I love that.And Roger Martin is so interesting on that, I think.And the other thing he said, which I think Richard Rommel, you mentioned earlier, has also talked about, is about how strategy is about choices.
So I think he said before now, it's like a strategy is a set of interrelated and powerful choices that positions the organization to win.So by definition, a choice means that you're choosing what not to do as well as what to do.
Is that something that you subscribe to?All the time.
All the time, yeah.I think you get better at that as you get older as well.And the fact that I've written professionally in various ways for nearly 20 years now.And there's the writing process and the editing process.
And I think the more you practice, the better you get at cutting stuff out and using the journalist term, killing your babies.So I get, I think you get better at being ruthless over time.
And my approach to brand strategy is I like my brand strategy work to have as few components, as few moving parts as possible.
So that again is about, it's not just about making choices within each element of brand strategy, it's actually, you can have so many bits of brand strategy that you almost trip over yourself.Is this a promise, a proposition, or a positioning?
You don't normally need all of those things.So it's making choices about which components of a brand strategy you actually need for this client in their context.
So yeah, that's a long answer to which basically saying yes, it's about saying no to stuff all the time.
Yeah, no, great.I mean, talk about brand strategy.Obviously, you do a lot of work in that area.And I've seen you talk before now about things like finding the irresistible truth that kind of helps the brand to navigate the world, I suppose.
But so talk to me a bit about this process of finding an irresistible truth for the brand.What does that mean?
Yeah, I mean there's various ways of looking at that.One way of describing brand strategy is it's about codifying what makes an organization brilliant at what they do.
I've heard another marketing director, I can't remember who it was, describe it as bottling the magic. Or there's the Dolly Parton School of Brand Strategy, which is work out who you are and then do it on purpose.So that is a big part of the work.
And I work a lot with B2B companies or service businesses.Quite often they are both of those things.And the reason I like that work is that those kind of organizations have close, ongoing relationships with their customers.
So if they let me talk to their best customers, those best customers know exactly what makes that organization brilliant.And it's not always what my client thinks makes them brilliant.
What my client thinks they're selling is not what their best customers are buying.That happens all the time.And talking to my client's clients or my client's customers won't, sometimes the answer lands in your lap.
But all the time, things that my clients' clients or my clients' customers will tell me, with a bit of analysis, that will get me to that truth.
Because if I can understand what they're actually buying and why they're buying it, I can then bottle that up to attract more clients or customers like that. It's not rocket science.
But that is so interesting, the process there of actually talking to a client's biggest customers to understand why they buy that.
And then that sort of being really almost a better indicator of what the brand stands for than what the company thinks the brand stands for.So why do you think that is?
That sometimes we kind of think if we're working within a brand, perhaps we think of it in a certain way, which is not necessarily how our customers think about it.
Yeah, I think it's, there's some good metaphors here.One I've heard is, you know, you can't read the label from inside the bottle. Thank goodness, otherwise there'd be no market for consultants.
Or I heard Will.i.am say, you know, you can't tickle yourself.You can't make yourself laugh by tickling yourself.So there are things that you just can't see or appreciate when you're working inside an organization. Maybe you know too much.
If the work I do is about isolating and distilling that compelling truth about what makes them brilliant, you can't, it's hard to see that sometimes when you're on the inside.And it's much easier to see it from the outside.
And it's much, much easier to see it from the outside if you actually talk to the people who are buying from that organization. And in my experience, service businesses are particularly bad at that.
They don't actually know what they're selling, which sounds quite extreme, but it's actually true in a lot of instances.They're doing really well and they're delighting customers without actually knowing exactly why they are delighting customers.
So it's good work when you go in and you can reveal to them what the truth actually is.
Yeah, that has a real ring of truth about it.I'm interested also to ask you about charisma, because it's something I've seen you talk a bit about as well, about the idea of a brand having charisma.
And really, I think you said before now, people with charisma know what they're about, and the same goes for brands.So it's an interesting word, isn't it, charisma?So talk to me a bit about what charisma means in the context of brand strategy.
Yeah, I mean, charisma is that kind of... I guess, animal magnetism, isn't it?When someone's got charisma.I was talking to a client the other day about the word charisma.And I realize now it potentially polarizing.
Someone with too much charisma can be off-putting.So I'm in the process of maybe revising my opinion about that word.But the reason I like it is a person or a brand with the right level of charisma people, customers are drawn to that brand.
And I guess it's a variation of, you know, Adam Morgan's challenger brand framework.One of the parts of that framework is establishing a lighthouse identity. So you project who you are and what you stand for.
And rather than the brand navigating by the consumer, the consumer navigates by the brand.So I guess it's a variation on that theme.If you've got a brand that has charisma, you are projecting this identity and people are drawn to it.
Yeah, that's really nice.And you've done a really interesting series of posts, I think, over the last few months about brand strategy mistakes, I suppose, or common sort of issues or problems with brand strategy.
So just if you can kind of capture some of the most common issues that you see with brands and how they define or execute brand strategy, what would they be?
I think the main one is the tendency to over-complicate and over-intellectualize.So it's about keeping it simple, grounded, telling the truth in the most compelling way.And yeah, I think a big issue
with creative strategy, brand strategy in general, is forgetting that it's a means to an end.It's a thing that needs to be executed, not stuck on the wall. So it's not, look at my amazing creative brief.No, no, no, no.
The purpose of that brief is to stimulate brilliant ideas that go out into the world.So it's a pragmatic discipline.It's not an end in its own right.So you need to keep it simple.You need to keep it grounded.
Yes, it's got to be inspirational for the people who are going to have to work with it and execute it.But keep the moving parts down to a minimum. And yeah, and keep it real, basically.I think that's the big overall problem.
I think there are other, I've got particular bugbears with certain aspects of brand strategy, particularly in areas of things like brand personality, tone of voice.
I think that it's really important to get those things right, but they're really hard to work with because they are, really low fidelity concepts.What do you mean by low fidelity concepts?
Because I think it's really hard to describe a brand's personality in a way that means the same thing to two people.You're limited by language. You know, you and I can watch the same ad and describe the tone of voice in wildly different language.
Or I can put a tone, you know, I can ask someone to, you know, to write something in a certain tone of voice, which I think is really precisely defined.And the output can be all over the place.
So I think tone of voice and personality are really, really important.In fact, they're vital to get right. But I think they're more things that you manage as outputs.
It's really hard to use them as an input to a strategy that someone has to work with.Yeah, they're low fidelity because so much gets lost in interpretation and translation.
But people agonize over getting them right, and I don't think that's time particularly well spent.
Yeah, that's been fascinating.
We're running short on time, unfortunately, but I'd just like to ask you about one more thing, actually, before we wrap up, which is just your experience of moving from agency side and having senior roles and running agencies into being an independent consultant and what that's meant in terms of perhaps the way in which you work or
What it's meant in terms of perhaps the balance of your life I mean tell me a bit more about your experience of actually working for yourself and making that transition yeah, okay, and So I'm about halfway through my fifth year now and There are lots of differences and They should be obvious, but they it took me a while to work them out so and I
One of the big things is in agencies, I was running quite big teams, managing people.So you're managing people on projects, you're managing people as a department, you're managing people individually.
And I hadn't really realized how much of my time was taken up managing people, but it was probably a good 50, 60% maybe.And that disappears overnight.
So in the early days of consulting, you know, I had several projects on and I was working quite hard on those projects, but I couldn't ever describe myself as busy.
And I had a lot of downtime and I spent a lot, I wasted a lot of time feeling guilty about not having stuff to do. And it was only when I sort of really thought it through that it became obvious.
So one of the biggest things to me was losing the guilt of having free time and making the most of that in the rest of my life.And when you do that, it's glorious.It's utterly, utterly glorious.And then there's some downsides.
It's obviously precarious. I think like every consultant, I'm trying to work to the position where all of my work comes in from referrals.So I don't have to do visibility and business development work, but I'm nowhere near that yet.
So there's a lot of hard work in being visible, just meeting up with people, having chats, working LinkedIn, doing business development stuff, because as soon as you stop doing that,
the work stops coming in, it flatlines, and it takes a long time when you start doing the business development work to, you know, the big lag between the effort and the work starting to come back in again.So it's precarious, so that's a downside.
I think if you work, if you're careful and you build up reserves, which I have, That puts you in a really good position because since I've worked as an independent consultant, I've never worked on something I didn't really want to do.
I've enjoyed everything.Obviously, in agencies, you don't have full control on what you work on.You do as an independent consultant if you have the reserves. So I can say no to stuff.
A polite way of saying no is to price it at a level where you know the client is never gonna go.So I can say no to stuff, but I can also be more confident in my pricing.
So yeah, it's hugely different, but when you get it working, the upsides are glorious and they far outweigh downsides.I was talking to someone literally yesterday.I can't imagine a situation in which I would go back to being a salaried employee.
I mean, never say never.But right now I can't, in touch wood, I can't imagine going back.
Yeah, and just my final question really is just to build on that.Earlier we were talking a bit about this idea of the collision of half ideas and the value of conversations and so on.
So as an independent consultant, where do you get your inputs or inspiration from to keep your thinking fresh?
Yeah, well, I think I developed a practice in this long before I went independent.I think it's part of who I am and it's part of who a lot of people are in advertising, I think, you know, being naturally curious.
and having a kind of voracious, omnivorous appetite for stimuli and sources of inspiration.So that's been a practice, I think, for my whole career.
One of the good things, so obviously the downside of working on my own is you don't have that kind of discussion going on all the time.
One of the upsides is I do have a lot more time to go on courses or go to events or watch YouTube videos or whatever it is.I've got more time outside of fee-paying work. to absorb stuff from all over the place.And I've also got better.
I use a thing called Roam Research.It's like a second brain.And by properly investing in that for five years now, I have got this amazing resource, like my own personal Wikipedia of cross-tagged potential rabbit holes and rabbit runs.
If I'm ever stuck for inspiration, I can dive into Rome and just sort of follow my meander And it's amazing what I've built up in there, this resource of stories and quotes and links, which is made in my image, I guess, in terms of how I think.
So that's been really, that's a great help.
That's amazing.And yeah, I think just to echo that, the value of curiosity, but also just to keep that repository of thinking and interesting ideas as you go.I've found that hugely valuable as I've gone forwards as well.So thank you, Phil.
We've run out of time, unfortunately.But thank you so much for your time and insights.It's been absolutely fascinating.So if you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and to share, of course.But my thanks to Phil Adams.Thank you, Phil.
Well, thank you very much.Been a pleasure.Brilliant.And thank you for your time.
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