How To Train Your Strategic Instinct
7 tools for the deeper side of strategy.
Welcome! If you found this article, or my recent posts Where The Future Actually Comes From or Not the AI Era. The Contract Era. valuable, I invite you to become a free subscriber to get more of my articles on the intersection of strategy and culture.
Last week I wrote about where the future actually comes from, that it lives inside us, in the structure of feeling distributed across millions of people sensing the same unnamed thing at the same time. You can read the article here.
There’s a spiritual air to my argument, but it rests on solid logic. In over a decade of doing this work as both a strategist and futurist (two modes inextricably tied in my practice) I know that every major shift shows up in how people privately feel long before it shows up in the world. That delay between the felt and the visible is what we call the future. Every technology, every act of nature, and every canon event is experienced through this larger psyche of the time.
Which means that if you want to read the future, you have to access the inner world of the masses, and that’s a much harder task than reading the headlines. You have to find ways of actually knowing people, meeting them where they are and making yourself porous enough to feel the energy of the wider population. Then you have to have the nerve to name what is felt but not said.
But this is only half of the work.
Once you have the makings of a signal, you have to do something with it. You have to shape it and decide which parts to keep, and which parts to discard.
Strategy is both intellectual and emotional. It’s both frameworks and feelings. And to hold those two poles at the same time takes some training.
This is how to train your strategic senses in order to decipher what is coming, and even more importantly, decide what to do about it when you are building something new in the world. Below is some of our process for holding that balance, and at the end I’ll point you to the full lesson my partner Jean-Louis gave on this, which goes deeper than I can here.
1. Insights average down.
Most people in this industry think that the job is about collecting insights. Surely, if you pull enough insights together, the truth will emerge from it, right? But the dirty little secret about insights is that they do not add, they average.
The reason drug makers have a litany of side effects written in small print is because they understand the averaging function of an argument. They know that if it just said “risk of heart attack,” you’d be terrified, but if it says “risk of heart attack, headache, loss of appetite, nausea and sluggishness,” you average those risks, and the risk of heart attack seems less severe when it’s couched among all those other things.
The same phenomenon happens with insights. Every mediocre insight you include drags the average down. This is why the job is never about collecting. Instead, it’s about hunting. You’re looking for the one or two most powerful insights to build everything else upon. The real discipline is to throw away the rest, even when they’re true.
A long tail of true, but weak, observations is how we make forgettable work.
2. The product is felt truth becoming known truth.
Every iconic idea, movement or brand has taken something already secretly felt and made it something known. Nike did it with the athlete inside you. Romantasy has done it with female rage. Kalshi is doing it with zillennial nihilism. These were all latent emotions waiting for expression, and when they were made known and available, they felt familiar, perhaps even freeing to their audiences.
They didn’t invent the feeling but they did name it first, and because of that, owned the market.
This is the bar. The best sentence you can hear in this work, from a leader or a member or a room, is “That felt like therapy.” That’s what it sounds like when a felt truth becomes a known one.
If your strategy doesn’t produce that sensation in someone, you haven’t found the insight yet. You’ve probably just found a fact and need to keep looking.
3. We create through excavation.
Michelangelo’s famous philosophy of sculpture was to just remove everything that wasn’t David. Meaning the art was already in the block of marble, his job was just to excavate it out of the material. That’s the relationship you need to have with strategy.
You’re not trying to build a clever new thing that the world has never seen before. You’re trying to reveal a hidden genius that’s already there and already felt by the people you’re building for. The magic is that they don’t realize they’re feeling it until you show it to them.
This reframe does two things. 1) It keeps you honest. Your job is accountable to something real and not your own dazzling cleverness, and 2) it changes how the work feels to everyone around you. The founder may be terrified that you’ll come back with some unrelated big idea, but they relax when they realize you’re not inventing something grand yet disingenuous. You’re simply showing them the grandness that was already there.
That’s why we end up in very special personal relationships with the people we work with, because we help them do something they simply cannot do for themselves. We show them the subconscious genius that has drawn them to an idea in the first place.
4. Get close enough to mirror people.
Our brains have an extraordinary ability for modeling other people. When you spend real time with someone, you build a working simulation of them, and it’s accurate enough that you can reasonably predict what they’d say next and how they’d react.
We all have this for the people that are closest to us, but we don’t have it for people who are described to us by others. This is where I make a soft case against insight by proxy (i.e. research decks, studies). Of course sometimes you will need to get insights second hand, but if you can skip the research deck and go straight to the people, that’s really where the crux of this work lies.
You need to have intimate experiences with other people in order to build a good mental model of who they are as a group. There’s no substitute for direct contact, and I would also recommend, a lot of it. For people in our work, that means real interfacing and learning how to get to emotional territories with high trust very quickly.
It should be happening at every level of the org. The idea is to get to real, honest, unadulterated feelings without them being mediated through text or decks or visuals. You do not develop empathy in a readout. You develop it when you look at somebody else in the eyes.
5. Measure intensity over everything else.
The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s apathy. For a brand, indifference is the only fatal outcome, because indifference means no one will encode a memory of you, and memory is emotional or it doesn’t exist.
We all know the famous Marmite case study. Early testing showed that people were largely indifferent to the flavor, so they created a campaign that made it feel divisive. Miracle Whip later did the same. Apple remarkably brought emotional intensity to a commoditized electronics market. The principle reaches far beyond products. Movements, leaders, whole ideologies all begin by turning a shrug into a feeling.
Intensity can go in any direction, but just be sure to go there and not get stuck in the quagmire of indifference.
6. Tension and specificity live at the boundary.
Everything interesting happens on the line between what’s acceptable and what isn’t. That line is different for every audience. An advanced wellness obsessive and a wellness-curious normie have completely different boundaries, but the line is always where the energy is.
So when you encounter something strange, interrogate it. Is this just shock value, or does it actually make me feel something? Does it trigger a moral response, an identity response, real discomfort? Discomfort means you’ve found a boundary, and boundaries are where the signal lives.
[I’ve written about how tension is our dominant cultural mood, and if you want to lean into it for your brand, there’s a specific kind of tension you need to be leaning into right now. Read it here.]
7. The opposite also has to be a strategy.
This is the fastest specificity test I know, and it was developed by Roger Martin. After all the work, teams arrive at things like “we’ll maximize the quality of our customer experience.” But who wouldn’t? That’s never a strategy, it’s a best practice wearing a strategy’s clothes (a common trap in doing this work). The giveaway is that the opposite is absurd. Of course no one would ever not improve customer experience.
A real strategy has a viable opposite. A former dating app client chose to focus on the individual, not the relationship (when everyone else centers the relationship). The opposite was a perfectly legitimate way to play. That’s how you know you’ve got something specific - someone else could rationally do the reverse, and probably will. If the opposite of your strategy is unthinkable, you haven’t said anything.
If you go back through this list, what you’ll notice is that none of these are pure logic tools. They’re something more than that.
We had the incredible leadership coach Diana Chapman come and work with our community Exposure Therapy a few months back, and she described three kinds of intelligence:
IQ
(roughly translated to the logic)
EQ
(the empathy)
BQ
(the gut)
Most businesses run entirely on IQ because it’s the easiest to measure, but that gets complicated when you say, “My gut says this is wrong.” If you say that in a boardroom, somebody’s going to ask you for the chart.
I would argue this is why so much of strategy can be misaligned. You’re being asked to create something meaningful in the world using only one tool, when we have at least two others. All three of these complement each other in fantastic ways, and to cut out certain ones because we can only speak in a singular language right now is to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.
I spent the first half of my career thinking strategy is logic applied to feelings. But in this second half, I now know strategy is feelings handled with discipline, and that’s a muscle you can build.
Everything I just shared with you is a way of training the other two languages, the EQ and the BQ. They can feel abstract, but they are very concrete when you look at them in this way, and even more importantly, they are highly trainable.
I urge you to train yourself in all 3 languages. Each is unique in its own way, but squint and you realize that perhaps they are different expressions of the same thing.
Everything above is the distilled version. My partner Jean-Louis gave the full lesson on this, and it’s where it actually goes deep.
If reading this article stirred something in you, I recommend watching it below. It’s 26 minutes long and worth your time:
He’s going to be giving another free lightning lesson in a couple of weeks, this time on Crafting Your information Diet as a Brand Strategist.
We had nearly 400 people sign up for our last session. Come join us for this next one:
This is just a small taste of what’s in our Build A Culture Brand masterclass. Signups for our next cohort close June 7th.
One Last Thought
I’ve been getting a lot of responses lately from people asking me how I organize all of my notes and ideas. The thing is, I don’t actually organize anything, at least not in the conventional way.
Instead, I put every new idea to work the moment I find it interesting.
I’m constantly writing down my mental models of the world, whether that be in my articles, presentations, team conversations, calls and coffees with cool people, community research drops, slack messages, or in one of the now 82 article drafts in my Substack. I don’t give notes and ideas time to be forgotten. I’m constantly attaching and reattaching them to a larger web of ideas that show up across all of these artifacts.
I might bookmark things in my MyMind app, but I rarely return to them. I might go there for inspiration or for a statistic I know I stowed away, but otherwise I keep a living construct of words and conversations always going, always alive, always among and between me and other people.
I didn’t plan it like that. It just started happening as I began putting more of my work out there and exponentially expanded my surface area across people. I have a small world of thought experiments that I’m always running, and if you meet me, you get to participate in those thought experiments too (whether you want to or not). A thesis isn’t done when I write the post about it, or when I make the video. It just grows and weaves in and out of others.
I would encourage anybody that wants to get sharper at their thinking to try and start organizing their ideas this way. Don’t park things or save them. Use them the moment they come to you, whether that be in a post, a project, or in a conversation with an unsuspecting cashier at the grocery store.
Ideas start to die when they’re “saved” for later. You have to put them to work right away to really see what you’re meant to make of them.
Yours,
Hi, I’m Jasmine Bina. I’m a cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:
My course on How To Build A Culture Brand (next cohort closes June 7th)
My private culture and strategy community Exposure Therapy
My agency Concept Bureau
Nice POV and the way we develop strategy. 🤘
I am thinking about how these concepts might apply to a civic movement....