The world feels like it’s falling apart but it’s really fusing together, and that’s why the most important skill right now is knowing how to see around corners.
My partner Jean-Louis packs a lot of insight into our newest lightning lesson on Second Order Thinking for Brand Strategists. You’ll find many threads for your strategic mind to pull on. It’s a rich topic, and each thread leads somewhere interesting.
If your strategy practice has expanded beyond just brand and moved into futurism, innovation or cultural strategy (or if you want it to), this is a good primer.
Jean-Louis walks through seven mechanisms of change that we use to build predictions: asymmetry flips, power laws, fragmentation vs. consolidation, the hype cycle, creative destruction, liquidity, and precedent. These are lenses you can reach for when you’re trying to understand where a market is going, and why things that seem random are almost never random.
Strategy is a bet on the future. And most strategists are making that bet without really thinking through the chain of consequences. Second order thinking is what changes that. And nowhere is that more important than in culture, where the forces shaping markets are rarely visible on the surface.
It’s important to broaden the way you think about your work, because strategy is expanding. The entire field teaches brand strategy as a business discipline. Positioning. Differentiation. Competitive analysis. But brands live in culture. When the concept isn’t connected to cultural forces, it has no structural foundation. Everything downstream takes longer than it should, and this is the biggest problem most brand builders have today.
Ideas are technology. Meaning is crafted. Cultural forces are readable, structured, and powerful enough to build on. My team and I have spent years synthesizing sociology, semiotics, behavioral science, second-order thinking and anthropology into one operational methodology for brand.
This video is a starting point for that kind of thinking. If you want to go deeper, we'd love to have you in the course — doors close this Friday at midnight Pacific.
It’s not just you. The nature of work is changing.
Hi, I’m Jasmine Bina. I’m a cultural futurist and brand strategist.
If you love this newsletter and need more:
My private strategy community Exposure Therapy
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