Annual Strategy Awayday - Report

... and implementation going forward

Probably the best thing about being freelance is that you’ll never, ever again, have to experience the hell of a Strategy Awayday - 8 hours you’ll never get back, indulging in the collective delusion that there’s something you can actually do to control the plughole-circling of your enterprise, the increasing indifference of your audience and the epidemic slack-jawed incompetence of your ‘team’.

I used to organise these things for other companies and I don’t think there was ever a time when ‘strategy’ was formed, (or even informed) during an actual awayday. Our job was to create a few hours of a Montessori environment where everyone could experience ‘empowerment’, so they would ‘engage’. But the ‘Key Takeout’ would be that the top dog would achieve total ‘Buy-In’ for whatever bit of batshit-crazy, self-deluding, hubristic horseshit he’d picked up from one of the high-level Creative-Ideation courses (which we also taught).

Truly... in a gold rush, the wise man sells shovels.

These days, I’m a sole operator (up to a point - see sidebar later) so I don’t have to do awaydays, but I’m also enough a of a marketing geek to schedule a bit of quiet thinking time, in advance of the new year, to try to rack my thoughts into a line about what’s going on in my business. I usually take a couple of weeks over it and, because it’s the easiest way I know to police an idea, I write it out.

A couple of days ago Rory Sutherland crept into my feed again. I have very mixed feelings about Rory. Partly, I don’t like his politics; partly, I get an overwhelming sense of fellow feeling when I watch him present. The art of being a planner is to identify something so bleeding obvious that nobody could possibly disagree, then reframe it. The trick then, is to deliver it with such self-assurance that everyone believes you instinctively and, therefore, in the hugeness of your intellect. He’s a sort of living antithesis of Imposter Syndrome. And I, with a much higher degree of cringe, identify with that.

He’s also, damn him, quite brilliant at it.

His most recent gift to us was this...

…an excerpt from a talk in which he explains “Reverse Benchmarking”.

I’ll summarize briefly.

Clients are predisposed to look at what competitors are doing better than them, and ‘benchmark’ themselves against it.

Instead, says Rory…

Identify what your opponents are doing badly, do it really, really well, and point out how good you are at it.

(It’s the Avis, ‘We’re No.2 So We Try Harder’ strategy, for the true wonks)

He then goes on to explain how the tendency to benchmark against peers is unhelpful, because...

1. It ultimately devalues the category because there’s less diversity in the category.

2. It makes individual businesses less valuable because they’re focused on internecine competition that they ultimately can’t win.

3. Consumers lose variety, differentiation and choice.

Then, he sums up; “When businesses in an area become less differentiated, everybody suffers. But they all think they’re doing the right thing.”

So why is this occupying my invaluable strategising headspace at this crucial time?

Possibly because the last thing I’d Post-Itted on the metaphorical fipchart was…

“Everybody is shitting themselves about AI... and they are absolutely right”

What’s most noticeable about writing, particularly journalism, is that we entirely develop our work, throughout our careers by consumption and assimilation of others.

It used to be that a great journalist was somebody who’d read all the previous great journalists, had learned and synthesised. Journalists, quite rightly, regard themselves as craftspeople, not artists. It’s why they set store in apprenticeship and learning from The Greats.

The problem here is that “AI” is better than any human at reading widely, learning, absorbing and synthesising. (The clue is in the name. An LLM works by Modelling its output on an extraordinarily Large amount of Language).

We will never never beat an LLM at that.

Previous Annual Strategic Dumps have usually resulted in a ‘strategy’ of “Keep doing what you’ve always done, only read more, write more and do it faster. (Also negotiate up)”.

And that made sense before. Before LLMs.

Sutherland is writing about competition between large product or service companies, but the logic extends to my area. It’s the definition of the ‘competitive set’ that’s a little more complicated. At last year’s Awayday, the ‘competition’ was half a dozen other writers. This year, all of us are actually facing an entirely new, huge and relentless competitor.

Back to Rory. In competition against LLMs (because that’s the Threat in our SWAT analysis), ‘doing what we’ve always done, only better’ is precisely what an LLM will do, eventually better.

Our aspiration used to be easy. You’re trying to establish a ‘voice’, a coherent position. You want to turn in a product that’s recognisably ‘you’, following the conventions of your craft. Ideally in 800 word weekly blocks. But what’s suddenly different is that, without really noticing, that aspiration is exactly what LLMs are daily getting better at.

That’s not a battle I can win. I need to identify what an LLM can’t do and concentrate on ‘doing that really, really well’.

That means humour, feeling, emotion, quirkiness, appropriate rule breaking, cleverness, smartassery, snark, transgression, provocation, playful or unusual use of language, allusion, rumination…

Y’know, once you start actually typing them out, the list of things an LLM can’t do is reassuringly endless.

So need to concentrate on these things. The things I can do better than “AI”. The things of which an LLM is structurally incapable.

Which is where I need to take on Sutherland’s second point - “tell people what you are doing”.

Sidebar Begins

I’m working on another piece, a long and formless screed at the moment but I’ll summarise it here quickly.

Most of us are motivated by a very fundamental belief that our job is a direct contract between the Writer and the Reader. We write the stuff... they read it and the less crap gets in the way, the purer the ‘Work’.

This is why writers are so excited by Substack. Because it’s the ultimate pure connection between my mighty cerebellum and your justly hungry eyes.

Except that’s bollocks.

I know. It seems hugely old-world to even think about going cap-in-hand to the Gatekeeper at a newspaper, magazine, publishing house or broadcaster - controllers of the Means of Production - and increasingly we just don’t need that Fascist Groove Thang. These days, with Substack and YouTube we can all own our own media. Most of us can get stuff out there faster and wider than anyone we work for.

But I’ve grown to understand that the really important thing about getting published isn’t the gates they keep. It’s that they make you work with someone else.

It seems weird if nobody’s thought of this, but writing is a uniquely solitary creative pursuit. Musicians work in bands, actors in casts, film-makers in crews, photographers with art directors. The writer, meanwhile sits alone and transfers thoughts to ‘paper’. But the the minute you slot into any of the traditional publishing models, they superglue you to a partner. Someone who understands audience, medium and making your stuff successful. An editor, a commissioning editor, a sub, a publisher, a producer, a series editor. And they get to shape your ‘work’.

We can make our own stuff and get it out direct to readers in ways that would have made Malcom McLuhan’s head spin. But if we try to do it without the feedback loop... it all turns to shit.

I’d have to be an arrogant idiot to believe that I existed without the Others. The communication from writer to reader only happens when mediated by other people.

(And we can’t, by the way, expect our audiences to magically help us shape stuff. Their contract with us is essentially passive. In this model they either ‘like’ us as we are or they quietly evaporate.)

If this - by which I mean things like Substack and podcasting and YouTube channels - is how it’s going to be, then online creators are going to have to find a way to replace the balancing controls of the editors, the partners, the others we no longer have.

Or we entirely disappear up our own fundaments.

Sidebar Ends

So, ‘strategically’, I’m going to think about writing a little differently this year, but I’m going to have to tell people. I’m going to have to bring the Others along.

Unless these creative partners agree that we need to take on a slightly different set of criteria for commissioning, editing and publishing, then it’s a waste of time.

I don’t want to write new rules - that should never be our job - but I think I’ll endeavour to get quiet agreement that we’re looking for something a little different to the long established models. Maybe we all need to find a way together.

Maybe the best way to start is to look at everything I produce and ask ‘could an LLM have done that’. The people I work for should ask the same question.

I want to write things that an LLM never could... but the good news is that will be original, funny, human, quirky and might not look entirely like the stuff we’re all used to. I hope that’s what they’ll want to commission and publish.

So. Thanks in part to Rory...

Reverse Benchmark

Write like Hell

Tell everyone

That was my Awayday, and this is the document.