Good Will Hunting & The syndicate
My wife Dunia and I took a HUGE leap to embark down our own path with CAWA and I want to share two insights that ultimately led to making the leap.
Insight 1: Will Hunting
Let’s get some awkward set-up things out of the way first. I have long suffered from imposter syndrome, both as a minority whose dealt with complex cultural constructs my whole life and as a pessimist trapped in an optimist’s body, constantly questioning my skills & capabilities yet having an unrelenting desire to grind and push forward. I’m Dr. Jekyll humble and Mr. Hyde arrogant. Couple those with an ever changing marketing landscape that has seemingly deprioritized the brand planning & strategy discipline and you start to get a glimpse of 5 minutes in my head.
Einstein once said, “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” And explaining what I do to people has never come easy to me. I often think about that scene in Good Will Hunting where Will says to Skylar that he can’t paint a picture or hit the ball out of Fenway or play the piano, but when it came to stuff like organic chemistry, he could just play. I’m far from a Will Hunting but when it comes to finding a brand’s unique space in the world — I just know I can play. But I can’t explain to you how I get there or ‘show you my work’. And here in lies the rub of insight 1.
As a strategist, a big part of my job is selling in a vision and ensuring the right stakeholders buy in to that vision. But not all voices, roles, departments are created equally. And increasingly, the role of the strategist’s job was to bring everybody along — if everyone wasn’t bought in, the work wasn’t right. That can wreak havoc on the Jekyll side of the psyche. Then I remembered a scene later in Good Will Hunting. It’s the scene where Lambeau questions how Will derives at a solution and Will goes on to say “maybe I don’t want to spend my life sitting around explaining shit to people…..And I’m sorry you can’t do this. I really am. Cause if you could I wouldn’t be forced to watch you fumble around and f it up.” Now you see my Mr. Hyde. You also see the metaphor for how I spent most of my days. Moments solving problems, ages selling, defending, refining, bringing others along. It was time for a change.
To be clear, this insight wasn’t at any one organization. But it’s becoming far more commonplace. And if we’re being truly honest here, just like in Will Hunting, it was never about the situation, it was about his own struggles and figuring out what HE wanted. And I haven’t been honest with myself about what I want for a long time — maybe ever. And life’s too short to not rectify that.
Insight 2: The syndicate
Strategists tend to be loners. We’re the quiet kids in the back of the library surrounded by a dozen books learning, seeking answers, exploring. We tend to think we’re in the fight alone most times. Then I met a bunch of others just like me. I knew they were out there, but it’s not like there’s a biker’s group for people like me. Until there was. A former (actually very much still) mentor of mine, Rocio, created Overflow along with some other co-conspirators — an incubator for strategists. Or as I like to call us — the syndicate.
Making a leap out of an airplane is hard enough as it is. But when you’re up in the air, strapped in, nearing your jumping altitude….you look around and realize you’re not alone. There are others just as crazy as you willing to jump out of a perfectly great airplane. And after meeting a number of others from the syndicate — creative strategists where despite our very different backgrounds somehow spoke the same language — I felt a sense of calm in making this leap. In knowing we’d be ok. But also recognizing that collectively we all believed the same thing….that the state of affairs today in the brand strategy world is at a crossroads. It’s time for the discipline to evolve. It’s time for our roles with or within organizations to evolve.
Here’s a great article over at Nasdaq where some of us chimed in on the state of affairs and a bit on the future. And while the solutions aren’t there yet, I can’t tell you how happy I am to be in cahoots with this group, alongside my incredible wife, shaping what’s next.
