Nobody knows what strategy is becoming. Not the agencies. Not the consultants. Not the people with the title. The discipline that's supposed to help others navigate uncertainty is itself uncertain about what it is, what it's worth, and who needs it. If you're a strategist reading this and feeling like the ground is shifting under you, it's not just you. It's the ground.
Last week I wrote a piece called Year of Stuck on the reasons why so many people feel frozen right now. The response made one thing clear: being stuck isn't really the problem. It's a symptom. The question underneath it, the one that keeps coming up in every conversation. What do I actually do that has value? Who needs it? And how do I build from it when the old paths are dissolving?
The relationship between what you do and what you get paid for is being renegotiated, everywhere. Which means the thing that actually has value now is what's distinctly, irreducibly you. This is a hunt for clues, not the answer.
Adam Grant's research at Wharton found that the people who navigate uncertainty best aren't the ones with the strongest convictions. They're the ones willing to update their thinking when the evidence changes. He puts it simply:
For strategists, that's an occupational hazard. The whole discipline is built on projecting confidence in the answer. But right now, there might not be one. Do you really want to be the smartest person in the room when nobody is smart enough to see the future? And if you're arrogant enough to believe you can, not many will want to work with you in 2026.
Treat what follows as a pathway; pick and choose where you go and what you do. Do the things in order or out of order. This is not about getting the precise answer; it's about transitioning from being out of focus to achieving greater personal clarity.
There's an interesting question buried inside any job: what's the part that's actually you? Not "I do brand strategy." The actual tasks. The deck-building. The trend reports. The competitive reviews. The unlocking of an insight. The briefing and working with creative teams. The development of a unique point of view. The deep understanding of the brand, the audience, and culture. But which parts of these do you excel at in a way a machine cannot replicate? And of those parts, what parts matter? What are they exactly? Can you describe them, and why you are good at them? Acemoglu and Autor at MIT spent years studying how work is really structured, and their key insight was simple: every role is a bundle of tasks, and inside every bundle there are usually a few things that are genuinely hard to replicate. Seth Godin in his 2010 book (Linchpin) offers a quick way to spot them: do people come to you, or do you go to them? Do they ask you for things that aren't on your job description?
Thomas Friedman and Dov Seidman have a useful way of thinking about this. For centuries, we worked with our hands. Machines replaced that, and we moved to working with our heads: analysis, research, strategy, intellectual labour. That's been the economy for decades. Now computing is threatening the head jobs too. What's left, Friedman argues, is heart work: the trust, the empathy, the ability to read a room, to understand what someone actually needs rather than what they're asking for, to connect people and ideas in ways a machine never will. If you look at your task bundle honestly, the head work is probably what's most at risk. The heart work is probably what's most valuable. And most people have never separated the two.
So here's the first clue to hunt for. What do you actually do in a week? Not your title. The tasks. If you listed them all out, which ones could a machine handle tomorrow? Which ones need a human but not necessarily you? And which ones are specifically, distinctly yours? Of those, which ones give you energy and which ones drain you? You can be uniquely good at something that exhausts you. That's worth noticing.
Do this. Make the list. Everything you do in a week. Write it down. All of it. Now circle the ones only you can do.
In the fall of 1983, James Pennebaker and a graduate student named Sandy Beall ran an experiment at the University of Texas that Pennebaker later admitted was "horribly underpowered." They asked students to write for 15 minutes a day, four days in a row, about the most difficult experience of their lives. No therapy. No feedback. Just writing. Many came out of the writing room in tears, but they kept coming back. Over the following six months, the students who wrote honestly visited the health centre at roughly half the rate of the control group.
Since then, more than 200 studies have replicated and extended the finding. But perhaps the most interesting discovery was about language. Pennebaker found that the people who benefited most weren't the ones who vented the hardest. They were the ones whose writing changed over the four days. They started with "I" language, shifted to seeing things from other perspectives, then came back to "I" with more clarity. They used words like "realise," "because," and "understand." They weren't just expressing feelings. They were building a story that made sense. That's the mechanism: not catharsis, but coherence. Turning noise into narrative.
One of the smartest things about Pennebaker's design is that nobody ever has to see what you write. You write for yourself. You can throw it away, burn it, delete it. Some studies found that even two minutes of writing produced measurable effects. He designed the whole thing around the reality that most people would rather not share what's really going on, and it still works.
Herminia Ibarra at London Business School calls them "possible selves": the futures you already sense you're heading toward, the versions of yourself you can almost see but haven't yet stepped into. The question is whether you wait until you're forced to find them, or go looking now. Adam Grant's research at Wharton adds one more thing worth knowing: the gap between what you think you're capable of and what you actually are is almost always wider than you think, and almost always in your favour.
So what's the professional story you've been telling? "I help clients understand the world." "I bring different people together across client and agency roles." "I'm the one who really helps creative people build their ideas." "I do comms strategy." For each one: still true? Still useful? Or just familiar? And what's actually true now? The thing behind the job title that you'd struggle to put on a LinkedIn profile but that people actually come to you for.
Do this. Write your work story as a story. Not a CV. Use the arc: this happened, which led to this, and because of that, this happened next. Follow the thread from the beginning. Now go back and find the parts that make you smile. The parts you wish were more of what you do today. The parts where you were most alive. That's not nostalgia. That's data.
In the early 1970s, a Harvard PhD student named Mark Granovetter went to a suburb of Boston and asked 282 professionals a simple question: how did you get your last job? Specifically, if a personal contact helped, how often did you see that person? The results were striking: only about 17% had found their job through a close contact. More than 83% got the crucial information from someone they saw only occasionally or rarely. The people who mattered most for career opportunities weren't close friends. They were acquaintances.
Granovetter called them "weak ties." Your closest contacts tend to share your worldview, your industry, your assumptions. But someone you haven't spoken to in a few months moves in different circles, hears about different things, and sees you from a completely different angle. The paper he wrote about it was rejected the first time he submitted it. He resubmitted it, and it became one of the most cited papers in social science. Fifty years later, researchers ran a five-year experiment with 20 million people on LinkedIn and confirmed the finding still holds.
So who are your weak ties? Not other strategists. They share your blind spots. Think former clients, futurists, business consultants, authors, journalists, coaches. The thing about weak ties is they don't know you well enough to tell you who you are. But they know you just well enough to surprise you. They move in different circles. They hear about things you'd never find. They see you from an angle your closest colleagues can't. So don't ask them to diagnose you. Be interested in them. Have conversations. Discuss and debate what their issues and challenges are and what they're working on. Engage, share and learn. The clues about yourself come sideways, from the conversation, not from the question. This is why concepts like Ben Dietz's Breakfast Club work so well: they're built entirely around engaging weak ties.
Do this. Reach out to 5 weak ties who are NOT strategists. "I'd love to catch up. What are you working on?" Five people. Don't overthink who they are.
Forget the title for a moment. If you couldn't use the word that's on your LinkedIn profile, how would you describe what you actually do? Not the process. The benefit. What does someone get from working with you that they can't get anywhere else? Some people simplify. They take something tangled and make it clear. Others amplify: they take a small idea and make it bigger, louder, more visible. Some facilitate: they create the conditions for other people to do their best thinking. Some divine the truth: they see what's really going on underneath the noise. Some connect: they bring people and ideas together that wouldn't otherwise meet. These are different animals. Knowing which one you are changes everything about how you describe yourself, who you talk to, and what you offer.
If you laid your answers from the first three steps side by side, where do they overlap? What appears in all three?
Can you describe what you do without using your job title? In a sentence specific enough that someone doing similar work would say "ah, that's not what I do"?
Which genus are you closest to? Or are you a hybrid? What's the specific combination that makes you the particular animal you are?
Do this. Make a mood board of your species. Not words. Images, textures, sounds, references. What does your particular species of strategy animal look like? Pay attention to trying to shape the following: What is its habitat? What does it feed on? Who does it hang out with?
Once you have that blueprint, something else becomes possible. You can build AI tools around your specific species. Not generic tools that do generic work. Bespoke, personalised tools designed to give your particular combination of instincts superpowers. The AI handles the speed, the scale, the processing. You handle the judgment, the taste, the instinct. The combination of the two, built around your unique species, is something nobody else has.
Do this. Give an AI the most boring task on your list. Use the time you saved to do the thing you never have time for.
Godin's sharpest question, the one he landed on in This Is Strategy (2024), isn't "what are you good at?" It's "who would miss you if you were gone?" He calls it your smallest viable audience. Not everyone. The specific people who already have the problem you solve and are already looking for someone to solve it.
For anyone working in or around strategy, this question comes with baggage. Should what you do even be called strategy? The word has a performative problem: too much fat on the bones and not enough lean meat. Too much theory, not enough action. Clients who've been through an exhaustive, intellectual, long-form process and came out the other side wondering where the answer was. The gap between what strategists want to sell and what clients want to buy right now might be wider than you think. Your audience might not want a strategist. They might want someone who gets their hands dirty, who shares process instead of hiding it, who works as a collaborator not a lone author, who can operationalise the insight instead of just presenting it. The question isn't just "who needs me?" It's "what do they think they're buying, and does the word strategy help or hurt?"
So who are three types of people who might need what you do? Do they know they have the problem? Are they already paying someone to solve it? And would they miss you if you were gone? If the honest answer is no, you might be talking to the wrong room.
Do this. Find the physical places where your audiences are. Where are they gathering? Where are they arguing and discussing? Where are they in debate about the future? Work out how you get invited and what you can contribute when that happens. Do you start as an observer and earn the right to contribute? Maybe. Then do the same exercise with a different opening question: who could your audience be? Find those places and spaces too.
In 1989, three researchers, Deborah Mitchell at Wharton, Edward Russo at Cornell, and Nancy Pennington at Colorado, ran an experiment they titled "Back to the Future." They gave people a simple scenario about a woman planning a party for her coworkers. Some were asked to predict whether it would succeed. Others were told "the party was a great success" and asked to explain why. The people who were told it had already happened generated 30% more reasons, and much more specific ones. The researchers used a basketball analogy: before a game, you talk about matchups and team strengths. After a game, you talk about Player A's foul trouble and Player B's off night. Those details are too specific to predict in advance but too important to ignore in hindsight. Prospective hindsight tricks your brain into generating them before the event happens.
Psychologist Gary Klein turned this into a practical tool he called the "pre-mortem," and it spread to military planning, surgery, and elite athletics. Daniel Kahneman called it "a low-cost, high-payoff kind of thing." We're using it here in reverse: not imagining failure, but imagining success, and working backward to find the steps.
For strategists, this has a particular edge. You spend your career imagining futures for clients but rarely do it for yourself. So: what does success actually look like for you in a year? Not the answer you'd give in a meeting. The honest one. Is it the work itself, the people you work with, the freedom, the money, the impact? These aren't the same answer. Which ones matter to you, and which ones are you chasing out of habit? Try it: it's one year from today, you're with people you respect, you've been asked to say a few words about the past year. What did you build? Who did you serve? What surprised you? Write it in past tense. Whatever feels most alive in what you wrote, that's your clue.
Do this. Write a short speech for a future gathering of your collaborators and clients where you're looking back over the past year and acknowledging what you all achieved together. What were the highlights? What were the dream projects you worked on? What were the moments where you did your best work and showed your best self? What progress did you make? What results did you achieve? And what and who was it that made these things happen?
Herminia Ibarra spent years following people through career reinventions at London Business School. Investment bankers who became novelists. Consultants who became teachers. Engineers who became therapists. She expected to find a pattern of careful planning. Instead, she found the opposite. Every successful reinvention followed the same messy sequence: try something, talk to new people, make sense of what happened, repeat. The people who planned carefully and waited for certainty were the ones who stayed stuck. The ones who ran small, cheap experiments, often several at once, were the ones who found their new path.
One thing worth knowing before you start: when experiments don't land, the instinct is to quit. Neuroscientist Jud Brewer at Brown University spent 20 years studying that instinct. He found that the brain treats uncertainty like a threat and defaults to an anxiety loop: worry, avoidance, the false comfort of giving up. His research showed the antidote isn't willpower, it's curiosity. Instead of "this isn't working," the better question is: "was this a bad idea, or a bad experiment?" A bad idea gets silence from everyone. A bad experiment gets the wrong response from the wrong audience. The difference matters.
For strategists, the experiments aren't about posting a thought and seeing who likes it. They're about demonstrating what you bring before anyone asks you to. Prove your worth. Show you understand the client's business and point of view. Put yourself in their shoes. Do something that makes them think "this person already gets it." That might be a short piece of thinking about their specific challenge. An unsolicited perspective on something they're dealing with. A workshop you offer to run. A problem you solve without being briefed. The goal isn't to show you're smart. It's to show what it would feel like to have you on their side: someone who sees their business clearly because you're not inside it. Don't expect to be given anything. The experiment is the demonstration.
Sociologist Allison Pugh at Johns Hopkins has a term for this kind of work: "connective labour." She spent years interviewing people in high-touch professions and found that the value they create isn't in the task itself but in the act of seeing another person and conveying to them that they are seen. It's interactive. It can't be automated. And it's the thing that makes someone want to work with you again. Her research won the American Sociological Association's top book award in 2025, which tells you something about how seriously the academic world is taking this idea. For strategists, connective labour is the heart of what you do when you're at your best. It's also the hardest thing to put on a slide. So what are three small experiments you could run this week? Not plans. Things you could actually do.
Do this. Develop generous experiments. Offer to share yourself and your thinking with others for free. Offer to bring a diverse group of people together for a discussion. Become the initiator of something. Try and keep trying. Some will stick, many will not. The point is to keep experimenting, keep showing up, and keep making valuable, generous offers.
What you're looking for is the provocation that gets you into the room. Not the polished pitch. The piece of thinking, the unsolicited perspective, the framework, the question that's interesting enough that someone says "come talk to us about that." If it doesn't get you in, try a different provocation. If it does, pay attention to what happens next: what did they react to? What did they ignore? What did they ask you to do that you didn't offer? Keep experimenting. Keep adjusting the provocation. The invitations are the data.
But data is useless if you don't sit with it. Roger Martin, named the world's #1 management thinker in 2017, has a golf analogy he keeps coming back to. You can go to the driving range and hit a thousand balls. But if you don't stop and ask yourself whether your swing produced the result you hoped for, you won't improve. You'll just groove your current swing, whether it's good or bad. He tried to get consultants at his firm to write a short note after every project on what they learned. Less than 1% did it. "These bright, hard-working people liked to practice but not to reflect."
Ibarra's research found the same thing. The people who successfully reinvented didn't just experiment. They sat with the results honestly and asked what the data was actually telling them. She calls it "making sense," and it's the step her research shows most people skip.
If your experiments came back cold, this is not the end. It's information. Consider going back and trying different provocations. The timeline is a suggestion, not a cage. What got a response? What didn't? What surprised you? Where was the lean-in strongest, and was it where you expected? Does your value statement still hold, or does it need rewriting based on what you've learned?
Do this. Collect the artifacts of your experiments. What you made. How people reacted and responded. What resonated and what did not. Write notes on what you thought the big challenges were. Think about the experiments that worked and have some early thoughts on why they did. This is about building concrete perspectives and actions that have potential, and the experiments are the way you test them. Here you are in collection mode. Picking up all the evidence you can. Then analyse.
By now you've audited your tasks, written down who you actually are, heard what other people see, synthesised it into a statement, found your audience, tested provocations, and refined based on what happened. Godin has a word for what comes next: "shipping." It means putting something into the world, not when it's perfect, but when it's real enough to show.
For a strategist, this can take many forms. A framework you've developed. A piece of writing that shows how you think. A provocation that galvanises a community around an issue. A workshop format that's distinctly yours. Or it can be quieter than that: the in-person conversation that nobody knows about except the person who values your perspective enough to pay for it. Not every artifact needs a URL. Some of the most valuable ones happen in rooms. You have to earn it. You have to be useful. And sometimes that isn't called strategy. The point isn't visibility. It's proof. So what's the one thing someone could look at, read, or experience that proves you can do what you say you can do? Does it need to be public, or could it be a conversation?
Do this. You have run a few generous experiments. They have helped you understand the value you offer and how that value can best be delivered. You've understood who your audiences are and what it is you do that could be useful for them. It's now about shaping and honing the clay of your new identity and offering. You are moving from one state to another. You are reconfiguring. Right now you might not have the answer. You might have to go back to some previous steps again. You might need to run more experiments. Engage more weak ties. You might also need to face up honestly to what parts of strategy are not really you and what parts are. And perhaps for those parts you need to develop your own personal MBA of sorts. Is it about becoming a better observer, synthesiser, writer, listener, or host? Do you actually need to not read about therapy, but do some courses so you can become a therapist? How are you going to go out and acquire those skills and who is going to help you?
There's a reason the last step isn't "make a plan." It's "start talking." Not a single grand declaration to one person. Something more ongoing than that. Talk about your ideas, your thinking, your perspectives. Talk to friends in the business. Talk to your network. Talk to the people you meet through your network. Use those conversations to test your ideas, to have them challenged, to build and find like minds who you could potentially work with or who could work with you. But all of this with the very clear frame of knowing what species you are and what is unique about you and you alone. This isn't general networking. It's focused, specific, and yours. So what's the one idea you keep coming back to? The thread that connects everything you've been thinking about. Can you say it in 60 seconds? And what's the conversation you've been avoiding?
Do this. When you have shaped the clay and start to have a clearer view of your offering, build it and share it with someone whose opinion you value. Let them play devil's advocate. Ask you the challenging questions. Find the parts they respond most positively to and use this to keep shaping and honing.
Herminia Ibarra. Working Identity (Harvard Business School Press, updated 2024). The foundational research on professional identity reinvention. London Business School. herminiaibarra.com
Seth Godin. Linchpin (2010) and This Is Strategy (2024). On becoming irreplaceable and finding your smallest viable audience. seths.blog
Adam Grant. Hidden Potential (Viking, 2023). On why we underestimate our range. Wharton. adamgrant.net
Daron Acemoglu & David Autor. Task-based model of automation (MIT). Building Pro-Worker AI (Hamilton Project, 2026).
Jud Brewer. Unwinding Anxiety (Avery, 2021). 20 years of neuroscience research at Brown University on habit loops, anxiety, and why curiosity beats willpower.
Mark Granovetter. The Strength of Weak Ties (American Journal of Sociology, 1973). Stanford
James Pennebaker. Opening Up by Writing It Down (Guilford Press, 2016). 40 years of expressive writing research, UT Austin. APA interview
Roger Martin. Playing to Win (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). Strategy as practice and reflection. Rotman School of Management.
Thomas Friedman & Dov Seidman. "From Hands to Heads to Hearts." On the progression from manual to knowledge to heart work. Thank You for Being Late (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
Allison Pugh. The Last Human Job (Princeton University Press, 2024). On "connective labour" and why the work of seeing another person can't be automated. Winner of the ASA Distinguished Scholarly Book Award, 2025. Johns Hopkins.
The Bhagavad Gita. (~200 BCE). Svadharma. your own nature. Recommended: Eknath Easwaran translation
World Economic Forum. Future of Jobs Report 2025. 170m new roles, 92m displaced, 78m net new. weforum.org
The Strategist's Sell:Buy Gap. Why what strategists want to sell and what clients want to buy are drifting further apart.
Titles. How the word "strategist" has been stretched until it means almost everything and nothing.
A Chat with Lucinda Bounsall, Sibling Studio. A conversation about what independent strategy practice actually looks like now.
Year of Stuck. The companion piece to this one: why so many people feel frozen right now.
We Are Now All Pretend Experts. What happens when AI gives everyone access to knowledge but nobody has the judgment to use it.
What's distinctly you is in there somewhere. Maybe it's something you've always done but never thought of as valuable. Maybe it's something other people see more clearly than you do. Maybe you haven't fully stepped into it yet. The ten steps above are just different ways of looking for it.
This is the Great Reconfiguration. It's not a rebrand. It's not a pivot. It's a fundamental shift from one state to another, and it's happening to individuals and to the discipline at the same time. Nobody knows how it will shake out, and anyone who says they do is selling something.
Change is never easy. And this is change in the most challenging of times. The temptation is to stay still, to wait for clarity before you move. But clarity doesn't come from thinking. It comes from doing. From the experiments, the conversations, the generous offers, the things you make and ship before they're ready. Stasis is the enemy. Action is the way through.
So keep finding. Keep searching. Keep trying. Keep adapting. Cycle and repeat.
Who are you, what do you do that has value, and who needs it?