Reassembling the Strategist
Introducing: Cultural Cartography, formerly known as "the thoughtful strategist"
Lets start this off with the TL;DR:
AI has entered the agency floor, hovering above you as you work, looking for ways to replace you as you work to train it on how to replace you. Many strategists are anxious, not because they misunderstand the technology, but because they recognize it. It mirrors their processes: desk research, rapid iteration, testing, and synthesis, but the machine does it faster and at scale. What if we rethought about the work of the Strategist from a human perspective? What can the Strategist do that the machine can’t? Where can it go that the machine can’t go?
The following proposal is a new theory/method for practicing strategy in agencies and in-house: theory (what does a Strategist do?) and method (how do they do it?).
The answer comes forward here in the form of an approach we’ve developed called Cultural Cartography. This is an attempt to document and name an approach we’ve developed in seven years of building brands in emergent, unstable categories, all those categories where regulatory rules are always in play, in categories where stigma and volatility break every strategic planning framework that operates smoothly in bigger CPG landscapes.
Nothing is going to be “bite-sized” and “skimmable” from this point on, so here is the essay on one page:
Strategy is drifting: The Strategist, once a creative partner embedded in the mess, has become a late-stage performer: retrofitting ideas, formatting decks, and adding “THE INSIGHT” slide to justify decisions already made.
Strategy has been stabilized to death: Rituals, templates, scopes, and timelines now script what strategy is allowed to be. PowerPoint isn’t just a delivery device, it’s a governance tool that shapes which ideas can even be seen
We’ve mistaken recall for rigour: Strategists now offer to perform fluency in the canon (Sharp, Ritson, Binet, etc.) rather than doing work that cracks creative problems open. We signal alignment, not inquiry. In doing so, we lose strategic ground to consultants, frameworks, and generative AI.
Cultural Cartography is a way forward: Instead of diagnosing problems from a distance, it asks strategists to re-enter the field, trace what’s already moving, attend to how meaning circulates, and map what holds or breaks in practice. We are less worried about what a brand is, and instead want to focus on how brands become legible.
The Strategist is now the Stalker: In the spirit of Tarkovsky’s film: no map, no mastery, just a set of instincts developed to feel when the ground has shifted and where meaning might fail next. We’re no longer planning for coherence. We’re surviving volatility.
Let’s get messy.
- PK Lawton, Sister Merc,i Co-Founder and CSO
Reassembling the Strategist
The Strategist used to be a liability worth keeping close. They laboured within the messy creative process, throwing in whenever a deadline broke, when a client changed the brief mid-plan, or when the story had to shift in real-time due to some external crisis that now jeopardized the creative idea. The strategy was less of a department and more of a role earned by being useful in chaos.
We have largely abandoned this vision. Many agencies now cast the Strategist late, if at all. Clients and account leads lock the movement and fix the narrative before a Strategist arrives on the scene. The Strategist's role is retrofitter, less of a creative partner and more of a rationale. What is more, the Strategist has been so good at stabilizing one type of creative process that they have accidentally made themselves utterly dispensable.
This process of stability happened gradually and then all at once. Over the past decade, the once-fluid tango between clients, account leads, creatives, and agency leadership has hardened into the creative ritual. In this new order, mid- and junior strategists are often cast as polished intermediaries, performative middleware in a system designed more for optics than insight. The Strategist has become a translator of creativity, repackaging raw ideas into slide decks, spinning success stories out of KPIs, and furnishing the data-driven evidence that promises to sell more cogs in the machine.
Unmoored from their original purpose, the Strategist's output has been made fully legible: pre-formatted, extracted and deployed across decks, briefs, scopes, templates, and timelines. This individual is now a modular actor in their agencies: a 'work accelerator' in timelines, a 'simplifier' in templates, a 'profit centre' in scopes, and a 'legitimizer' in decks, summoned only to help certify consensus.
When agencies summon the Strategist to perform, they script the performance in advance. The "THE INSIGHT" slide is populated into the deck before anyone has had two seconds to think about it. What was once a site of emergent, situated reasoning has become what John Law (2004) calls a method that cleans up the mess, a ritualized form that performs order, smoothing out friction that once made the role so vital. The Strategist is now an intermediary, a channel for pre-digested insight rather than a source of new associations.
Visit any strategy department and observe the talented Strategist at their desks working the template; no time for contact with the real world, left to translate reality via market research (surveys, focus groups only, please!), whitepapers from other agencies glued to social media because both time and budget are tight. From the factory floor, what is approved looks like an analysis but has no smell or flavour.
A lot of strategists are ringing this particular alarm right now. Martin Weigel’s Strategy, Rediscovered? (2022) is a must-read, surgical takedown of an industry that has started to forget what strategy even is. Weigel targets the planners and strategists who’ve retreated into vague platitudes of “insight,” “consumer truth,” “voice of the customer,” abandoning any serious attempt to define, defend, or practice strategy. Instead of confronting the complexity of real-world consequences, Strategists have regressed into decorators of decks and peddlers of post-rationalizations.
Weigel (2022) suggests that strategists have always had a hard time making sense of the role itself. The field of strategy has built itself on that slipperiness, claiming authority without committing to what that authority is, even for. When asked what planning is, we default to how we do it: research, insight, and cultural relevance. That we still answer with a method is the giveaway. Strategy, in most agencies, has been relegated to workflow.
The problem is avoidance. Strategists, the ones supposedly trained to cut through noise, go quiet when asked to define the discipline itself. We say strategy is “hard to define,” as if that proves how complex or nuanced it is. It doesn’t. It just shows we’ve stopped trying. And in that silence, the work gets handed off, to consultants, to account teams, to frameworks written elsewhere.
If you can’t define what you do, you can’t defend how you are doing it. You don’t lose your seat at the table because others push you out, you lose it by refusing to state what you’re there to do. Until strategists can better name what strategy is, what it changes, what it produces, we will keep getting treated like tacticians and slide decorators.
You Can Never Really Leave Here
I didn’t start out as a Strategist, I did zero internships. I spent the first decade of my career as a working sociologist, trained to study systems from the inside: institutions, routines, scripts. I left academia mostly because the university had started to feel like a closed loop. Bureaucracy over inquiry, 95% of students who treated their degrees (and my class!) like a transaction (A’s all around!). Most of the time, I worked alone, and when I wanted a career change, I was drawn to advertising because I simply wanted something faster, more collective, more porous to the outside world.
When I moved into a career in advertising, I used to always insist that sociology and strategy were doing the same kind of work. That wasn’t entirely true, but it got me in the room, which was hard to do initially; no one believed me! I came close to landing roles at a few of the big Toronto agencies, but I never quite stuck. I remember one recruiter at Taxi telling me, “We think you’d make a good Strategist, but you’d be bored here.” I was furious at the time, how dare someone decide on my behalf what I’d find boring! In hindsight, I think they were picking up on something real: I liked strategy, but I REALLY liked watching how strategy moved in an agency setting.
Since then, I’ve worked inside and around agencies as a kind of double agent: hired to do the work, but unable to stop taking field notes on the system itself. What fascinated me wasn’t just the brief or the deck, but the role itself, the way strategy moved through the network, and all the weird, contradictory effects attached to it: admiration, suspicion, performative reverence.
The ideas in this new series on strategy theory/method are drawn from these years of observation. I kept them close for a long time, out of fear, not wanting to alienate the strategists I admired (a sensitive lot, ya?). I didn’t want to name the thing too precisely and make it disappear. But the conditions have changed, my own urgency has changed. I see clients on LinkedIn, whether they even need agencies anymore! And then, on our side, some agencies are already rushing forward to confirm their client's suspicions by building their own proprietary AI stacks that can generate the simulacra of a usable brief in 90 seconds, and no one wants to pay for thinking that can be simulated, so say goodbye to hourly rates!
That perception alone has consequences. As the Thomas Theorem reminds us: “If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” The Strategist doesn’t need to be replaced by AI wholesale, only displaced just enough for the headcount to move elsewhere.
So the question becomes: what parts of this role are truly replaceable, and what aren’t? What work does the Strategist still do that cannot be templated, prewritten, or cleanly automated? What kind of thinking resists simulation?
To answer that, we have to stop hiding behind the vagueness of the role. We have to stop retreating into the idea that strategy is “hard to define,” as if opacity were proof of depth. If you can’t say what you’re doing, you can’t defend how you’re doing it. You don’t lose your seat at the table because someone else pushes you out. You lose it by refusing to name what you’re there to do.
What follows in this essay and this series of essays is an attempt to name it, not as a job title or deliverable, but as a situated practice under real constraints. Not what strategy should be, but what it has become and what it still could be. I think we have to be willing to define this new role for strategy on our own terms before someone else defines it for us.
Put plainly: if the machine can fill in the framework, what is your job going to be? If the machine can’t leave the room, where can you go instead? If the machine can articulate the entire knowledge of human history, what happens when you are no longer the smartest thing in the room?
I take Weigel’s (2022) call seriously when he argues: “Why are we in the job if we don’t know what it’s about? If it’s ‘hard’ to define, how do we know what to do? If it’s ‘hard’ to define, how do we know when we are doing it well? If it’s ‘hard’ to define why do we expect to be highly valued? And why are we okay parading our uncertainty in public?”
PowerPoint is a Black Box
One huge consequence of being unable to define what we, erm, do here is that we now have to navigate around a growing number of black boxes that have rendered our work both invisible and incontestable. Strategists imagine themselves acting upon the work, but the truth is that they act through the work and only as far as the network allows. Agency is no longer theirs alone, spreading across timelines, budgets, approval chains, and pre-formatted decks and briefs. The action arrives pre-inscribed, partially decided.
The campaign's logic no longer emerges through creative friction but through the silent choreography of already-aligned actors. Those embedded within this black box cannot describe how things work outside it in the real world. Critically, black boxing is not a failure, just the gradual outcome of a perfectly assembled network that has erased all traces of its construction. In Latour's terms, it has become a fact: stable, closed, and beyond question (2005).
The humble PowerPoint deck is the first black box that needs the most reassessment. Over time, it has become one of the most powerful actors in the agency network. Before strategy speaks, PowerPoint has already decided on its form. In her ethnographic study of strategy departments, Kaplan (2011) argues that the deck does not merely capture ideas but constitutes what an idea can be. The deck defines the pace, sequence, and credibility. At the same time, the Strategist becomes a mere narrator, performing alignment, setting up the creatives to shine, and removing any objections possible before they go into the real work.
More of us need to read David Byrne's 2003 polemic, Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information! Yes, Talking Heads’ David Byrne wrote a book on the hidden evils of PowerPoint. Writing from the vantage of an artist attuned to the politics of visual language, Byrne dissects PowerPoint as a medium that shapes cognition itself. He was especially unnerved by its omnipresence across business, education, and even warfare, most chillingly exemplified in Colin Powell's 2003 UN address justifying the invasion of Iraq, presented through a clean, bullet-pointed slide deck.
To Byrne's point, PowerPoint privileges linearity over exploration, reduction over complexity, and resolution over ambiguity. As a tool, the more we’ve embedded it into the agency collaboration process, the more it has become the agency collaboration process. It encodes a bureaucratic epistemology: knowledge must be modular, digestible, and de-risked. What thoughts get abandoned because they can't be bullet-pointed?
Borrowing from Latour (2005), PowerPoint is an inscription device, an actor that formats, frames, and authorizes specific performances while rendering others invisible. PowerPoint is a method of governance that quietly enforces a regime of legibility that makes complexity look like a disorder and uncertainty look like a risk. In this system strategy, it can only appear to act as if it behaves like a PowerPoint-shaped object.
PowerPoint, by virtue of its formatting constraints and aesthetic conventions, makes invisible how much had to be aligned to make an idea look clean, bullet-pointed, and “on strategy.” The smooth slide is a cover-up. So, the PowerPoint deck is not merely a communication device. It is a methodological technology that creates a particular kind of strategy: one that is conformant, linear, credentialed, and, above all, digestible.
If strategy was once a situated, exploratory process, through PowerPoint, it becomes a preformatted performance. The deck does not merely communicate strategy; it produces a certain kind of Strategist! One who earns credibility not through friction, but through legibility. PowerPoint is an inscription regime (Latour, 2005), a method of governance that selects for ideas that can circulate cleanly, look aligned, and reduce controversy.
Once PowerPoint logic dominated the network, strategy no longer thrives through argument or creative tension, it survives by appearing already resolved. In such a system, the Strategist no longer argues a case; they testify to the validity of the insight; they cite Byron Sharp or Mark Ritson. They conform their own thinking to fit the thinking of the day, which has caused a bit of controversy in the field, a new debate on what even counts as strategic inquiry, which falls into two schools of thought: Strategist as Master of the Canon or Strategist as provocateur.
“I think there just might be no rules…”
Over the last year, I have never seen as much content produced on the topic of strategy itself, who owns it, or whether it is dead. The field has ruptured, partly from pressure and partly from the boredom of LLMs speeding up the work. What emerges are competing networks struggling to define the practice.
I feel a great affinity to the new school of Strategist Provocateurs, who are independently breathing new life into the form, largely via research-backed and observational strategy flipbooks on LinkedIn. These missives are well-designed but lo-fi, visually sharp, and always intellectually restless. I love following strategists like Zoe Scaman, Joe Burns, and my friend Umar Ghumman, they use the medium to present and challenge conventional thinking. Strategist Provocateurs see strategy as an event, not a product.
The other group claiming dominance in strategy circles is the Canon Master, who communicate via automated ChatGPT posts, formatted in the "LinkedIn Thought Leader" format. You know it on sight: single-sentence paragraphs (no more than 25) loaded with "it's not X, it's Y!" binary pivots, emojis, and, always, three key takeaways for marketers. We blame Gen-Z for slop and brain-rot content, but I think TEDx walked so TikTok could scroll. (Honestly, God loves the Canon Master, but I recoil at the FORM: nakedly obvious ChatGPT output and the long string of single-sentence paragraphs and emojis, I too often feel like Ralph Wiggum stuffing a crayon up my nose while exclaiming, "I'm learning!")
The Canon Master performs the role our current system demands: low-friction, high-alignment output that signals competence through recitation. The Canon Master lives and dies by their recall of the 10 books that every Strategist must read in a listicle written in 2013 on the HubSpot blog. They are not performing thought leadership as much as they are bearing their strategic testimony.
I grew up as a Mormon, and on the first Sunday of the month, the service was a fast and testimony meeting. You skip breakfast and head to church for some good old-fashioned open-mic time. As a kid, I loved these sessions because sometimes people would get up and confess everything, and I was messy like that. Mostly, the testimony stays within the lines of a pre-approved format where you don't say ANYTHING about your life, but you deliver a series of belief lines: "I know this church is true, I know that Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God…"
The Canon Master performs a similar testimony daily on LinkedIn as proof of strategic prowess; "I know this church is true…I know brands grow through mental and physical availability." Or, pick from the following list if you are worried about Lord Sharp coming at you in his DMs:
I know this church is true:
Research tells us we should balance 60% brand building with 40% activation. (Binet & Field, 2013)
Brand identity should align with the product, organization, person, and symbol. (Aaker, 1996)
A brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. (frequently attributed to Bezos, but ????)
The data shows that positioning is about owning a distinct place in the consumer's mind. (Ries & Trout, 2001)
You're not competing with your competitors. You're competing with indifference.
To get unstuck, brands must choose cost leadership, differentiation, or focus. (Porter, 1980)
Research reminds us to define our business by the customer needs we fulfil. (Levitt, 2004)
We know the most effective brands create uncontested market space by altering value factors. (Kim & Mauborgne, 2005)
The brand isn't your logo. It's the sum total of every experience. (Neumeier, 2005)
I believe iconic brands are built by resolving cultural tensions through myth-making. (Holt, 2004)
People don't fall in love with products. They fall in love with stories.
The evidence suggests differentiation is actually about distinctiveness. (Ritson, 2019)
People don't want more content. They want consistency.
People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. Simon Sinek said it, and I still believe it. (Sinek, 2009)
A good brand isn't everything to everyone. It's something to someone.
As Drucker taught us, the best marketing strategy is to know your customer so well that the product sells itself. (Drucker, 2009)
The important thing is you never quote the canon to show how it acts in the work; instead, always signal that you know the canon. The citation becomes a performance of alignment, not an act of analysis. What was once a strategic move is now an inscription device (Latour, 2005), stabilizing artifacts passed around to imply consensus. What Strategist will make a post that says brands don't grow through mental and physical availability?? And risk Lord Sharp's wrath?!?
Cast in this role, the canon is a black box. Strategists drop these readymade, plug-and-play rigour nuggets into decks shaped entirely from other black boxes. At that level of abstraction, these concepts offer little strategic value. They are no longer useful for cracking a brief or sparking an idea; they just give the illusion that everything is under control.
Many of these lines were once deeply useful ideas. They helped so many strategists break out of ruts many times over. But they have now been abused, and their shine has dulled. They've circulated to the point where they don't help us push forward; they only help us conform. The phrase is the stabilizer, a placeholder for the work the Strategist should have done in the first place.
None of this helps us make sense of the world. It just makes it look sensitized, like something already thought through and proven. And so, strategy becomes a field without friction. Friction, as we know, is where the action is.
This map makes no damn sense!
The Strategist is drifting in the ether, rerouted as the system demands. What looks like a loss of influence is actually a shift in the circulatory system of action (Latour, 2005). Where strategy once moved through relationships, friction, and slow thinking, it is now enacted via dashboards, scopes, prompts, and procurement interfaces. The strategists are here, but their action is needed elsewhere.
Today's Strategist has never been at higher risk of becoming an agency NPC. They are always present and always speaking, but only within the limits of a predefined script. Their dialogue is modular, and movement is bounded by deliverables, mostly tethered to the screen. They may introduce the quest for the main character (creative director), but they no longer shape its unfolding. Real action is delegated to systems: tools, briefs, decks, and teams, which are no longer supported by strategy; they are strategy now.
There are many reasons for this drift, but three are top of mind:
First, the procurement portal puts a lot of pressure on the Strategist. No longer a passive constraint to strategy work, they are market devices and technological actors that define how strategy is scoped, valued, and made visible (Muniesa et al., 2007). Embedded strategic work, the messy, entangled, frictional kind, is difficult to sell. The strategist-as-deliverable is billable, legible, and tethered to predefined output.
If strategists were slowly leaking oil from procurement, LLMs entered the picture and accelerated. ChatGPT does not kill strategy, it just amplifies what has already been set in place: polished, fast, and extractive work articulated through templates and frameworks. The machine promises the exact things this new agency system rewards: insight (or the insight placeholder), speed (the fields are populated faster; what they are populated with is of lower concern), and certainty (will this work?). All of this output without the labour that once made the Strategist's role meaningful (Faraj & Azad, 2012). Leonardi (2011) would call this imbrication, or the recursive entanglement of human judgment and technological architecture. The Strategist no longer shapes the format; they adapt to it.
The final blow comes from the clients, who no longer trust in the rigour of agency strategy output. The stakes for their careers are too high, and they no longer leave it to chance. Who can blame them? How many agency decks have you seen with a slide that says, "We asked ourselves…" Horrifying! As Kaplan (2011) shows, epistemic authority belongs to the one who authors the brief. Today, agencies are losing the right to define the problem. Their response hasn't been to reclaim territory but to automate faster and formalize harder. To turn strategy into throughput.
Since at least the early 2000s, agency work has been governed by calculation: the marriage of quantitative precision and evaluative judgement (Callon & Muniesa, 2005). Originality doesn't win the pitch; alignment does. Campaigns pass through KPIs like airport security: You may bring your ideas only if they fit in the tray.
In this world, strategy becomes a shadow function, present in form but displaced in consequence. Strategists still show up to present, but the decisions travel elsewhere: through APIs, prompt libraries, auto-tagged research dashboards, and auto-generated media plans. The strategy remains an icon, a marker of thinking, even when no thinking is needed.
Cultural Cartography: A Strategy Expansion Pack
What seems clear to me as I stand in this mess is that strategy should be better at giving us tools to understand how things hold together. The frameworks and templates still in circulation, while useful in their time, are ultimately designed for a system that no longer exists. These templates and frameworks assume legible markets, stable audiences, and the possibility of control. They promise that a Strategist can impose meaning on the world with enough clarity. I have to believe this system is collapsing, even as we are just now able to articulate it.
This is where cultural cartography comes in. This approach does not treat strategy as a diagnosis or a message but as a way of moving inside systems where meaning is already in motion. It focuses on the composition of action, not the idea that precedes it. We are interested in the field that sustains it.
To work as a cartographer is to stop asking what a brand is and start tracing how it becomes legible in practice. Not through story or symbolism, but through constraints, delays, formatting rules, and friction. For example, working in cannabis in early days when money was flush and an industry was being born, we came to understand that brands live in positioning statements, but they also live in policy documents, reddit threads, compliance filters, platform banning and shadowbanning, retail displayers, budtender reccos, bad menu providers, procurement, and (especially) high THC.
None of this is even a little abstract! Every campaign carries these forces, whether they are acknowledged or not. Cultural Cartography does not clean up these contradictions, it just helps to make them visible. It asks what alliances form, and what alliances fall apart when a strategy meets the field. It tracks how decisions move, which ones get ignored, and what systems carry them forward or shut them down. It treats every object in the network as a potential actor, not just the ones with titles or talking points.
The classical model of strategy assumes a chain of causality: insight, idea, execution. That logic still appears in decks, but it no longer holds in practice. Execution now often begins before the idea is formed. The Strategist is not in control, and instead, we put the Strategist in back in contact with the world, inside the movement.
In cultural cartography, we do not speak of strategy as if it were a clean intervention. Strategy becomes the tracing of effects, a process of watching how meaning is assembled by human and nonhuman actors alike. Strategy, in this light, does not seek to name “culture” or “emotion” as if they were causes but instead just asks how those terms get produced and by what configuration of systems and constraints they come to matter at all.
This is where strategy must return to contact, as labour, not inspiration, or worse, “inspo.” The Strategist observes what enters a given network, documenting who gets enrolled, what breaks, how ideas adapt, and what gets left behind in the process. A message does not spread because it is true, but because an infrastructure allows it to circulate. A brand does not resonate because of the story, but because the timing was right, the tag structure aligned, and no actor in the chain blocked its motion. Nothing in this list should be secondary to The Strategist!
Cultural Cartography is a school of thought for strategists who can no longer work on abstraction alone. It is for those who know that clarity has been overvalued, and who are trying to stay awake to the real terms of the work. It is for those who are no longer satisfied by the language of “audience,” “brand purpose,” or “voice of the customer,” and who are looking instead for a way to name what the strategy actually does once it leaves the document.
This shift will take time to percolate. Much of what I said above will seem abstract or unobtainable, but I assure you it has made my own strategy practice that much more meaningful, and I’ve regained my love of the game. Because it asks me to pay attention, to move from focusing on ideas to effects, from method to relations. It asks simply what is visible from the field, and not the deck. It treats the brief not as an instruction, but as an S.O.S. from inside a moving system. The Strategist listens first, moves second.
Cultural Cartography does not offer the team closure: it provides working coordinates. Move carefully, the field is already in motion, and danger lurks!
Endnote: Strategist as Stalker
Early in my time as a strategist, primarily focused on developing cannabis brands, I read the Russian Sci-Fi classic Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Shortly after, I watched Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which I saw days later projected from a worn 35mm reel in a near-empty theatre. This experience didn’t clarify the world but instead broke open the assumptions I had been having on the best way to navigate unknown terrain.
Roadside Picnic is often misfiled as science fiction because it is a story about alien contact. I think the power of the story lives in its refusal to treat the aliens as characters or agents; they arrive, they leave, and what remains is their garbage and broken tech, left behind in a scorched and distorted landscape what the characters call the Zone, landscape marked by inexplicable material effects and unpredictable physics, abandoned artifacts with unknown logics, patches of earth that twist gravity and memory alike, a kind of haunted matter that resists both scientific explanation and moral interpretation.
In Tarkovsky’s hands, the Zone is presented as the present rendered bare, a space in which narrative fails and reason disintegrates, where machines break, rituals reverse, rules lead to ruin, and survival depends less on mastery than on something closer to attunement. The Stalker, a type of employment, is a figure who leads people into The Zone to collect samples and artifacts. The Stalker is not a prophet, a guide or even a protagonist. They work with no tools, maps are useless. What they have is feel: an embodied, unprovable ability to sense when the ground has turned against you, when the light means danger, when a path that looks safe will not let you out. He doesn’t explain.
That’s the job for Strategists now.
The dominant fictions of strategy, the ones still taught, sold, and performed, assume that if we build better models, or collect more Julian Cole frameworks and deck templates, or collect richer data, or choose smarter KPIs, then the future will yield. That with enough insight, the chaos can be named and tamed. That markets can be decoded and that audiences are rational (or highly driven by emotion, either way). That positioning is the highest form of intelligence, where culture is a backdrop. We are no longer living in that reality, and pretending we have become less a matter of optimism than a clear sign of delusion.
The rules of the game have changed, and no one bothered (or had the capacity, either way) to tell you. Platforms can now collapse mid-campaign, and algorithms shift mid-sentence, but no one will tell you; you will see it in the measurement numbers. Regulatory changes arrive overnight, and there isn’t even a person you can talk to about it. Cultural resonance burns fast and reverses faster. Under these conditions, strategy can no longer be built on the promise of control.
The Strategist is no longer a diagnostician offering a coherent intervention. The Strategist is the Stalker inside the Zone: feeling, watching, hesitating, acting. They’ve developed a skillset of how to notice what no longer fits, what doesn’t sound right, what wasn’t supposed to repeat and now won’t stop. They are quick to notice that the path that was safe yesterday is deadly today, and you ignore that advice at your peril.
It’s the realization that to chart a path means refusing to simplify it to abstraction. We want deep rigour, a return to the real, and a rejection of false-safety emerging from false-coherence. We want to share what we’ve learned on how to move with the grain of instability, to sense where the break is coming next, and to build the senses needed for the survival of strategy as practice: pattern recognition, critical nerve, a tolerance for ambiguity so high it can read contradiction not as failure but as the ordinary texture of now.
Strategy, in this mode, is a discipline of attention, the practice of staying awake in a world that will not stay still. You do not need a full map, you just need to know where the ground has shifted, and to move, not because the way is clear, but because staying still is no longer an option.
This is the refusal to let strategy as work to die where it stands.
A dialogue between a planner and a cartographer
Planner: So, what exactly is Cultural Cartography?
Cartographer: Cultural Cartography is just a way of noticing how meaning moves through a system, how that meaning attaches to things, who carries it, and what conditions allow it to stick, mutate, or disappear. It doesn't begin with predefined categories like culture, audience, or insight but with an effort to trace what gives those terms their shape in the first place. It is less about supplying answers than it is about sustaining attention. It helps us see how associations form, hold, and sometimes fall apart, all things that are critical to strategy work in the age of AI.
Planner: So it's like a trend report, just deeper?
Cartographer: Not quite. A trend report tends to name a moment and explain its appeal. Cartography doesn't stop there but asks how that moment came into being, who worked to stabilize it, what tools helped amplify it, and which elements might already be slipping. As cartographers, we are not interested in isolating a phenomenon but in tracing its dependencies.
Planner: But strategy is supposed to simplify and clarify the world so that we can build creative concepts! People come to us for clarity, insight, and direction. Cultural Cartography is interesting, but it feels... hesitant.
Cartographer: That's a fair reading, but I don't buy into the premise. What if clarity doesn't precede complexity but follows from it? What if the demand for insight has taught us to leap too quickly to summarize before we've done the work of observing how things hold together? Cultural Cartography treats clarity as a fragile achievement.
Planner: And what does that mean for me, practically? I still have to write a brief.
Cartographer: It changes what kind of questions you ask to get there. Instead of jumping to define tension or extract a key human truth, you begin by identifying what is in motion. You trace what's already acting in the system, all the myriad of tools, platforms, routines, constraints, and forgotten defaults. You look for where energy is gathering or dissipating. A brief becomes less about capturing truth and more about describing a field, an active, uneven field where certain actors are already pulling others into relation. Besides, ChatGPT can write the brief now; your job is to deliver better inputs.
Planner: You keep using the word "actor." I don't want to get lost in jargon. What exactly do you mean?
Cartographer: In this context, an actor is anything that makes a difference, anything whose presence shifts what happens next. That could be a person, a piece of software, a budget line, a legal constraint, a meme, or an interface pattern. If it participates in shaping the outcome, it's an actor. Cultural Cartography is the process of noticing those actors, mapping their relationships, and attending to how they work.
Planner: How do I know which actors matter?
Cartographer: You test for energy. Latour writes that if something does not have enough force to trigger other movements, it is not an actor; it is an intermediary, something passive, something circulating without consequence (2005, p. 147). So you ask: What's being translated, rerouted, slowed, resisted, absorbed, and by whom t? We look for sites of activity, friction, or unexpected stickiness. That's how you know something is alive in the system.
Planner: And if it's not alive?
Cartographer: Then it may be what we call a dead actor or a placeholder. These concepts still appear in strategy decks but no longer do any real work. Think of terms like "brand purpose," "Gen Z mindset," or "authenticity." If you can't trace how an idea moves, if it appears only because expectation demands it, then what you see isn't insight. It's residue. That doesn't mean it never mattered, but it might mean it no longer does.
Planner: So, do we throw those out?
Cartographer: Not immediately. You reopen them. You ask: What did this idea once help us do? What did it make visible? What did it suppress? You treat it as a black box and examine what's inside. Sometimes, you find nothing. Sometimes, you see a whole system running on autopilot, quietly shaping everything.
Planner: All of this feels like a lot. Agencies are built for speed, and clients want certainty. Isn't this just embracing chaos?
Cartographer: Can we at least stop pretending the world is as tidy as our deliverables make it look? A strategy that cleans too early often creates a distorted picture that feels clear in the room but collapses in contact with the real. Cartography accepts that things wobble, and it uses that wobble as data. False certainty and failed outcomes greatly slow us down more than a slower strategy would.
Planner: Okay, but still. You sound like you're arguing against strategy. Why do you hate strategy? If you hate it, why not do something else?
Cartographer: I am trying to give it its bearings back! We don't care about strategy as performance, where we pretend our frameworks are neutral tools. We long to return to strategy as inquiry, grounded in observation, alive to context, and hyper-aware of its limits. It doesn't reject tools like segmentation or positioning; it asks what holds them up, what might be missing, and who gets left out when we rush to simplify. It's not about abandoning the field. It's about re-grounding the practice.
Planner: What happens once you have a map?
Cartographer: Now you have a new surface from which to work. You begin to see what's driving the system, not just what you hoped it would. You trace the dependencies behind a message, a behaviour, or a breakdown. You give the creative team real material to respond to, a live field of forces. That's the work: not reducing complexity, just revealing enough so the Strategist can act.
Map Legend
Actor: Anything (human or nonhuman) that changes how a situation unfolds is an actor. A strategist, a TikTok trend, a budget cut, a retail planogram—if it shifts action, it's an actor.
Actor-Network: A temporary web of human and nonhuman actors whose relationships produce effects.
Attention: The most overlooked skill. Cultural Cartography treats attention as a method. Notice what’s left out. What’s gathering energy? What gets ignored? Pay better attention, stay ahead.
Black Box: Something that “just works” but no one questions anymore. Insight slides. Personas. The 60/40 rule. It feels true because no one opens it up. But open it, and you’ll see the whole network it depends on.
Cartography (Cultural): Strategy as mapping, not simplifying. Less about stating what’s true, more about tracing what’s active. Who’s doing what? What forces are in motion? What’s actually holding this idea up?
Controversy: a live disagreement or rupture, something people are still figuring out. Cartographers don’t avoid controversy; we follow it. If there’s tension, there’s strategy work to be done.
Dead Actor: An idea that once made things happen but doesn’t anymore. Still in decks, still name-dropped, but doesn’t move the work. Examples: “Gen Z wants authenticity.” “Brand purpose.” “Disruption.”
The Brief (Cartographic): Not a neat insight. Not a clever statement. A map of the field, what’s moving, what’s resisting, what might snap. Less “What’s the big idea?” More “What system are we walking into?”
Friction: Where strategy actually happens. Constraints, misalignments, turf wars, timing issues, compliance rules, and weird vibes. If you’re not hitting friction, you’re not close enough to the real.
Framework Fatigue: When strategy becomes just filling in boxes. Decks start to look good but feel dead. Everyone knows it, no one says it. Cultural Cartography is a way out.
Inscription Device: A format that shapes how ideas show up. PowerPoint is the most powerful one we have. It doesn’t just present thinking, it determines what kind of thinking can even be seen.
Intermediary: Something that moves ideas along without changing them. Like quoting Sharp or Ritson without context. It moves, but it doesn’t do.
Live Actor: An actor with force doesn’t just show up; it pulls other things into motion. If something creates heat, tension, or shift, it’s alive. If it sparks a Slack thread or legal asks to talk, it’s live.
Placeholder: A shortcut that fills space when the work hasn’t been done. "Sneaker culture = resell economy" (but did you check?). It looks like thinking, but it’s just filler.
Simulation Strategy: The clean, logical stuff LLMs are great at. Insight-shaped statements. Pre-filled templates. High polish, zero contact. If it can be faked by ChatGPT, it wasn’t strategy, it was formatting.
Theory/Method: A theory is how you explain what the world is; a method is how you move through it, and in strategy, these ideas are blurred: our explanations (theory) is built through the tracing (method).
Work: The activities that people do to make institutions run, even if those activities aren’t recognized as official. Also, the effort it takes to hold an actor-network together.
Housekeeping
The Thoughtful Strategist is now Cultural Cartography! I thought that the name “The Thoughtful Strategist” would be taken as it was intended, a bit of a piss-take, but ya, it didn’t work. Oh, I went back to the lab, and here we are with a new approach. Here are the details:
The early essays draw from three foundational texts: Reassembling the Social (Latour), After Method (Law), and Institutional Ethnography in Practice (Smith). The goal is practical: to build a usable method assemblage in public for people doing serious strategic work inside systems that demand speed over substance. I would recommend all three books as essential to fully operationalizing the theory/method laid out here.
There’s more in Cultural Cartography than I fully understand yet. If this new direction does what I hope it does, if it moves others too, the next step is to workshop it. That means gathering strategists, academics, and other friends to work a live controversy, map the actors in real time, and show what it looks like to build this into the workflow. I have many ideas, such as group documenting, in full, all of the dead actors stinking up our briefs.
Finally, I’ve written the Cultural Cartography Field Guide, a strategic manual for working in messy, unstable environments where old models no longer hold. Drawing from Actor-Network Theory, it reframes strategy as the act of tracing what actually makes meaning move, not audiences or abstractions but specific, situated actors: tools, platforms, policies, habits, and breakdowns. It is available to all paid subscribers!
Quick Shoutouts
This project would not exist without the thoughtful, incisive, and generous feedback from a wide cast of collaborators who helped me see what I could not see alone. I am deeply grateful to Mark Silverman, Kevin McHugh, Edward Cotton, David Akermanis, Umar Ghumman, Joe Burns, Spencer MacEachern, Pedro Porto Alegre, Helen Androlia, Tyler Murphy, Hayden Lawton, Michelle Lee, Mihir Marolia, Mel Eshaghbeighi, and most especially my Sisters who have continually helped me push on this idea: Katie Waterman, Allison Disney and Jennifer Dunaj.
From the first cold reads to the tiniest design adjustments, these fine individuals helped me sharpen the argument, calling out blind spots and pushing the work forward. Your encouragement, pushback, metaphors, and provocations have shaped this project more than you know. The goal of this work is, in every sense, co-authorship through dialogue. Thank you.
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I appreciate this because, as a strategist, this made me uncomfortable (in a provocative, exciting way). Your diagnosis of what’s going on in strategy today resonates with me. That being said, a lot will need to change before agencies and clients will be able to adopt this mindset/approach. Two questions for you:
- In my experience, timelines have only sped up in recent years, yet CC seems to rely on a more open-ended (and slow, deliberate) style. Any ideas for how to resolve this tension?
- You reference a return to “strategy as inquiry, grounded in observation, alive to context, and hyper-aware of its limits.” Any specific practitioners/agencies that you were thinking of? One of the perennial problems in our field is another kind of black box: the inability to widely share “real” strategy output with each other, leading to strategy mythology rather than a real peak into what great strategy has proven successful over the years.
Anyway, thanks for this thought-provoking piece, looking forward to following along with whatever’s next. Would love to join any working groups or conversations on this as they pop up.
IBR
Working on a similar thesis actually! Unveiling it in a few weeks at a talk, but the mapping metaphor is increasingly making sense.