Strategy. Once a useful word, now a catch-all term for anything that isn’t account handling or design. It’s become the junk drawer of agency roles, where you throw anything that feels a bit too thinky to call admin, but not tangible enough to call creative.
And I’ll put my hand up. I’ve used the label lazily too. We all have. It’s an easy shorthand. But the more we use it as a vague umbrella, the less it means. And when words lose meaning, they stop being useful.
So rather than debate what is and isn’t strategy (and fall into a philosophical black hole) I’d rather suggest something simpler: most of what agencies call strategy is actually synthesis.
What We Actually Do
When you strip away the jargon and the slideware, what does strategic work actually involve?
It’s digging. It’s listening. It’s absorbing. Primary research, interviews, customer journeys, audit decks, competitor scans, positioning exercises - all of it creating noise. Useful noise, but noise nonetheless. You can end up with dozens of presentations, hundreds of pages, walls covered in printouts and Sharpie scrawlings.
It feels like one of those hard-boiled detective dramas, the kind with red string and cigarette ash and a murder board in the corner. And honestly, that part of the job is great. It’s messy and absorbing and you need to be curious and obsessed.
But at some point, it all needs to be turned into something.
Something that makes sense.
Something people can act on.
Something that still holds the shape of everything that went into it.
That’s not strategy. That’s synthesis.
The Harder, More Valuable Bit
Synthesis is the real skill. It’s the ability to reduce the volume of input down to something that still represents the whole, without losing clarity or truth. It’s the ability to zoom out and see the big picture, while still remembering what detail matters.
That might be shaping a tight, directional brief.
It might be pulling out the essence of a brand’s values.
It might be unifying opposing stakeholder views into a single compelling line.
Whatever it is, it takes judgement. It takes time. And it’s not easy. Because synthesis isn’t about adding more layers, it’s about stripping them away – without dumbing anything down.
As Mark Twain said: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
The best strategic work reads simply because someone took the time to do the hard bit. Most of the bad work you see – the waffly, overlong, jargon-thick decks that leave clients saying “but what does this actually mean?” – fail because no one made the effort to reduce. Or worse, no one knew how.
Clients Know When It's Done Well
One of the best compliments we’ve had in this agency was from a client who said:
“You’ve basically said what we were all thinking, but couldn’t articulate.”
That’s synthesis.
It’s not about invention. It’s about distillation.
It’s helping people see what they already know, more clearly than they ever have.
That’s what creates momentum. That’s what builds belief.
The Team Effect
This is also why experience matters. Over time, you get better at knowing where you need to end up – and start structuring your input to help you get there faster. A good team, with time together under its belt, knows how each other think. That rhythm helps avoid going down the wrong rabbit holes. It sharpens the output. Like a band that knows how to play without overplaying. The output looks sharper because the thinking underneath is sharper.
So Let’s Call It What It Is
If we want our work – and the people who do it – to be properly valued, we need to name the skill accurately.
Good synthesis is rare. It’s hard. It’s crucial.
So maybe it’s time we stopped lazily calling everything ‘strategy’… and started recognising what actually creates clarity, cuts through abstraction, and helps teams move forward.
Less strategy.
More synthesis.