Strategy Teams And The Speed Of Planning

A flat vector character running with a huge stack of charts while a small key falls behind them

A planner can now assemble a category review, a competitive audit and three audience cuts in the time it used to take to brief the research team. The speed of planning has changed completely. What it produces has not changed nearly as much.

That gap is the whole story. Most of what a strategy department was asked for was never the thinking; it was the evidence of thinking, delivered in slide form, in a volume that justified the fee. That part is now close to free.

What The Speed Of Planning Actually Changes

It removes the excuse that the work was not ready. A team can arrive at a Monday meeting with the landscape mapped, which means the conversation starts at the interesting question rather than at page fourteen of context.

It also removes a hiding place. When assembling the evidence took three weeks, the assembly was the visible work. Now the visible work is the judgement, and a planner who was mostly an assembler is exposed in a way they were not two years ago.

The Risk Of Faster Wrongness

A quick landscape is built from whatever is easily available, which skews towards the categories and markets that write about themselves the most. In India that means a metro and English-language bias arrives silently inside the speed.

The discipline that matters is unglamorous: check what the summary left out, and go and find one fact that nobody in the room already believed. That step is the job now, and it is the first thing dropped when the deck is due at nine.

The deck used to take a week because gathering was slow. Now it takes a day, and nobody has decided what to do with the other four.

What Good Departments Are Doing With The Time

Spending it outside the building. Shop visits, conversations with sales teams, time with the client's call centre transcripts. None of that is faster than it was, and all of it produces the thing a summary cannot: a detail nobody else in the pitch has.

The alternative is to fill the time with more slides, which is the path of least resistance and the reason some strategy teams now deliver three times the volume and the same amount of insight.