September 2023
Indecision is Marketing’s Silent Saboteur
Where indecision comes from, what it does to the work, and how to overcome it
Let’s start here:
Today we’re going to talk about indecision, the harm it’s doing to strategists, agencies & brands, and the ways you can avoid creating a culture of hesitancy. For a topic this meaty, I thought it might be nice to hear not just from a strategist, but also from an organizational leader with experience on the account and business side of things. That’s why I’ve invited my cofounder Alexa Beck, the managing partner of Quick Study, to join me.
Alexa: Hello there!
Rob: Thanks for doing this with me (and by “this” I mean “write back and forth in a Google Doc as if we’re having a conversation”).
Alexa: Excited to be “here.”
Rob: Alright let’s get into it. As you know, I love a big, obscure windup. So here we go:
I read a short novel earlier this year called “A Month in the Country” by J.L. Carr. It’s a lovely fictional story about a World War I veteran who is hired to restore a church mural in a small English town. Over the span of the summer, he develops a routine of sorts with the townspeople, gets to know them deeper, and as he comes near to the end of his time working on the mural he begins to have doubts about finishing it. It’s not that he doesn’t want to finish the mural, but more so that he doesn’t want to burst the idyllic bubble of life he has constructed around the job of restoring it. He openly tells the reader that he is slowing things down on purpose, and eventually gets called out by another character who forces him to admit that his inability to call the job done has little to do with the mural itself.
“Whatever you’re hanging about for, it’s not to finish that job,” he’s told by a confidante. “You can only have this piece of cake once; you can’t keep munching away at it… You’ll find that, once you’ve dragged yourself off round the corner, there’ll be another view; it may even be a better one.”
I found myself thinking about this dilemma the other day in relation to strategy. Every strategist has been in a situation when they weren’t sure whether to let a line of thought go, or if their argument for a specific solution was truly complete. It’s that moment of being on the precipice of revealing your story to others, be it colleagues, clients, whomever. It can be scary to make that leap into the unknown of what comes next, and that fear can breed indecision.
To me, indecision is a strategist’s worst nightmare. Is the story backed with enough data? Which way do I point this POV for a client? Am I pursuing the correct course of action based on what I’ve seen or do I need more time to suss it out? These frequent challenges for strategists can be a petri dish for indecisiveness, which in turn can cause a team to lose confidence in their strategic thinkers.
I want to go deeper on this from a strategy perspective, but I also believe indecision at the strategy position creates an aggressive domino effect into other agency disciplines. Alexa, what’s the first thing you notice when a strategist is being indecisive? How does that indecision start to cascade to others?
Alexa: It can rattle the whole system, depending on who is privy to the strategist’s vacillations. Strategy is supposed to be the rock, the vetted truth that you assume is the single best direction to take a project forward. So when that rock is unsteady or lacks the structural integrity you expect, it opens up a level of uncertainty that can ripple through a team like a bad indecision virus where everything is questioned and nothing is answered. Indecision is also a hard condition to mask or tap dance away with clients – once they start to feel the virus seeping in, it opens up a whole other can of worms. We are the experts they trust to make the right decisions, so again, that confidence in strategy is a critical bedrock.
Rob: Let’s talk about the endpoint of that indecision ripple you mentioned: the client. In my experience, clients can be all over the map in regards to how they view the role of strategy and its usefulness, and that’s part of what can create the indecision for a strategist when it comes to the story they are telling. For an agency, that means the best strategy is sometimes simply the one that gets a client to say yes, whatever that entails.
For example, a long time ago an agency I was at had one client who we knew didn’t care for the presentation of strategy but would say the strategy was bad if they didn’t like the creative. That meant that the strategy portion of the presentation needed to be as short as possible, but that the strategist also needed to be ready to speak “extemporaneously” on the strategy at whichever point in the creative portion of the deck the client predictably claimed the strategy had been wrong. I put extemporaneously in quotes because this client’s actions became so predictable that the strategists eventually began placing a longer, more detailed strategy section in the appendix that was ready to be flipped to when the client began their unraveling.
On the flip side, I’ve also worked with clients that are deeply engaged in the strategic thinking behind the work, and particularly ravenous for the data that proves the direction of the strategy. In those instances, the strategists had to indulge by stuffing their slides with stats - so many that it would at times become difficult to follow the story because it went into so many tangents simply to prove the merits of the story itself. Backing every single thought in data can be powerful, but it also risks establishing that the independent thought of the strategist themselves is not expert-enough to be seen as useful or convincing. Strategy decks should be stories, not bibliographies, and showing your work can sometimes feel like it delegitimizes the story.
In both cases (and all the ones in-between), the way the client was prepped for and received the work played a major role in the hand-wringing & indecision of the strategists preparing to deliver it. Is it really true that the best strategy is the one that gets a client to say yes, regardless of the story’s contents or the nature of the delivery? How can account teams support both the client & the strategist when they see the indecision ripple spreading both ways?
Alexa: From the relationship management perspective, there are typically two things to cultivate that will benefit both camps and are intertwined – trust and exposure.
I think pulling disciplines apart is fatal and contributes to the lack of trust and exposure teams get with clients. To your point, some clients want to see the thinking, the data, the work behind the work, and others just want to get to the final answer. In both cases, they want the confidence that their agency did the due diligence to get to that final answer as a group, so you have to build their trust in your full team, your methods, your way of collective thinking to get their head nodding. And to build that trust, they have to know you and you have to know them. My best client relationships have been when the account, creative and strategy leads were all accountable for a relationship’s success – a united triad, working together in support of the client’s brand. Hard conversations could happen in real time, and a way forward charted by the end of the call.
On a not-so-different point, exposing clients to the process – not going away and coming back with a big reveal – is also critical to fostering progress. And it doesn’t have to be heavy-handed, especially for those “just tell me the answer” clients. It’s something we’ve designed Quick Study’s system around based on our experiences. Getting that buy-in – the co-signs along the way – is so valuable; for clients, they see the logic and the thoughtfulness, and for the agency, we get to temperature check before we have to commit. This does a lot to allay indecision and can keep teams plugged in vs burning out.
Rob: I’ll admit that allowing others into my process as a strategist was something I had to learn to be comfortable with. When you are so focused on telling a good story, you want to hoard as much time as possible for yourself to think about it and work through it. I used to see internal reviews as a danger to my story because I feared others would mess with it or point out flaws, and I often would hide slides behind big text boxes labeled “TBD” or “WIP” to save myself from having to explain thoughts I wasn’t sure were complete yet. When I was feeling extra indecisive, I would even pretend certain slides weren’t final to throw folks off the scent and protect myself from constructive criticism I knew would come my way. So much unnecessary stress for strategists is because they get too deep and are afraid to poke up their head for help or assistance.
But now, as you alluded to, our process at Quick Study allows me to pressure test the strategy with clients along the way and get buy-in before the big reveal. Sure, you lose that Mad Men “flip the page and wow them” moment sometimes, but you also get to set aside your indecision. By the time we get to the big meeting we know our client is already on the road with us to the answer we’re presenting, which relieves so much of the stress I felt early on in my career.
Creating that buy-in early in the process also gets work approved faster. What value is a massive brand strategy to clients if it’s been stuck in approvals for months and the data that formed it is now outdated? Sometimes indecision literally makes the work obsolete.
Alexa: Our industry – client and agency side – is coming to terms with the idea that “perfect is the enemy of progress.” By no means am I saying that the craft of it all is dead, but there is nothing worse than watching a cultural opportunity pass you by while your head is buried in scenario planning or going through rounds of creative reviews on a single TikTok. Everyone loses, the overburn is real, and the market has taught you nothing since nothing went out.
It is tough because most organizations aren’t set up with business leaders who are actually deputized to make and fund decisions. We’ve all been swept up in the swirl as the indecision torch is passed from one “stakeholder” to another. Not only is the agency along for a dizzying ride but that “indecision by committee” can’t be satisfying for the clients either. Worst of all, the work gets denatured as it tries to do everything for everyone. You know that moment when you look at something like a strategic platform and you’re just like, “Wow, I don’t even know what that sentence says…” – that’s when you have to snap out of it, ground yourself in the simplest form of the job to be done, and help others regain clarity as well.
As a strategic partner, how do you help clients regain focus?
Rob: Usually a good loud cough during a Zoom call does the trick! (Kidding… mostly.)
To be honest, sometimes good strategy can feel like informed therapy. Quite often the challenges or solutions uncovered by a strategic deep dive aren’t “new” to the client, but framing them in a fresh way can help the clients see why they were spiraling out of control and unable to make a decision. To help expedite these “breakthroughs” I like to find words or phrases that the client team is latched onto, and then reframe those words or phrases in an early worksession so that we create a shared language around the problem being solved.
We’re in a lucky position being a company consisting of 2 senior, experienced people; it gives us permission to act more directly on the challenges we are seeing and also push clients to join us in taking action without having to worry too much about the bureaucratic and political challenges a strategist can run into at bigger shops. It also helps us build trust faster, and as you mentioned earlier trust is a key to maintaining the focus of a client. A distrustful relationship between a client and a strategist is an E-ZPass to indecision on both fronts.
Before we wrap up, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention probably the worst part about indecision: how boring it makes the final results! On a scale from yawn to snoozefest, I find the churn of an indecisive client relationship and the resulting outputs to usually land around a zZzZz. What about you? Any final tips for how to avoid indecision and its litany of ripple effects we’ve discussed today?
Alexa: I have the “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” response to work that has been blanded to death.
Some things to keep in mind at the jump and to also trigger if you find yourself mid-indecision vortex:
Align on the single most important objective
Build trust with clients and understand their motivations. Also, don’t be afraid to show your expertise — that’s what they’re paying for.
Finesse your system to include exposure points so you get client buy-in along the way
Establish decision-making protocols on both sides
React quickly and decisively when something does start to swirl
Get comfortable in the new reality that “perfection” doesn’t equal performance
Rob: Those are all great reminders for everyone, so I’ll just add a specific few points for strategists:
Your team isn’t your enemy - don’t be afraid to present them work you aren’t sure about yet.
If you find yourself unsure and feel like you’re trying to talk yourself into an answer - it might not be the right one! Sometimes you gotta trust your gut.
On the flip side, don’t overthink things that feel right. Injecting extra stress into an already challenging situation isn’t worth it.
Alexa, thanks again for joining the conversation today! It’s been valuable to include your thoughts as an experienced account executive and leader.
Alexa: Of course! I enjoyed it. Thanks for the invite into your sacred newsletter space.
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