#411 – August 3, 2025

Explaining Strategy, Engaging Attention

Hello, fellow strategists!  We all know that even the best strategies fall flat without clear, credible communication. In this issue, we explore how a single, well-designed slide can engage stakeholders with greater strategic impact, why attention (not just reach) drives results, how trust beats polish in marketing, and how certain values show up in high-performance behaviours. Enjoy!

 

Quick Takes

Can You Explain Strategy on a Single Slide?

It seems the right picture really can be worth a thousand strategy meetings.

Most visualizations of a strategy framework don’t work — fewer than 20% clearly communicate an organization’s decisions. Yet when they do work, the impact is huge: in a study reported in HBR recently, professors João Cotter Salvado and Freek Vermeulen found investors were twice as likely to support a deal when the strategic rationale was shown on a single, well-designed slide.

To build a visualization that helps people understand and respond to your strategy:

• Group ideas into 3 to 4 main strategic concepts. People need just a few anchors to grasp a coherent story.
• Organize detail in layers. Let viewers zoom in to see how strategic choices connect to implementation.
• Use colour and shading sparingly and intentionally. Use them only to distinguish strategic layers — not to decorate. Too many colours confuse.
• Show cause-and-effect with flow diagrams. Highlight the logic linking clients, resources, value delivered. and the external environment.
• Lay it out horizontally. People process strategic “landscapes” more easily when arranged left to right.

Taking the time to design a clear, layered visualization of your strategy will have far greater impact compared to other tools such as photographs, maps, logos, and even bar charts and line graphs. For more details, see The Right Way to Design a Strategy Visualization.

 

Trust Before Polish:  Marketing in the Age of AI

In a world overflowing with slick, AI-generated content, organizations in your target market are tuning out brand polish and tuning in to peer voices. What cuts through the noise today isn’t clever copy — it’s credible content from real users. Before your message impresses, it has to be believed.

In a recent article, MarketingProfs.com explained how to build a trusted business-to-business brand in an AI-first world.

• Prioritize Customer Voices: Peer reviews, case studies, and unscripted testimonials have far more impact than vendor-authored blogs or buzzword-heavy web pages.
• Structure for Discoverability: Use schema markup and clean formatting in your digital communications so AI tools like Google’s AI Overviews can surface your most credible content — especially reviews and FAQs.
• Bake Reviews into the Journey: Don’t treat testimonials as an afterthought. Ask for feedback after wins, then amplify it in your sales and marketing materials.
• Centre Your Strategy Around Communities: Your audience is already having trusted conversations in their peer networks. Show up there, not just on your homepage.

Trust is your best differentiator — lead with proof, not polish.

 

Values Behind High-Performance Behaviours

Many clients spend hours articulating their workplace values as part of a strategic plan, but sometimes we struggle with how those qualities get translated into behaviours that are applied day-to-day. Writing on LinkedIn, Justin Wright identifies 12 Rare Traits of a High-Impact Employee  — learnable qualities that separate high performers from everyone else. Here’s a selection of some of our favourites from his list:

• They don’t wait to be asked. They see what needs doing and handle it. They take action without being told.
• They fix what’s broken. Anyone can point to problems. They solve them. They bring answers, not just complaints.
• They truly listen. Not just waiting for their turn to speak. They hear what others really need.
• They balance data with instinct. Numbers matter. So does intuition. They know when to trust each.
• They finish what they start. Starting is common. Finishing is valuable. Their word is their bond.
• They make work better for others. Value isn’t just about your personal output. It’s about helping the whole team shine.
• They lift others up without seeking credit. True help comes with no strings attached. They cheer for team wins like their own.

All are great traits to hire for and develop in your team.

 

8020Info Spotlight:

Breaking Down the Consumer “Attention Equation”

In a new study, McKinsey has found that a third of the payback from media investment is driven by the quality of consumer attention — what the global consulting firm calls the “attention quotient”. For consumers in an audience, their level of focus is driven by two main factors:

Why they are engaging with it:

• To enjoy something that they love (like movies, music and sports).
• For education and information (magazines, newspapers and podcasts dominate here)
• For social connection (Facebook and other social media)
• For light entertainment and relaxation (cable television and video streaming are primary)
• For background ambience (primarily radio or digital music or podcasts)

How actively they are engaged with the content:

• In-person experiences elicit the highest level of focus.
• The level for books (physical and digital) compares well with live experiences.
• Gaming is the only digital medium that gets close to live levels of focus.
• Communal experiences (such as video games or streaming video) correlate with focus.

McKinsey notes that younger consumers aren’t less attentive; they just pay attention to different mediums.  (We found it interesting that the level of book consumption was even across generation members, i.e. close to 50% said they had read a book in the prior month). And overall, the more focused consumers are, the more likely they are to spend.

The most valuable types of media consumers (as customers) are “content lovers” (the super fans of entertainment); the “interactivity enthusiasts” (from online betting and video games to message boards like Reddit), and “community trendsetters” (the extroverted culture creators who seek out concerts, movies, theme parks and social media).

For more details, see their article on the distracted state of consumer attention.

 

For Your Reading List:  The Mystery of Mastery

How do people get really good at something—baking sourdough, drawing nudes, performing sleight of hand? In The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery, longtime New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik sets out to explore that question. What he finds is that mastery isn’t magic — it’s a matter of breaking things down, practicing the parts, and building them back up with care. And more than just a how-to, the book also explores a timeless human drive: our deep desire to improve, to understand, to get just a little bit better at the things we love.

 

Closing Thought:  The Cheshire Cat Principle

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, there’s a scene in which Alice reaches a fork in the road and has a simple exchange with the Cheshire Cat:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

— noted in Sahil Bloom’s Curiosity Chronicle.