Why Good Efforts Still Fail
Strategy, Systems Analysis, and Cybernetics For the field of Marketing and Everyday Life
“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft a-gley.”
- from To a Mouse by Robert Burns.
Any reader over the age of ten, mice included, can likely sympathize. As we grow into adulthood and start to piece together what we might like our lives to be, despite any amount of hard work, despite having what we think are all the pieces, despite “following all the rules,” plans and dreams still go awry.
Despite how it may seem, I don’t mention this to discourage you. In fact, I think it should do just the opposite. Let me contrast that Burns quote with a more verbose paraphrasing I seem destined to misremember to the point of it being as unattributable as it is profound:
When God was making the universe, He realized that if everything were rational and predictable, humans would quickly learn everything there is to know, cease to marvel, and become nihilistic. On the other hand, if nothing were predictable, humans would become so discouraged or terrified by the chaos of life that they would become apathetic all the same.
So He decided, in His wisdom, that some things should follow the laws of rationality so strictly as to be predictable, and others would remain forever just out of reach of human conception. That way, He surmised, humans would be left with the infinitely interesting task of sorting out one kind of thing from the other.
- A misquote I am choosing to misattribute to either Freeman or George Dyson.
Plans do go awry, but if nothing ever did, there would be no room for improvement or growth. There would be nothing new, nothing surprising. Not to shoehorn Hegel into every article, but contradiction and internal collapse are part of conscious being, and those failures of rationality to fully capture an amorphous reality are what allow for creativity and the birth of new ideas.
That said, it is often more relaxing to walk across a bridge whose engineers did not take such a cavalier view of predictability. We do see a pattern in “the greats” of history in being those who were able to account for amorphous reality and accurately make predictions about the future.
The differentiating factor between those whose names we remember and the trillions of names we do not is the subject of today’s article: strategy.
Not the infuriatingly popular hack industry term peddled under the name “game theory,” but honest-to-God strategy as a holistic concept innate to all manners of life.
Plans do not fail solely because their authors are lazy. More often, plans fail because immense effort is applied non-strategically and forward-looking views are kept too narrow.
Strategy is not a question of effort. It is a question of architecture, and it has implications for business owners, war chiefs, and grandmas alike.
What Is Strategy?
As always, we channel Socrates and begin with a definition.
“Strategy” is a difficult concept to nail down because it is so wide-ranging. In Lawrence Freedman’s “Strategy: A History” (2013), he situates the concept in nature first. He cites observations on chimpanzee social behaviors made by the late Jane Goodall that, for lack of a better term, had to be deemed “politics.” Even in primate bands, simple aggressiveness was rarely the first or last measure taken in the pursuit of “alpha male” status. The chimps were observed playing social games, seizing control of resources, and even performing espionage to aid their faction in its quest for power.
This suggests that strategic thinking, as we would likely deem this behavior, is not simply a human enterprise; it is ingrained in our DNA, a primal inheritance from our days on the savannah.
Simply wanting something is not usually enough to achieve that thing. Many factors around you will seem to manifest out of thin air to impede your progress. The desires of the other conscious beings around you may also run counter to your own, and even when they do not mean to, they may invalidate your assumptions about reality as they focus on their own pursuits.
With this in mind, I would put forward the following working definition: strategy is the management of a system’s structure to fulfill a specific objective.
This frame has two parts. First, it requires systems analysis, meaning a genuinely holistic account of factors, resources, relationships, and actors. Second, it requires contingency-minded reasoning, meaning an effort to keep a system oriented toward a desired outcome even when some of its pieces change.
Simply then, strategy is partially systems analysis and partially critical rationalism.
Even simpler, strategy is understanding the pieces on the board, understanding how they move, and understanding that your understanding is always limited by the information available to you at the time.
It is important to emphasize that simply having a plan does not constitute a strategy. I can plan to use my car to get to work on time tomorrow, but if I do not take into account how snoozed alarms, freeway construction, or an empty gas tank can derail that plan, then I may be blindsided and left depressed when reality fails to be as I assumed it would.
Let us delve a little deeper into systems analysis. This is something you can get a degree in, so I will try to keep in mind that this is a marketing blog, not a PhD defense.
A system consists of three basic parts: its elements, its interconnections, and its purpose.
A system is not just a collection of objects and actors. Yes, a system contains objects, but the objects “in play” may be far broader than assumed on first glance. The connection and relationship each of those objects has to one another is also deeply interconnected; moving one piece can inadvertently affect one or several others. Lastly, from a practical perspective, a system constrains and enables what choices, actions, or movements are available to any given piece at any given time.
Systems, from this perspective, appear as opaque “black boxes,” often too complex or all-encompassing to quantify and assess.
I find a famous quote from the cybernetician Stafford Beer especially useful here: “The purpose of a system is what it does.” Beer used that line to insist that observed behavior is often a better guide to a system’s real purpose than official rhetoric or stated intention. This gives, even the novice, an entry point into detecting and examining systems.
This perspective helps because there is always a rhetorical layer to human-made systems. People often say they want one thing and then act in a way that reliably produces something very different. If a system consistently produces a certain result, despite varying inputs, then that result tells you something important about the system’s real operative purpose, regardless of what anyone says its purpose is supposed to be.
Without getting any further into the weeds, we can take a relatively naive view, for practicality’s sake, that a system exists whenever elements are manipulated to do something. The resulting something is the purpose of that system at that moment in time.
Emphasis at the end there to indicate that just because a system does a particular thing now does not mean its purpose and results cannot be changed.
I like this definition of strategy because it is specific enough to let us reason about it clearly, yet general enough to apply to almost any goal-oriented situation.
So now we have a little bit of solid ground to understand what Strategy is.
What might be helpful now is to examine what Strategy is not.
Why People Misunderstand Strategy
Planning, optimizing, staying busy, being ambitious: all perfectly fine things in their own context. But a narrow focus on one, to the detriment of the others, does not a strategy make.
True strategic thinking begins by abandoning linear, compartmentalized thinking.
Modern education and modern organizations often teach subjects and problems in separable boxes. Biology has its box, chemistry has another. Economics here, history there. Within each subject, problems are broken into parts in order to trace local causes and effects. This happens, it leads to that, so if we change the first thing, we will change the second.
Systems-thinking challenges exactly this habit, arguing that it often leads to sub-optimization, where improving one part inadvertently degrades the whole.
Linear thinking is useful for building educational institutions and carving out lots of space for many different experts in many separate and non-competitive fields of study. However, this narrow view of reality ignores the way in which the fluidity of natural observations may transgress the boundaries of academic domains. The best solution for a given problem may stray from one domain to another as time goes on and the problem itself changes and complexifies.
Strategic thinking is holistic thinking. It is not enough to assume that your individual perspective fully grasps the nuance of a problem. In fact, problems are often better seen as open-ended and ongoing phenomena. A solved problem typically gives rise to several more.
Modern education often teaches and incentivizes a way of thinking that rushes, simplifies, and protects assumptions (if not our own, then those of the educational institution). That is precisely what structured analytic methods exist to critique.
In Clear Thinking (2024) by Randolph H. Pherson, structured analytical techniques are presented as ways of slowing down, externalizing thought, and deliberately engaging more reflective reasoning rather than relying only on automatic intuition. The same book highlights five “habits of the master thinker”: challenge key assumptions, develop alternative hypotheses, look for inconsistent data, identify key drivers, and stop to reflect on the broader context before plunging ahead.
Techniques like these can help break oneself out of the rigid structures of thought we inherit from school, media, and other institutions less in vogue to critique.
One technique I have found incredibly effective and painfully simple to perform is to write a problem down. That’s it.
It’s astounding to me how few people do this. When a thought remains in your head, it remains formless, like the Boggart of the Harry Potter series that assumes the shape of whatever its victim fears the most. Problems that stay in your head seem worse than they usually are because any of their various attributes can be summoned into your mind at any moment. When you think of how to effectively handle one aspect, more pop up in its place like the many-headed Hydra (sorry to mix metaphors).
When you write a problem down, you pin it; you take away its power to shape shift. Then you can start to see its true shape and the pieces that make it up.
As you do this, practice another helpful technique: critical introspection. As you are writing a problem down and cataloging its various aspects, you should ask yourself if any of the things you’re writing down may be more attributable to a personal bias as opposed to the way the world really is. Every person has some form of bias; that’s the first thing they teach you in any credible school of journalism (“fair and balanced” is a propagandistic myth).
Your bias is not just your opinions on a given topic. It is how your unique history and experience guide, and sometimes limit, your ability to conceptualize a situation.
Don’t be impulsive with your reasoning; go slow. When quantifying a problem, ask yourself whether you have taken anything on assumption. Imagine how other people with other backgrounds might conceptualize the situation differently. Check whether anything you are taking as evidence would be better classified as opinion. What are the critical elements, the principal elements, that impact all others?
Important as well is to think about what larger problems and systems your problem or strategic goal may sit within. Inversely, what smaller problems and systems may rest inside it?
As you write these thoughts down and work them out logically, choices will begin to reveal themselves. Your notes will begin to resemble clusters of interconnected parts and impacts. By studying these interconnections, you begin to see how addressing one small factor changes others, and how.
Now you are thinking strategically.
Applied Systems Thinking
We have defined a system as a set of interconnected elements that form a structure, exhibit behaviors, and seek to fulfill a purpose. We have also defined systems thinking as a discipline that examines not only the parts, but the relationships and boundaries of a given system.
Now, let’s turn the heat up a little and get cooking.
Two more elements of systems thinking I want to introduce are feedback and emergence.
Feedback, without straying too far into cybernetics just yet, is one of the characteristics that make a system a system. Feedback is what allows a system’s parts to be adjusted in pursuit of a goal, and critically, as obstacles appear in the path toward that goal, allows a resilient system to respond in such a way that an unexpected input does not destroy the system entirely. The feedback mechanism at play is the constant comparison of the present system state to a theoretical “optimal state.” Feedback is the datum that allows the system to better steer itself towards that optimal state.
Take a car engine, for example. There is a common misconception that putting sugar in a gas tank is uniquely detrimental to the engine as opposed to, say, putting sand in the same tank. The truth is, sugar impedes an engine’s ability to function because it is a sediment, not because of any unique chemical found in sugar, and engines are built to function when they are given liquid fuel as an input. Putting sugar or sand in an engine doesn’t permanently disable it, though. To return an engine to running order, a mechanic simply needs to empty the tank, scrape the sediment, and replace the fuel filters.
The engine’s parts are susceptible to breakage due to unexpected inputs, but strategically, modern engines are built modularly such that you can often replace individual parts to return the engine to working order rather than needing to replace the entire engine.
This is an example not only of how the engine itself behaves as a system, but also of how the engine manufacturing and maintenance industries represent broader systems that encompass the day-to-day system of you using your gas tank for sugar storage.
Emergence is a word that gets thrown around in a lot of academic fields, so it can mean different things in different contexts. For our purposes, emergence refers to the way new complex behaviors arise from the interactions of parts within a system. A system taken as a whole can display qualities you would never infer from studying each component in isolation. Systems-thinking literature treats emergence as a central reason linear models fail to capture real-world behavior.
A standard way this concept gets explained is in sports. As any movie on the subject insists, having a single superstar on the team is never enough to win the championship.* Which team becomes champion is always, at some level, a question of which team has better cohesion, which team functions better as a diverse system of interacting parts.
When all the players on a team shift their mindset from doing what is immediately beneficial to themselves to making in-game decisions based on give-and-takes that are beneficial to the team as a whole, what emerges is a different kind of play. Indeed, what may emerge is the concept of team sports itself.
If all 11 players on a futball team only look out for themselves, the resulting actions would scarcely resemble the game of futball. Team sports are an emergent behavior of individuals aligning their actions toward a common result.
With these final definitions, you have most of the conceptual tools you need to apply strategic thinking and systems analysis in your life. Despite this, I do hope you will continue reading.
* LeBron James being the obvious exception to this rule.
Why Planning Is Not Strategy
Planning is an important element of strategy, but it is a single part of a larger system, if you will.
Simple planning is tactical. It relies on linear thinking and simple cause-and-effect understandings. Something happens, which causes another thing to happen, which in turn causes another thing to happen. I will do this, then I will do that, and so on.
Strategic thinking, by contrast, is more dynamic and feedback-oriented. A plan exists as a proposed goal within a broader system. Choices of action are determined by given positions within that system. Certain decisions affect, and are affected by, other objects within the system. The system can also contain other actors with different purposes who can change pieces within the system in ways that run counter to your own purpose.
It is not enough to simply say, “I will do this task to accomplish that goal using these tactics.” It is better to say, “That is my goal, here are my current courses of action, and these are the interconnected pieces at my disposal. Moving a piece in a given manner will have these expected results based on theseassumptions. If a given assumption turns out to be wrong, or a given course of action is disabled, here is how I will move other pieces to counteract and continue the system on its way toward my goal.”
It is not enough to plan to wake up on time. You set an alarm just in case you sleep in. You may snooze one alarm, so you set a few instead. If you are likely to snooze one alarm, you are likely to snooze all of them, so you put your phone on the other side of the room. Even if you leave the bed, though, you may still feel the desire to go back, so you set tomorrow’s clothes out to make staying out of bed easier. Yet, even if you have your clothes, you may still lack the energy to get your day started, so you prep the coffee maker the night before to make activating it trivial. In thinking all this through, what emerges is the realization that the best tactic for waking up on time is probably going to bed sooner.
Each step you build in this way increases the likelihood that your goal will be achieved. Each of these steps can be thought of as a tactic. Tactics are the building blocks of plans. Plans are enabled by linearly conceived assumptions. Strategy is the thinking through and crafting of additional plans and new tactics in the event that one planned assumption or another proves incorrect.
To paraphrase Baron Vladimir Harkonnen: plans within plans, wheels within wheels.
A fishbone diagram can be a great tool to get started in systems thinking. Imagine the skeleton of a fish, with its tail, spine, ribs, and head. The head is the problem or goal you are trying to analyze. Begin there and work backward. This is your ultimate effect.
As we have discussed, each ultimate effect is the product of many different interconnecting causes. Thus, the ribs of the fishbone diagram, as they connect to the spine, represent categories of causes that drive the system toward its result. One rib may be labeled Environment, another People, another Processes.
Let’s say, for instance, you run a grocery store, and you notice that you have been getting fewer customers lately. You may take individual tactics like putting products on sale or putting an inflatable man outside your store, but if you have not analyzed the problem as a system, you are taking shots in the dark.
As a fishbone diagram, the fish head would be the observed problem: a decline in customers. The ribs represent categories of possible causes, such as people, environment, processes, measurement, materials, and competitors. Fewer customers may reflect a lack of awareness, distance, transportation limits, weather, stronger competing offers, weak store layout, wasteful internal processes that raise prices, or even bad measurement. A supposed drop in customers may not be a true drop in foot traffic at all, but a decline in average order value, customer quality, or profit misread as fewer visits.
Once these possible causes are categorized, the shop owner can respond more intelligently: audit the metric first, run targeted ads if awareness is low, offer delivery if weather or distance are barriers, or reposition around higher-quality products instead of competing on price alone.
What this does well is breadth and legibility. A fishbone diagram is excellent for forcing you to stop guessing and systematically inventory possible causes. It’s really great for early analysis because it helps you separate categories, notice blind spots, and question whether the problem has even been defined correctly. In this example, one of its strongest contributions is that it reveals measurement itself as a possible cause of misdiagnosis.
What fishbones do less well is dynamics. A fishbone diagram helps brainstorm possible causes feeding into a result, but it does not naturally show how causes influence one another over time, how one intervention may create second-order effects, or how a result may loop back and worsen or relieve its own causes.
That is where a “causal loop diagram” helps. Causal loop diagrams help you conceptualize, for example, that fewer customers reduce revenue, reduced revenue weakens staffing or product quality, and weaker quality drives away more customers, thus the decline reinforces itself. Or it could show a balancing loop, where a decline in customers pushes the store to improve delivery, which recovers convenience and stabilizes demand.
In other words, the fishbone helps you ask, “What could be causing this?” while the causal loop helps you ask, “How do these causes interact, reinforce, delay, or counteract one another over time?”
Something something use both. Something something Hegel. You get the idea.
If Your Only Tool Is a Ladder, The Whole World Looks Climbable
How Changes in Quantity Can Manifest Qualitatively
As a personal challenge to myself, I will complete the following section without invoking Hegel.
Now that we have strategic thinking and its applications down, we can start to get a little more creative.
Systems often work in a purpose-oriented, teleological way. That is a fancy way of saying that the end shapes the means. When we aim at a goal, our means manifest around that goal. Aim at a different goal, and your means will change right along with it. When a system’s purpose changes, its structure and internal behaviors often need to change as well.
Even if a newly proposed goal represents a purely quantitative change in a system’s desired outcome, the necessary adjustments that system’s internal structure needs to achieve that new outcome may be qualitative.
To make this less abstract, imagine you need to get onto the roof of a single-story home. For this purpose, a 15-foot ladder will do the trick.
Now, imagine you need to get onto a rooftop that is 50 feet off the ground. Suddenly, your ladder is not sufficient. Ladders in general are not sufficient. A 50-foot ladder would be unruly and dangerous; an additional impediment rather than a solution.
What changed from the first situation to the second? The desired height of the roof expanded only quantitatively from 15 to 50. We’re not climbing to the moon, still a rooftop, it’s just that this rooftop is higher. The fascinating thing to notice is that in expanding the desired outcome purely quantitatively, new qualities emerged and rendered the previous tools obsolete, even if they were to be scaled at the same rate as the goal.
When your goal gets bigger, simply scaling your tactics is not always enough. Sometimes you need new tactics altogether.
If your ads are performing poorly, it is rarely enough to throw more money behind them. If your goal is to increase ROAS by a modest amount, a bigger budget may sometimes help. But if your goal is to increase ROAS by ten or twenty times, you will probably need better tactics, not just the same tactics with more gusto. What that looks like is more efficient budget allocation, cleaner offers, better targeting, tighter positioning, A/B testing, and a clearer understanding not only of whom you want to include but also of whom you do not.
Just because something has worked in the past does not mean it always will in the future, and that becomes truer as your goals scale.
As a philosopher once said, the truth loses nothing by being written down, though truths can certainly go stale.
I believe the philosopher who said that was... damn it.
Strategy Is a Multiplayer Game
Before I close out this general section and move on to strategy for marketing specifically, I need to address one final and critical element of general strategy, and that element is other people.
I’ve already mentioned it a couple of times in passing, but it is worth examining directly: while you are analyzing the systems in front of you and building strategies to address them, other people are out there in the world doing the same thing. You need to take those people and their strategies into consideration within your own. If these other players are known to you specifically, think through their individual position and likely desired outcome. If you don’t know the other players specifically, but know they are out there, then strategize about them in the abstract. This is about as close to a discussion of “game theory” as I will get.
In building a strategy to sell your product or service to potential customers, you need to consider how your strategy for earning money from them will come into conflict with their strategies for spending as little money as possible.
Human strategy very often involves signaling, concealment, misdirection, and partial information. Signaling one action while preparing another is a pattern old enough to show up in mythology, from the Trojan Horse to the temptation of Job. Not only will people mislead others when it helps them achieve their goals, but they will frequently mislead themselves as well.
My focus here is on the latter archetype: the passive players in the abstract, whom you do not know specifically and whose personal strategies may conflict with yours coincidentally rather than intentionally.
A deer in the road is still a detriment, whether it is personally trying to spite you or not.
Behavioral and cognitive research often treats human beings as “cognitive misers,” meaning that we are biased toward conserving mental effort whenever we can. We can imagine these energy conservation tactics employed by the brain as belonging to the “System 1” conception. This reference is taken from the two-system model popularized by Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), in which System 1 is fast, intuitive, and automatic, while System 2 is slower, more deliberate, and more effortful.
A person operating without an intentional strategy will often default to “System 1” thinking, the brain’s built-in strategy for conserving effort. Knowing that can matter a great deal in your own strategies.
For marketers, the trick is often to engage a potential customer’s System 1 without prematurely forcing them into System 2’s more effortful, skeptical, and deliberative mode of evaluation.
This is part of why “default options” and “decoy pricing” can be effective marketing tactics. When something is on sale, your first thought may be of a strong compulsion to buy whatever is being offered because you believe not doing so will cost you more money. Urgency is such a big deal in advertising because, if a person thinks for too long, they will realize that the best way to save money is actually to buy nothing at all. It’s not enough to say that something is on sale. Effective marketing insists that a thing is on sale for a limited time, and that to reap the benefits, you need to act right now. Less thinky, more shopy.
When factoring other people into your own strategy, what you are really considering is their internal narrative, the story they tell themselves about their life and why they do the things they do. The human brain is a storytelling machine.
A famous “brain-severance” experiment shows this best.
In some severe epilepsy cases, the corpus callosum, the major connection between the hemispheres, is severed so that the two sides of the brain can no longer communicate normally. The pop-culture “left brain vs right brain” cliché is mostly nonsense, but some brain functions really are lateralized, with lobes within each of the hemispheres taking on different mental tasks and image processing.
In the well-known “chicken claw and snow scene” experiment, a “split-brain” patient was shown a chicken claw in their left eye and a snowy scene in their right eye. Asked to choose related images with each hand, the patient selected a chicken with the right hand (controlled by the left hemisphere that saw the chicken claw) and a shovel with the left (controlled by the right hemisphere that saw the snowy scene). When asked why they chose the shovel, the patient’s left hemisphere, which controls speech and had not seen the snow scene, confabulated a story: "You need the shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”
That explanation is coherent, but we know it was invented after the fact to make behavior feel intelligible. It was made up out of thin air to soothe the mind in the face of a truth that may be psychologically damaging.
That is one of the most important psychological concepts to grasp, not just for marketers, but really anyone who wants to understand people: People often act first and rationalize later, but they are completely unaware of this.
We often attribute inaccurate levels of cunning and planning to the actions of people around us or even to ourselves. The truth is, we almost always act first. It is only retroactively that the mind creates an intelligible narrative around why we performed the actions we did. That narrative takes the form of thoughts like “I am this kind of person, so I do things like this.”
The truth of the matter is almost always that one acts out in an immediate, intuitive, System 1 manner.
In Freudian terms, the ego, the conscious mind, that in your mind which refers to itself as “I,” rather than accept the terrifying possibility that it is not the master of its own house, chooses to believe in a story of its own creation that paints itself as the one steering the ship.
As David Hume said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”
What this implies for your strategy is a need to leverage emotional drivers. Presenting someone with all the rational reasons why your product is superior is often not enough to convince them.
Rather, your strategy should take into account the somatic markers, emotional touchpoints, and symbolic meanings at play in a given system. Semiotically, consider how various signs and symbols will be interpreted by your target audience. Psychographically, consider what your customers think about themselves and the world around them. Ask how your product or service fits not only into your prospect’s life, but into the story they tell themselves about why they live the life they do.
You should now have everything you need to understand Christopher Nolan’s Inception.
Strategy in Marketing
If you have gotten to this point, the next section should appear fairly self-explanatory. If that is the case, see you next week, stay fresh!
But if you are someone like me who works in marketing and is always curious to know more, what I want to do in this last section is demonstrate more concretely how strategy is used in marketing.
We can see now that simply putting an item on sale is not a strategy. It can be a tactic within a broader strategy, but without a dynamic, systems-level analysis, a tactic alone can end up doing more harm than good.
Diagnosing and solving business problems, and by extension social problems (which I think is the true purpose of marketing), requires developing theories of customer behavior, psychographics, and segmentation, while also examining a business’s positioning, offers, pricing, and channels to determine whether they are actually attuned to the needs of the market.
People rarely buy products. People do not really even buy “solutions,” at least not in the sterile way that phrase is often used in marketing textbooks. What people buy are ideas. People buy a product to solve a problem so that they themselves, or the people around them, will think of them a certain way.
A recurring theme in marketing author Seth Godin’s work is the idea that effective marketing tells a tribal story: “People like us do things like this.” I find myself recalling that phrase a lot in my work because it frames buying behavior not merely as utility-maximization, but as belonging, identity, and social alignment.
What matters more than the problem you, as a business owner, think you are solving with your product or service is the problem your customers think your product or service solves for them. These are not always the same thing. A car dealer might think they sell cars, but to their customers, they sell a look of jealousy on neighbors’ faces, words of gratitude from a community for hauling half the youth soccer team to practice, or even the simple ability to daydream about belonging to one fantasmatic group or another and the character traits that belonging may provide.
You do not learn customer nuances like this from one-off campaigns either. That is why it is better to think of a marketing strategy not as a static document or a series of if-then statements, but as a continuous system, one that is built to take in information and improve as it goes.
Your strategic goal as a marketer should not be “great performance on a single campaign.” That is a good sign that your strategy may be working, but a successful campaign is not itself a strategy. Without a proper strategy, you can get lucky and produce an ad campaign that performs well. But if you want more reliable results and the ability to improve those results over time, you need strategic theories and systems that you can use to test and refine your tactics.
Remember, a durable system is one that sets a target, compares current conditions to desired conditions, detects deviation, and reacts accordingly. Marketing takes place in the world of human social interaction. It is volatile and constantly evolving. A system that is not built to evolve with it is doomed to fail.
Cybernetics (took me long enough) is the study of how systems regulate themselves and interact with their environment. Without deviating too much from the topic at hand, the Viable System Model, put forward by Stafford Beer, proposes five internal systems a complex system needs to adapt, survive, and improve. In broad terms, System 1 performs the primary activities; System 2 coordinates them; System 3 manages resources and control; System 4 looks outward to the environment and future; and System 5 provides overall policy, identity, and direction. If a system contains all five of these elements in one form or another, it is considered a Viable System and is much more resilient to decay than other non-VSM systems.
This idea really did a lot for me when I first learned it. Once you internalize the VSM, you start to see it everywhere.
A smart thermostat for your house, the prototypical cybernetic example, can be read this way: System 1 is the heating and cooling equipment doing the base work of changing the temperature; System 2 is the thermostat’s continuous signal-sharing between sensors and HVAC so those actions stay coordinated; System 3 is the control logic that allocates when and how strongly the system runs; System 4 is the outward-facing sensing of the environment, reading room temperature, time of day, weather changes, and occupancy patterns; System 5is the target temperature range and comfort rules that define what the whole system is trying to maintain.
A business can be framed the same way: System 1 is the operating core, the teams that make, sell, deliver, and support the product or service; System 2 is the meeting rhythm, reporting, and information-sharing that prevents those units from colliding with each other; System 3 is management, budgeting, process control, and resource allocation; System 4 is research, strategy, forecasting, and market intelligence, the parts looking outward to competitors, customers, risks, and new opportunities; System 5 is the executive policy layer, mission, priorities, and big-picture decision-making that determines what kind of business the firm is trying to be.
If you wanted your marketing strategy to be highly resilient to change, applying the VSM to it would look like this: System 1would be campaign execution, content production, distribution, email, ads, landing pages, and sales enablement, the actual value-delivery and demand-generation work; System 2 would be the dashboards, calendars, channel coordination, and KPI-sharing that keep those efforts aligned; System 3 would be the layer that allocates spend, enforces process, sets performance thresholds, and decides where resources go; System 4 would be audience research, market monitoring, trend analysis, platform watching, and competitive intelligence, the outward-looking function that detects when strategy needs to adapt; System 5 would be the overarching marketing policy, your positioning, goals, brand logic, and definition of success.
That’s all, folks
I realize today’s edition may have been more than you bargained for when you started reading, but I genuinely think this way of approaching reality is as applicable in war as it is in work.
When you are faced with a problem in any facet of your life, ask yourself the following questions:
What happened?
What structure keeps producing this result?
What assumptions am I making?
What second-order effects might my actions create?
Is my actual goal different from my assumed goal?
Is my strategy operating inside of any larger systems?
Are there micro-systems operating within mine?
Have I exhaustively cataloged the variables at play within my system?
Have I sufficiently identified how those variables are interconnected?
What other players are operating within my system, and what goals and strategies might they be operating according to?
This is not just typical marketer BS either. I genuinely think this way of thinking can change your life.
Now, in closing, if you are reading this, then my strategy has worked perfectly.
Until next time, stay fresh.
- Casey