STRATSCRAPS v195

Consulting Consignment

After a year and a half at Day One Agency as a Strategy VP, I am returning to freelance in the new year.

Why?

Because being the only full time fully remote employee is really hard. Not for me specifically but hard for/on everyone.

Because the agency model is increasingly broken and the cracks are starting to show¹. Not ideal to pivot back into uncertainty amid the biggest round of layoffs the agency world has ever seen, but I enjoy freelance because it offers what agencies can’t – to be embedded quickly into a problem and given permission to focus on it in its entirety. As a freelance strategy consultant, I am no longer part of a production line, I am a mechanic listening to the engine knock.

And finally, because I enjoy it. I enjoy meeting new teams and digesting new problems. I enjoy the sprint and the deep dive and even the onboarding. This is where I am able to offer the most.

Services²;

• Research & Consulting

• Project Briefing and Creative team partnership

• Comms Planning

• Go To Market Strategy

• Positioning and Messaging

You can read more at alexmorris.co.

With that out of the way, let’s see what I end up putting in here this time around.

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I made a good better version of a project I have been tinkering with for a while… Still not where I’d like it to be, but I wanted to share now rather than wait till it was perfect.

Scrap.cards is a little website that shuffles through random quotes I’ve collected. It’s meant as a digital version of my notecard box. Note that I am tinkering with it constantly at the moment and there may be moments where it goes down. Also, there are meant to be a mix of quotes and images but the images aren’t working at the moment. Coming soon: a submit feature.

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A variation on the user journey, is the user clock;

Read more here, but I like this way of thinking as a variation of journey mapping/day parting.

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Not unrelated to the news up top;

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A big challenge with Strategy is that it –more than any other department– performs in an amphitheater rather than a theater.

You have to play to many audiences at once, and any time you are facing one direction, your back is to someone else.

(note: this reinforces why I like to think of my freelance practice as “forward facing strategy” – I try to work on projects shoulder to shoulder with people rather than treat clients like an audience member. Together, we deliver something to the audience. And if the audience isn’t singular, well, usually those I work with are better equipped to deliver work in an amphitheater than I would be.

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By 2015, for example, eleven criminal convictions had been overturned in United States appellate courts based on prosecutors’ egregious misuses of PowerPoint. One Damn Slide After Another. (I know I’ve shared this link before, can’t remember if I’ve shared the quote)

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The TED talk I want to see.

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Friend of the pod³ Richard Shotton released a new book recently called Hacking the Human mind. Sensationalist title aside, it is a really nice little set of behavioral science references and guidances that likely wont have anything wildly new in it if you are a hard core student of cognitive bias, but even then it’s worth grabbing a copy just for the simplicity of the information, alongside the examples given. You can buy a copy here.

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The Strategist Deliverable Bingo Card

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Kinda like this as a freelancer’s services menu.

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Craigslist would be a cool tool for researching regional differences.

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Another reason the objective perspective of the freelancer is important

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I really do love a good 2x2

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This would be a fun (though likely unnecessarily complex and overly heady) way to think about comms planning

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relevant essay on going back to freelance

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WEEKLY⁴ MONSTER

Made this a while ago, but it’s remained a fav.

1. as per usual, Zoe Scaman has already articulated this incredibly well.

2. I am potentially expanding into creative ideation and development as well through partnership with 1-2 individuals. Stay tuned.

3. Was talking to someone recently who said I should start a podcast. While I will absolutely not be doing that, it would be a pretty funny format to just live read the newsletters.

4. Calling this newsletter weekly at the moment is pretty blatant false advertising. Blame my editor.