A former colleague texted me on Monday from the middle of review season. She had just been told, kindly, in a calibration meeting she was not in the room for, that her thinking was strong but that strategy sits at the next level up, so this cycle she should focus on execution excellence and revisit in the spring.
She is very good. She has been very good for four years. She wanted to know what execution excellence meant, and whether I thought she should stop having ideas until April.
I get some version of this text every November.
Somewhere in the life of every organization, usually around the time it gets big enough to need a leveling framework, somebody writes a job architecture that puts the word strategic in the senior band and the word delivery in the junior one. It is meant to describe scope. It gets read as permission.
Every org eventually decides that thinking is something you get promoted into, and every org that does it stops producing thinking.
Watch what happens next, because it is always the same three moves. One, the people closest to the customer stop volunteering what they are seeing, because volunteering it reads as overstepping. Two, the people with strategy in their title start generating it from decks and dashboards instead of from contact with the actual thing. Three, the gap between those two groups gets filled with a research vendor.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, and I have been on both sides of it. At the agency I was twenty-six and doing the strategy while a director presented it, and I told myself that was just how apprenticeship works. Some of it was. Plenty of it was not. The part that was not is the part where the director could not answer a follow-up question, because the insight had never actually been theirs.
The people closest to the customer stop volunteering what they are seeing, because volunteering it reads as overstepping.
Seniority is real and worth paying for. It buys pattern recognition, the nerve to kill work, and the capital to say no to an executive. Those are genuine goods. But none of them are the raw material. The raw material is noticing, and noticing is distributed randomly across a company with no regard whatsoever for your comp band.
So if you run a team, the fix is unglamorous. Ask the most junior person in the room first, not last. Attribute the idea to whoever had it, out loud, in front of the client. Stop treating strategic thinking as a competency to be demonstrated at promotion time and start treating it as the job.
I told my friend to keep having ideas. Then I went home, where Truffles was sitting on my open notebook, unpromoted, entirely unbothered, doing exactly what she thinks is important.