The Synthesised Strategist
Why Now Is Our Time To Become F**king Formidable
We're standing at the edge of the most exciting revolution in strategic thinking since the digital revolution began.
Listen to the echo chambers of strategy Twitter and LinkedIn: "AI is just a fad." "We need to go back to proper planning." "None of this will replace human insight." The desperate mantras of those clinging to comfort while the ground shifts beneath their feet.
The age of traditional planning is over.
Business models are being born and buried in the same breath. ChatGPT and its AI siblings aren't just changing the game – they're rewriting the rules of what's possible. Your precious frameworks and tried-and-tested methods are dissolving faster than you can document them. But this isn't a crisis. It's an opportunity for those bold enough to seize it.
In this wild new landscape, traditional strategy has all the relevance of a fax machine in a group chat. The safe harbours of specialisation are disappearing. The comfortable bubbles of industry expertise are popping. We're living in a time where understanding crypto communities is as crucial as knowing consumer psychology, where gaming dynamics shape business models as much as market forces, where a teenager's TikTok can tank a stock faster than a Goldman Sachs downgrade.
And it's fucking brilliant.
Because in this chaos lies the greatest opportunity our industry has ever seen. The chance to completely reimagine what strategic thinking can be. To build something more powerful than what came before.
Enter the synthesised strategist: the new apex predator in the strategic ecosystem. Pattern-seekers and meaning-makers who combine the range of a polymath with the precision of deep expertise. They wield AI like a sixth sense while maintaining razor-sharp human judgment. Above all, they excel at synthesis – weaving together insights from multiple domains, perspectives, and tools to forge clarity from complexity and light new paths forward.
For too long, we've bought into dangerous myths about what makes a great strategist. That generalism means shallow knowledge. That true expertise only comes from specialisation. That AI and automation dull our creative edge.
Bullshit.
The next evolution in strategic thinking transcends the false dichotomies of breadth versus depth, human versus machine capabilities. The synthesised strategist forges disparate skills and tools into new powers that were impossible before.
Look at pattern recognition. Most see patterns within their domain. The synthesised strategist spots them across universes. When analysing dating apps, they recognise the same dopamine loops that keep us endlessly scrolling Netflix. When studying luxury brands, they see the same initiation rituals that power exclusive underground music scenes.
The magic happens in application. Building a membership ecosystem by studying how Furries create belonging. Crafting recommendation algorithms by understanding how sommeliers guide wine discovery. Each pattern becomes a lens for predicting what's next.
While others view AI as either threat or saviour, the synthesised strategist sees raw material for creating new forms of intelligence. They create symbiosis. AI pattern detection married to cultural intuition. Large language models fused with strategic storytelling. Machine learning amplified by creative instinct.
This matters as we push beyond industrial-age metrics toward exponential value. Traditional measures fail to track the intangible drivers – community resonance, cultural energy, network effects. AI helps us detect, measure, and monetise these previously invisible forces. The machine reveals what we previously couldn't even see.
Synthesised strategists weave contradictory viewpoints into breakthrough insights. They hold opposing ideas in perfect tension: brands simultaneously global and hyper-local, mass and personal, planned and emergent. They find opportunities in apparent contradictions: how constraints breed creativity, how losing control can increase influence.
Modern brand building showcases this approach. In an age where brands get built in days and destroyed in hours, the synthesised strategist combines brand architecture with meme theory, cultural anthropology with real-time data analysis. Modern brands grow through curated chaos, not controlled messages – and they know how to make that chaos work.
The boundaries between disciplines are getting steamrolled by the sheer pace and complexity of change. Today's strategist works as part technologist, part anthropologist, part data scientist, and part future forecaster. The specialists watch their carefully carved niches shrink, while demand skyrockets for strategic swiss army knives – people who cut through complexity from multiple angles.
Developing these powers demands rewiring how you think. Cultivate range with depth – find the underlying patterns that connect domains. Build your pattern library – notice connections everywhere. How does a street fashion trend spread like a meme? What shared patterns connect sports fan bases and political movements? Master tool alchemy – see AI tools as elements to combine into entirely new capabilities.
The future belongs to restless minds who refuse confinement by disciplinary borders, who see the world as a living, breathing ecosystem of interconnected possibilities. This demands more than curiosity – it requires an almost feral hunger to understand, connect, and transform. Every unexpected connection rebels against the status quo, every synthesised perspective weaponises against intellectual stagnation.
The synthesised strategist doesn't wait for permission or ask for a seat at the table – they build an entirely new table. While traditionalists debate, we move. While skeptics analyse, we create. This moment demands tearing down old barriers and proving that strategic thinking imagines what could be rather than protecting what exists.
I wonder if anyone else recognizes this as an ode to the neurodivergent strategist - there’s so many kickass strategists, especially women, who’ve realized over the last several years that their strategic superpowers (and! some of the things they spent too long apologizing for) were connected to one diagnosis or another that flew under the radar because (shocker) none of that was designed for them either.
Anyway, I see my audhd self in this and many others that fit the bill above and I applaud the shit out of it — obviously it goes way beyond that, but I wanted to call it out because I think it’s likely to be particularly resonant and so I wanted to say I see you too. The patterns! The deep diving! The willingness to go rogue! The intuition!
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Comfort with the old methods is entirely dead. But I found it odd that everything itemized in your strategist's manifesto was passive and receptive, which is a major oversight.
Even tinkering with "new tools", such as AI, and extracting signals is still playing with old data. Old data is useful when the future is very much like the present. But guess what? That way of working is dying along with everything else. The more strategy remains observational and aloof, the more it will be a victim of the future. That's just driving a car looking through your rear-view mirror.
What's missing is the active piece. In complex adaptive systems, no one can simply surmise all the complexities and interactions of the system's mechanics by modeling it on old patterns and past data. The only way to truly understand how a system is working, and how it can be changed, is to intervene.
And by intervention, I don't mean "applying" observed patterns by strategically committing to leverage them in related domains. Fire and forget has no place in our future. This is much more "start with evolving hypotheses and learn as you go", committing to iterating on your hypotheses as you seek windows where you should commit more. This is analogous to what BCG Henderson Institute highlighted as "competing on the rate of learning" a few years ago.
Lots of experiments with tight, data-fed feedback loops to iterate and discover the adjacent possible. And a continuous process of reconciling the adjacent possible with desired direction. Note that I used direction and definitely NOT destination - because that kind of myopia closes perceptive minds off from novelty that will ultimately emerge during the process.
It's insufficient to leverage old data. You must create new data as part of the act.
Get out of the ivory tower and get your hands dirty. Strategy that isn't actively participating in the learning process, with tight learning loops, is dead strategy for a past that no longer exists.