The Importance of Evolving - Not Regressing - Our Thinking Through Interactions

Written By Bruno Araldi

Getting out of our heads is important. 

People evolve through interactions and feedback, our psyche evolves through interactions and feedback.

As strategists, our thinking evolves through interactions and feedback.

It’s most often better that these interactions are with real people - in life and at work while developing strategies. Yet, as we all know and have been testing possibilities, AI can be very helpful if used in moderation for interactions and feedback loops that improve our way of thinking.

Initial research.

Bounce first hypothesis.

Make a sea of information become more concise.

Open new possibilities.

Exercise angles and wordings.

But better not to depend too much on it or you loose your critical thinking capabilities. And better not to rely solely on it to unleash your imagination, otherwise you risk loosing your divergent thinking skills. Cognitive atrophy is real. Losing autonomy can be an issue. Filter bubbles are there and even impact on social skills are a threat.

Everyone working with strategy nowadays is constantly figuring out how to use these tools at best during our strategy process. Nobody is denying the benefits of AI, but there are moments that having a conversation still might be the best thing you can do, especially for people starting to work with strategy nowadays, as basic as it may seem (I understand the temptations and challenges of starting to work with all these tools). 

Discuss the brief with the client.

Chat with colleagues in the same mission and with brand and category knowledge.

Talk to people about the subject.

Interview consumers.

Discuss with a specialist about a niched theme.

Refine observations, insights and strategic directions among teams.

I’ve spent some time thinking about our usual process and for me here is where conversations are still key and where AI can help strategists the most - keeping our autonomy and capabilities, while evolving our thinking with interactions and feedback, from people and AI tools:

1. Bring your own initial thoughts and discuss with other people, before getting AI help

Being in a meeting or receiving a written client brief, I like to put things on paper, writing the main info with my own words. This help to synthesize key information, consolidate the main information in my head and start organizing your own way of seeing the challenge.  Also, chat with colleagues and client to have better understanding and get different perspectives is essential. 

And of course, AI can help summarizing the key points or even building the first draft of what could be a creative brief, if you want to. Of course this needs to be revised and rewritten, but it can help. Using ChatGPT and prompts like: “Write a creative brief for the [BRAND] next campaign. Here's the goal, audience, and offer: [insert main info from client brief]. Include sections for objective, audience insights, strategic proposition, phasing and KPIs”.

2. Dig deeper and expand possibilities 

Sometimes you might write a creative brief alone, in one day. Sometimes you’ll have time to research, have more discussions and build a proper strategy, that later will be written in a brief as a tool to simplify things and inspire the team. Regardless, research and real conversations are essential (more and more essential nowadays actually), but AI can help here too among other tools.

It doesn’t replace bringing yours and your team initial hypothesis and intuition about the brand, category and people’s behaviors. But tools like Perplexity and Claude are great to help to research and a structured way, with reliable sources and links.

  • Brand: brand’s origin, values, interesting facts and stories, what experts have to say about the company.

  • Category: moment of the category (growing, decreasing), biggest issues and challenges, where is the category moving, areas of opportunity.

  • People: what do consumers want from the brand and category, which problems they current face related to the product, how they perceive the brand.

  • Culture: what is happening in culture that the brand could tap to in an authentic way, what trends and existing behaviors make sense to the brand.

3. Defining the consumer problem and insight 

When the main findings and take aways of the research are there and the idea is to make problem clearer, or when insights are being tested and refined, after rounds of discussion - AI can be useful too.

To make the problem more human and from our consumer perspective, using prompts that help to show the emotional and functional benefits for people can be a great support, like [the BRAND/PRODUCT is about - add brand/product truth - and have the challenge of - add business objective - what are the current problems that AUDIENCE might be facing that our BRAND/PRODUCT can help them to solve].

For insights, writing the key truths and observations from the research and exercise them to turn into more inspiring insights, creating more tension, withe prompts like [our AUDIENCE, adding fact/observation from people’s behavior adding terms like BUT/HOWEVER/YET/DESPITE/EVEN THOUGH/BECAUSE and asking the tool to complement with options of behaviors that can build the insight, adding more tension].

4. Refining the strategy

I wrote just refining on purpose. The strategy should be defined and written in your own way, words, personal point of view considering the diagnosis, problem and insight you identified. But when it’s time to think about the best words possible to express the strategic direction, to write a statement, a proposition, build an analogy to represent it and make it simpler and stronger for everyone to get it - AI can also help in this exercise.

The thinking is yours, the wording might come from AI (especially if it’s not your native language).

5. Building written documents and slides 

I usually write the storyline my own, especially the headlines for each slide. I don’t like and still don’t trust AI for it, even if revising it later. It’s better to write it as a story in your own way, the strategy also feels more personal. But it can be helpful for the secondary information on the slides.

For the layout and visual, tools like Beautiful and Canva Magic Design can be great, or Dalle for image generation (but I still prefer the good old Unsplash).

This is my current way of seeing things, but there are a lot of interesting articles to read and very smart people doing experiments and sharing tips and best practices to use AI as a Strategist. If you came this far, I’ll keep a few links below to keep you going on the subject if you would like to:

Bruno Araldi
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Bring yourself to the work – thoughts on creative intuition