How long should a strategy take?

So how long should a strategy take anyway?*

The correct answer is 4 weeks. And also 6 months. And also 24 hours.

I once did a strategy in 2 days because of a tight new business deadline. "Pitch fidelity" we called these.

The goal was to build around insights that the client would find provocative and unexpected, but still credible and familiar - same as any other strategy. The difference between pitch fidelity and longer work periods is that there isn't as much data to support these insights, so you can't have as much confidence in them.

And because they're not generated with as much rigor, they're designed to be "notional" - to give the client an idea of how we think, but obviously not represent the sum total of our strategic thinking on their problem.

Didn't matter. The client was fully on board with the pitch fidelity insights. We won the business (which was great) and they wanted to use the pitch strategy to go right into another round of concepting (not so great, because we were able to bill exactly $0 for the strategy work).

It made me feel like Jack Nicholson from "As Good As It Gets" in the clip below.

So even though we took a margin hit, it helped me realize the answer to the question of how long a strategy should take:

Exactly as long as it takes to inspire enough confidence in the client to drive action.

This isn't always easy to know - especially in a pitch when you don't know the client yet. But if you work regularly with a client it's the strategist's job to understand their appetite for strategy - how much they need to feel secure, and also how much is too much and contributing to strategy fatigue.

Learning to scope projects with the right amount of strategy was one of the hardest things for me to learn. It just takes a lot of practice - both to learn how much you or your team can accomplish in a given period, and how much is not enough or too much for your client. You'll get there if you learn from your mistakes. There will be plenty of them to learn from.

(*Though "how long is a strategy" is ultimately the wrong question to ask because strategy should be a function, not a phase. But that's a conversation for another day.)