The Unnamed Things

An early 5MSM this week, ahead of the mystery of Easter.

Trust takes time. Ask Wabi.

Wabi is our five year old Burmese.

Runt of the litter. Three kilograms fully grown.

She looks like a kitten and has the personality of someone who knows exactly how charming she is.

But she didn’t always show it.

When she first arrived, she watched from a distance. Assessed. Decided slowly whether I was worth her time.

Cats work like that, especially the ones who’ve had to earn their place. Trust is built through patience and consistency, not grand gestures. It took two years but, eventually, she started head-nuzzling. Grooming me. Rolling onto her back for a tummy rub.

I was fully admitted into the pride.

A client recently told me they wanted the “moment of truth”: the singular “north star” that would anchor their entire strategy. I understood the appeal. Who wouldn’t want that?

But it doesn’t exist. Good strategy, like earning a cat’s trust, is a whole lot of things done consistently over time. Presence. Attention. Small gestures that accumulate. There’s no turning on a dime. No silver bullet. No magic formula.

Just showing up, reliably, until the trust is real.

Question: Where in your strategy are you still looking for the one thing, when the answer was always several things, done well, over time?

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100 pages of the wrong answer

A client recently showed me their freshly commissioned competitor analysis. One hundred pages. Twenty organisations. Ranked by contract size. Complete with histories, projections, and service breakdowns.

I glanced through it. Then I asked: “So what?”

Silence. Then came the reply, slowly: “It really just means we need to get better at what we do.”

I couldn’t help myself. “Why did you spend $100k on an inaccurate account of what others are doing?”

Here’s the truth about competitor analysis: we can’t know what actually matters about another organisation. Their real profit drivers. Their critical levers. What’s working and what’s held together with sticky tape. What lands in a report is the visible surface: history, size, structure. The stuff that doesn’t explain why they’re winning or losing.

And here's the deeper problem: build your strategy around competitors' actual moves — or worse, your guesses about their moves — and you'll always be reactive. Always one step behind someone else's game.

Now, I’m not saying ignore your competitors entirely. In contested markets, knowing a rival just lost a key leader or won a major contract is useful. But that’s sharp, targeted intelligence, not 100 pages answering questions nobody was actually asking.

The organisations I see thriving aren’t the ones watching their competitors most closely. They’re the ones who understand themselves most clearly.

Question: Does your competitor analysis tell you what to do, or just what others have already done?

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Feels right. Can’t explain it.

Recently, in a strategy workshop, I watched something interesting happen to a single word.

The organisation faced significant change. And every time someone said the word “change,” the room contracted slightly. Shoulders. Voices. Energy. All of it, just a little smaller.

So I stopped and said: “Remember — you’re all experts at change.”

I invited them to think about their own lives. Relationship changes. Moving house. New schools for their kids. The word visibly shifted. Suddenly it wasn’t whispered. It was claimed. The energy lifted noticeably.

There’s a name for what happened. Well, almost a name.

In 1977, architect Christopher Alexander published a quiet masterpiece called A Pattern Language. He had spent years trying to codify what makes places feel truly alive. He eventually gave up trying to name the quality, calling it simply “the quality without a name.”

His point: it’s real and recognisable, even when language fails it.

Strategy works the same way. Sometimes the most valuable thing isn’t analysis. It’s finding the word that unlocks the room.

Question: What word or idea in your organisation is being spoken in hushed tones — and what would change if someone said it out loud?

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Some things don't need explaining to be real. But clicks are real, so please give me a ‘heart’. Have a wonderful Easter, and I'll see you on the other side of the mystery.

I’ll be writing to you next week, as I start a road trip in the north of Portugal, where I’ll be attending a consultants’ meeting for a week.

Have a great week,

Andrew