The translation problem
Strategy rarely fails at strategy. It fails in the handoff.
Every few months I see the same thing happen. A strategy consultancy delivers a genuinely brilliant piece of thinking — months of research, sharp insights, a clear direction. The client approves it. Everyone celebrates. And then the deck gets handed to a design team, and six weeks later what comes back has lost everything that made the strategy worth paying for.
Nobody did anything wrong. That's what makes it interesting.
The consultancy did its job: the thinking is right. The design team did its job: the work is competent. But between the two sits a gap that belongs to no one — the moment where strategic intent has to become visual and product decisions. Type, colour, hierarchy, interaction, tone. A hundred small choices, each one either carrying the strategy forward or quietly draining it.
I've come to believe this gap is structural, not accidental. Strategy and design are different languages, and fluency in one doesn't grant fluency in the other. A strategist can write "the brand should feel effortless and human" and mean something precise. A designer reading that line cold will produce their own interpretation of it — competent, defensible, and often wrong in ways nobody can quite name until it's too late.
The fix isn't a better handoff document. I've never seen a brief thick enough to carry conviction across that gap. The fix is a person: someone who sits inside the strategy while it's being made — the workshops, the debates, the discarded options, the reasons behind each choice — and then directs the design with all of that context intact.
That's most of what I do now. Not because I stopped designing, but because I've done the work long enough to know that execution quality was never the scarce resource. Conviction is. When the person directing the design was in the room where the thinking happened, the team doesn't interpret a PDF — it executes a decision. The difference shows in the speed, in the coherence, and most of all in what doesn't happen: the slow drift back toward what everyone else in the category is doing.
Working with Pepsico, we spent months on research and ideation before a single visual existed. When the time came to land it — identity, packaging, social — what made the translation work wasn't executional talent. It was continuity: the thinking and the making never left the same room.
If you run a strategy consultancy, this is the quiet risk in your model. Your thinking is your product, but your client experiences it through whatever the design team ships. The translation is the product, in the end.
And if you lead a brand: the next time strategy and reality diverge, don't audit the strategy first. Ask who owned the gap.
Keep this:
Strategy rarely fails at strategy. It fails in the unowned gap between the thinking and the making.
No brief is thick enough to carry conviction. The translation needs a person, not a document.
Whoever directs the design should have been in the room where the strategy was made — that's what turns interpretation into execution.
If you sell strategy, the translation is part of your product, whether you own it or not.
