Strategy & Design: You’ve got to go through it to get through it.

I recognize a pattern to my strategy work that gets glossed over in the “Design Process” (Capital D, Capital P). Joe Stewart at Work & Company calls it “brute force” in his 99u interview. I agree.

Most of strategy (and design too) is a process of elimination. It’s slogging through all the possible outcomes, all the minute details, all the teeny tiny decisions. That then narrow down to a few small gems. The trick is that you won’t know the gems until you compare them with all the other dull, unshiny rocks.

There’s this myth of a design eureka moment. As if a strategist has a flash of brilliance from seemingly nowhere. The truth is that hours and hours of research, talking to other people, trying things out—doing “bad” strategy—is what allows us to make smart connections with all the data at hand. Good strategy isn’t a momentary insight, it’s the result of a lot of hard work.