JP Castlin

JP Castlin is an internationally recognised authority on strategy, a writer and keynote speaker.

In this episode we discuss:

Why the world is complex not ordered
Why the strategy process is flawed
Complexity science and it’s practical application
What most of the great strategic thinkers got wrong (think: Porter, Mintzberg, Rumelt, Drucker, Taylor, Martin… everyone!)

JP Castlin

JP Castlin is a strategist, writer and keynote speaker.

A former corporate lawyer who moved into consulting, JP works with clients on global business and marketing strategy and operation excellence in a world of uncertainty. When not working with clients, he’s writing or speaking. JP is regularly found speaking about dynamic uncertainty and why businesses need to embrace that concept.

His written work includes “Strategy in Polemy” (popularly known as “The Castlin Manifesto”, 2021) the upcoming book “What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do” (2026), and another book TBA (2026). He’s also a columnist for MarketingWeek, produces irregular written work can be seen in WARC and authors the weekly newsletter Strategy in Praxis. Find JP on LinkedIn

Strategy Sessions Host – Andi Jarvis

If you have any questions or want to talk about anything that was discussed in the show, the best place to get me is on LinkedIn or Instagram.

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Episode Transcription

This transcript has been done automagically using Happy Scribe and hasn’t been checked by a real person, so there may be some hilarious mistakes where the AI can’t work out our accents – I’m sure they’re trained on just the American accent.

[01:00:00.100] – Andi J

JP Castlin, what one thing do you wish you’d have known 10 years ago?

[01:00:05.620] – JP Castlin

Uh, that the world is complex and not ordered, primarily. That would have helped me a lot.

[01:00:12.130] – Andi J

Which is a great introduction to what we’ll be talking about later on. This definition of the world being ordered, um, or this understanding that the world is ordered, it’s kind of deep-rooted, isn’t it? There are lots of people in lots of places, and we’re kind of taught this at school that everything has a structure and we decide these things and if A and B happens, then C is the next thing to happen. We’re told this, so it must be true, right?

[01:00:39.570] – JP Castlin

Yeah, I mean, yes, that’s precisely it. So in the Western philosophical tradition, you can go back probably to the ancient Greeks at least, but for the sake of the argument, let’s say that we go back at least to the late 1700s. So you had, um, ideas, well, coming out of Newton originally, which was the 1600s, but then into classical, neoclassical economic theory. And like these ideas spread far beyond their kind of immediate purview. And the issue again was like, don’t get me wrong, those ideas have helped humanity a very great deal, right? And we took massive leaps forward as a civilization as a result. Having said that, there are limitations to these theories, which we’ve seen with Einstein and so on and so forth. But we’re still taught that fundamentally, this is how the world works. This is how markets work. This is how marketing works, if you will. And for every question, there’s one correct answer. And if we do this one thing, regardless of the context, then we’re going to get this result over here. And the effectiveness rule is 60/40, regardless of where you are. Or sometimes now with effectiveness in context, it’s 60 or 70/30 if you happen to be a brand working in quote-unquote finance, whatever it might be, right?

[01:01:58.870] – JP Castlin

Those kinds of rules. And unfortunately, as I think most people realise in practise, in reality, is that that’s not really how the world works. Sometimes it is, but oftentimes it’s not. So that’s the big thing.

[01:02:12.110] – Andi J

So from our perspective as humans, we love this certainty that rules and order can give us, don’t we? It helps us through our day because we cling to the certainty that, well, economic theory says that we behave in this way and these rules of marketing tell us to behave like this. And it’s comforting in some ways. What you talk about, if you kind of explore it to its further limits, which we will do after the introduction in a minute, but in many ways could be terrifying. Yes. When you think about it initially, it can be terrifying.

[01:02:45.700] – JP Castlin

Yeah, no, it’s a very good point because it’s kind of a paradox, if you will, because It’s easy to understand why that is. So, if you go back to our savannas living on— sorry, ancestors living on the savannas of Africa, it’s easy to understand why they would not like uncertainty. Because if there’s something moving about in the shadows of the tall grass ahead and we don’t know what that is, we don’t know whether we would live to see the next day. And so, we try to reduce that uncertainty. And originally, we had things like religion. So, we would seek to appease the gods by means of ritual sacrifice or penance or prayer and thereby lower the uncertainty about whether our kids will live or whether we would live or whether the harvest would be bountiful or whether we would travel a few miles up once we travelled 6 feet down and so on. And that idea is comforting of kind of— it’s a feeling of safety. It’s a, you know, as Christopher Hitchens once said, the false security of consensus. But in reality, it can lead to well, risk aversion for one, but it can also lead to behaviours that are actually quite dangerous long term, which I’m sure we’ll get back to during our conversation.

[01:03:54.480] – Andi J

And we are— I think I said this in the last episode— humans are just chimps in shoes, aren’t we? So we are just— we’re simple beings that maybe simple emotional beings anyway. So that cling to certainty is a place that we feel comfortable. So yeah, yeah. So understanding that that maybe isn’t true has inspired your work in the last decade, but also I’m assuming changed how you approach life generally?

[01:04:19.640] – JP Castlin

Yes. I mean, I think a lot of these things become painfully obvious once you have kids. I’ve written about this in Marketing Week, but a very simple example is you can’t really plan how many diapers you need to purchase. That’s more of an agile thing. But similarly, we have in complexity, we talk about boundary conditions. And so Boundaries when you’re raising kids are things like, when do you go to bed? Right now, that’s a rigid, we go to bed at 7 or whatever. It can be negotiated sometimes, and it will change over time. So you might actually go to bed later once the kid is older, right? But it’s a similar thing of working with principles, heuristics, and boundaries, as opposed to, well, on Wednesday we plan to go to bed at, you know, 7:05. Or whatever it might be. The problem with the world is that it keeps changing, right? And that’s where plans tend to go to fail because any change will bring about novel information that you could not, by definition, have known when you were planning, right? So, you need to continuously— either you continuously update your plan, which means you’re going to spend a lot of time planning as opposed to actually doing things, or you can learn how to manage that in practise.

[01:05:34.620] – JP Castlin

And so that has been quite helpful.

[01:05:38.010] – Andi J

And listening to you talk about this reminds me of why Mike Tyson is probably still the most quoted man in strategy. He’s famous. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Now, we’ll not fall out about the difference between a plan and a strategy in the context of Mike’s quote anyway, but that’s broadly what you’re saying, isn’t it? When you get punched in the face, you’ve got to make a new plan really quick. Otherwise, he’s going to keep punching you in the face. And yeah, who knew Mike Tyson would be the world’s leading strategy thinker?

[01:06:07.540] – JP Castlin

Yeah, yeah, the Sun Tzu de jour. Brilliant.

[01:06:13.980] – Andi J

Well, look, let’s get to a quick introduction and we’ll be back in 60 seconds with JP Castlin.

[01:06:19.840] – Andi J

Eyup and welcome to The Strategy Sessions. My name is Andi Jarvis. I am the host of the show and the Chief Strategy Officer at Eximo Marketing. Thank you for joining us today, where my guest is JP Castlin. You’ve just heard from him. JP might be one of my favourite people in strategy. I’ve rarely met anyone who thinks in quite the same way about the discipline of strategy. He never accepts the first-level explanation of anything, digs deeper, references it, and comes at it from an entirely new viewpoint. What you’ll take away from this is how to be a better strategist and how to avoid some of the pitfalls that a lot of strategy can take you into. He has some interesting ideas, he has some challenging ideas, and that’s some ideas that might make you think, oh, I’ve never really thought of it that way. That’s why he’s on. So enough of me, let’s just get back to JP, have a listen, share it with your friends, rate the episode, leave a comment if you want. JP Castlin, welcome back to The Strategy Sessions.

[01:07:17.170] – Andi J

You were last here, episode 4, season 2. Just give everyone, because we’ve picked up some new listeners since then, let’s just give everyone a quick introduction to who you are because you write in Marketing Week, but you’re not a marketer. You are in strategy, but are you a strategist? Here we go. So give us an introduction to yourself.

[01:07:35.010] – JP Castlin

Right. So it’s the mum question about, so what do you really do for a living? Right. The simple explanation or the simple summary of it all is that I’m a I consider myself a strategist or strategic management consultant. My storey is I began life as a lawyer working in mergers and acquisitions and corporate finance, went on to corporate governance, which is strategy disguised as board work, really. And then from that into strategic management consulting and then being the CEO of a consultancy, building one, which basically meant I had to do or we had to do everything. So I’ve done everything from programmatic supply chain analysis, content marketing, creative stuff, to broader strategic stuff, to planning, to media planning, whatever. But then over time, you tend to get narrower and narrower and narrower and narrower. And then it became global marketing strategy and global business strategy. And these days, what I tend to do is I tend to work with brands, executives, C-suites, and so on. On so-called adaptive strategy and how we make decisions under high uncertainty, which of course is quite relevant these days. And on top of that, I write quite a lot.

[01:08:54.750] – JP Castlin

So I’m writing two books, finishing one now, starting another. And then I write for Marketing Week, I have a newsletter, and then I do what you do, which I travel around the world and I talk to people, or sometimes talk at people, but you know, I keynote basically. So that’s it. And the long and short of it.

[01:09:13.770] – Andi J

So a very busy man. So adaptive strategy, because that is built out of— stop me if I get this wrong— out of complexity theory. Yeah. So we need to at this stage get a bit of a handle and some definitions on. So adaptive strategy, people are like, well, I think I might know what adaptive means and I think I know what strategy means, but what do they mean together? Yeah. And then we’ll drill down into complexity theory as well.

[01:09:35.850] – JP Castlin

So when I was working as a strategist doing more strategic planning stuff. What I would find was that the client would really like the process of planning or strategizing because usually, it involved going to a nice retreat, playing golf, sauna, a couple of glasses of wine, maybe a glass of whiskey and a cigar. And you kind of end up with some kind of plan which involves a target, which is usually whatever revenue we had last year plus 5%. Something like that, right? What Ritson calls the SOMA database, which is straight out of my ass. But basically, that’s it. And people enjoy the process. And then you’d leave them there, right? And then you’d call back 6 months later, whatever it might be, and go, hey guys, okay, so what happened? How did it work? And that kind of thing. And they’d either go, oh, right, I think the document is ‘Brenda, is the document still in that cupboard?’ Right? Either it was that or, ‘Well, we intended to do it, but something changed.’ Now, if you’re a consultant, it’s actually not a bad thing to happen because what it does is it enables you to kind of double dip back into your client pool, to use a Seinfeld reference.

[01:10:52.420] – Andi J

All right, don’t tell him. You’re giving all my secrets away, Jeffrey. Don’t do it. Sorry, sorry, carry on.

[01:10:58.280] – JP Castlin

And, um, Yeah, and so you can do that and you kind of tell your clients, listen guys, clearly something has changed. We need to come up with a new strategy. And because they like the process, they’re happy to do that again. Right. But, and that’s fine. And that’s, you know, a lot of companies do that. But what I kind of realised was that I could either do that or I could try to figure out why this was. Right. Why is it that things don’t go according to plan? Why is it the plans don’t really they’re not executed as intended. And I started digging into this. And what I realised was that there are fundamental assumptions in conventional strategy that actually are quite easy to disprove. And once I’d done that, I kind of deconstruct the strategy. I go, okay, so what can I do instead? And I, for some reason or another, can’t remember really how it happened, but I started reading about complexity science, which I think it might be because around that time it became more kind of popular media because it started winning a lot of Nobel Prizes. So I started reading that and then I basically had like this epiphany moment when, oh right, so actually the reason why this is happening is because the world is complex, it’s not ordered.

[01:12:14.320] – JP Castlin

We cannot plan for every detail. Actually, there are a lot of moving parts. When you think about it, it’s not a massive kind of threshold or barrier that you have to cross because as people, we know that, right? We know that when we’re going to grandma, sometimes something will happen to the car or maybe your kid gets sick or you know what it’s like. Shit happens. And so, I started building this other framework and then, The first time I really took it to practise, I was doing global strategy for a large fintech company. And we did this thing which later became the ABCD framework, which is in the book. And although obviously it’s a continuous process and it was not just down to the strategy, but a bunch of things happen in the global economy, wherever else, broadly speaking, the company made $5 billion off of that strategy. And I basically went, right, so maybe there’s something to this. But actually, this seems to be working. And then I came across a guy called Steve McCrone, who’s now my co-author for the book, who is also one of the leading figures in adaptive strategy. And what we realised was that none of our clients had to change their strategies during COVID for example.

[01:13:33.180] – JP Castlin

So, we think of— sometimes when you talk about adaptive strategy, people mistake it for agile or a series of pivots. That’s what BCG likes to tell people that it is. It’s not. It’s nothing like that. But actually, it’s the ability to adapt over time. Planning is tied to a specific moment in time. Do this and do this and this and this is going to happen in a 5-year period or 10-year, whatever. Adaptive strategy does not have that kind of end state or Garden of Eden state, which Steve likes to point out. That paradisiacal kind of moment in time where magically all of our problems have been solved. That doesn’t exist.

[01:14:10.500] – Andi J

The angels appear with harps.

[01:14:12.360] – JP Castlin

Oh yeah, exactly. World peace and puppies to everyone and whatever else. Yeah, yeah. And so I just realised, okay, that this is actually working. And again, it’s not weird that it’s working because it’s based off of proper, actual cutting-edge science as opposed to a lot of the conventional stuff, which is based on, like I alluded to in the intro, based on ideas that are at least 300 years old. And again, that’s not to say that these ideas are necessarily all wrong. It’s just that they’re quite limited in scope and there’s a bit more to it than that. And we know why these days. So why not take advantage of that knowledge?

[01:14:51.620] – Andi J

So if you’re listening to the podcast as a marketer and you’ve not heard anyone mention brand or anything like that yet, and you’re thinking, okay, but some of the things JP’s just mentioned there are probably really, really relevant and resonating to you. If you’ve been through a strategy process, you’ll know you make a series of decisions typically that say, well, we’ll do this, we’ll do this, we’ll do that. And then at the end of that, we will achieve something. We will achieve this target, the 5% or whatever. And if you’ve been through this, if you’ve got a few more candles on your birthday cake, you’ve been through it a few times. Think about how many times you’ve actually got to the end of that and landed exactly where you said you were going to land. Yeah. Now, I’ve been doing this a number of years now. I’ve probably been doing strategy consultancy strategy for close to 15 years, my own consultancy for close to 9. I’m not sure I’ve ever in that time worked with a client or run a business or anything where we’ve landed exactly at the point we said we were going to do.

[01:15:49.820] – Andi J

It’s not to say we’ve missed it. Sometimes we’ve gone past it and overachieved it. Sometimes we’ve underachieved and missed, but I’ve never landed exactly where we said we were going to do. And that’s what really appealed when I started reading JP’s writing. It was like, if actually things worked as we said, as we think they were going to work, as we’re taught they’re going to work, If we do these series of steps as we said we were going to do, surely we should land at the point we said we’d land on, or pretty damn close. But no one ever does. And if you have ever landed exactly at the point you said you were going to land on, get in touch. You’re the next guest on the show. I want to know how you did it. But have you genuinely, just a quick one, have you ever landed at the point you said you were going to land at? I don’t think I ever have.

[01:16:29.860] – JP Castlin

No, I don’t think I have in terms of like very precise goals. Sometimes when you do things like global media purchasing, for example, that you have kind of, you have a lot of historical evidence for roughly speaking what might happen, and you have a good econometric modeller or econometrician, then you can get roughly right. But you’re dealing with essentially macro patterns. And so one of the things that you learn in complexity is that there’s something called emergence, right? Things emerge and they arise. And emergence basically means, in a technical aspect, that you have various layers of information without kind of any— they don’t describe or predict one another. And so you might take a very basic example. So if you look at an employee, for example, an individual employee will tell you nothing about the behaviour of the company that he or she works in. Similarly, that company will tell you nothing about the behaviour of the economy. The classical example for marketing that I use is the Ehrenberg-Bass quote-unquote science versus the traditionalists, where the Ehrenberg-Bass patterns are macro patterns. So you talk about negative binomial distribution. In other words, it looks like a banana.

[01:17:47.970] – JP Castlin

If you look at your customer base, your buyer behaviour, you’re going to have a few people who buy you a lot, a lot of people who buy you a little. And most people will not buy you at all. So, that shape looks like a banana. That’s a macro pattern. That pattern tells you nothing about what any specific individual customer is doing at any one point in time. And the issue sometimes I feel with the marketing debate that’s been raging ever since How Brands Grow came out in what was 2010 is that the Earn Big Bass crowd are talking about macro patterns up top and the other people are talking about the mental positioning 3 things in your brain. They’re talking about micro patterns beneath, and they can still both be correct. But because they’re talking about various layers of information, they’re talking past one another. So they’re kind of doomed to continue this debate until the ends of time. So things like that are quite valuable to understand because if you are looking for a goal, which is a macro goal, and you think you can describe it on a micro level, you’re kind of doomed from the outset.

[01:18:53.450] – JP Castlin

You might hit that goal, but it’s more likely to— you’re more likely to do so despite your plan than because of it. Right. And that’s— and also, by the way, there’s a, there’s a book by Kenneth Stanley, I think it’s called, called The Objective Paradox, where he basically established that the very act of defining a specific goal pretty much guarantees you’re not going to be able to reach it. So what you instead should do is you define the direction in which you go and then kind of the goal will emerge as you move in that direction, basically.

[01:19:28.430] – Andi J

So to come back to the very opening conversation we had about what you wanted to know 10 years ago and the way we explored that through people clinging to certainty and we’re almost, I don’t want to say we’re hardwired for that, but we’ve had a lot of years of development of looking for that certainty. Sometimes just to reduce the mental load, because we know if A and B are going to happen, we can just carry on and do the other things. So what you’re talking about, people may be listening going, yeah, that makes sense. We can’t predict everything that’s going to happen, so maybe we should stop trying to. We need to be more adaptive in how we approach this and all those sorts of things. But then you’ve got an organisation to convince of this. You’ve got a whole bunch of people in the room who also have years of experience of not doing it the way that you talk about, of doing it the other way, the golf way, and all those sorts of things. And they like it as well, and it gives them some certainty. And certainty helps you speak with certainty to the higher-ups and all those sorts of things.

[01:20:26.970] – Andi J

And it feels to me when I hear what you talk about and write about, that the sense is there, but it breaks the model for so many people that actually, is it hard to land with them Do you spend 30% of your consulting time trying to convince the people in the room that you’re right, as opposed to doing the thing that you need to be doing?

[01:20:47.200] – JP Castlin

It’s an interesting question. I’ve had gigs where I’ve had to be a bit of a hair dryer early on. It has earned me the nickname Snape a couple of times. But ideally what you want is you want for people to kind of discover that for themselves. The challenge is twofold from my experience. The first one is that the human brain reasons off of, or acts, interprets reality based off something called cognitive blending. What that means is that whenever we encounter new information, we map that information against our pattern, the patterns that we have based on our experience. But crucially, we don’t go for a best fit pattern match. We go for the quickest pattern match. What that tends to mean is that whenever people suggest something new, we kind of match that against our most recent experience of change and we go, “Ooh, that didn’t work last time.” So, we’re reluctant to do it. This is why when people talk about digital transformation, for example, one of the telltale signs that they haven’t got that much experience actually doing it is because they say, “Well, the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to announce that we’re doing a transformation project.” And you go, “Well, okay, that pretty much guarantees it’s not going to work.” Because people go, “Ooh, I don’t like transformation projects.” The second issue is that we know from research that a lot of managers prefer, to your point, predictable performance rather than peak performance.

[01:22:21.970] – JP Castlin

Actually, what’s been proven in quite— I mean, I was going to say in psychological research, but a research in psychology, but that these days can mean anything because they have a replicability issue.

[01:22:35.400] – Andi J

Does this mean you saw it on Instagram? Is that what you mean?

[01:22:37.640] – JP Castlin

But there’s actually quite a robust finding. And what we find is that, what people have found is that people would actually prefer a predictable negative outcome than an unpredictable positive outcome, which sounds weird, but it kind of proves to your point how little we really like uncertainty. We’d rather know what’s coming, even if it’s bad.

[01:23:03.730] – Andi J

Is this the example— I think Rory Sutherland’s talked about this— you stand people on the tube in London, they would rather have the sign that tells them the next tube is 10 minutes away than stand on a station platform with no sign but the tube arrives in 2 minutes. Yeah, they would rather understand that the train is 10 minutes away, even though the train arriving in 2 minutes is actually better for them. But we want the information that tells us it’s worse for us. Rather than it just being better.

[01:23:27.940] – JP Castlin

Yeah, exactly. Another example of that is they ran tests where people would get mild shocks in their hands, and what you could see that anxiety levels were at the peak when it was 50/50. So when they knew that they were going to get shocked, it was actually less kind of less painful in a way than when they didn’t know whether it was going to happen or not.

[01:23:48.700] – Andi J

Somehow I knew you’d give an example related to electric shocks as opposed to standing waiting for a sheep.

[01:23:54.310] – JP Castlin

But yeah, but then of course, I was going to say there’s a third thing, of course, in practise, of course, as well, which is incentive displacement. So one of the, for me, who’s done quite a lot of global strategy, one of the telltale signs for me is, and I think this applies to most approaches to kind of strategy, but it’s when people go, right, so we kind of agreed on what to do and then we did as we agreed. And you go, no, you didn’t. Because what happened was that you did your strategy, you got everyone on board and whatever else, and then the very next day you had to be on a call with Jurgen, who was the head of sales in Berlin. And he just went, yeah, I’m not doing that because it’s into my bonus. And then just like, and then what do you do? Because there are always incentives for that kind of do not synchronise within an organisation. Part of the adaptive strategy is actually synchronising things. But yeah, there’s always more to strategy, to strategic management than just going, here’s what we’re going to do and we’re all going to do as we agreed because people do as they’re told.

[01:24:56.050] – JP Castlin

And you go, no, they don’t.

[01:24:58.210] – Andi J

So as you’re running this through organisations, then the strategy work and the work of the consultant exists often in the boardroom and the away days and the C-suites and all that sort of stuff. But the reality of strategy coming to life tends to be as it philtres down the organisation. So you talk about synchronisation and things like that. How, as a strategist, can you impact that as it cascades through, especially at a global level when there’s so many layers of people, teams, local nuance, all that sort of stuff? How do you manage to get that to philtre down so that you do get those great $5 billion results?

[01:25:34.150] – JP Castlin

So what you’re looking for, the quality that you’re looking for, and apologise to listeners because this is going to be a technical term, but I’ll explain it in as simple terms as I can. So what you’re looking for is a fractal-like quality. So fractality basically means self-similarity. So the kind of easy example is if you look at a floret of broccoli and you look at like each part of that broccoli will look like a slightly larger part of that broccoli, which actually looks like the part, the broccoli itself. So each part will kind of, it looks the same across scales basically. And this is a pattern that we see in all kinds of things from the blood vessels in your heart to galaxies in the universe to all kinds of things. So this is called fractality, self-similarity. It’s a mathematical concept. So you cannot have a strategy which is fractal, strictly speaking, but you have a strategy which is fractal-like. And what that means is that your strategy should look the same or across the entire organisation. Now, that does not mean that the decision that you make off of that strategy is necessarily the same because you have various, you know, the decision that a CEO makes will not be the same decision that a guy on the floor, a girl on the floor does or makes, right?

[01:26:51.730] – JP Castlin

But it should still inform that decision so that you move in the right direction at the right tempo. And the way in which to do that is to ensure that the strategy is legible and understandable and simple. That you establish, rather than having a definition of success, we talk about a shared understanding of success. What that means is that people, when you talk about your strategic aspiration, what you want to achieve, quote unquote, as an organisation, people need to understand what that means. It cannot be something so esoteric and poetic that people go, oh, that’s a nice bit of prose. I have no idea what it means. Our customers haven’t got a fucking clue, obviously, because if you’re not able to translate it internally, guess what? You won’t be able to translate it externally either. But it’s that thing of keeping things simple and ensuring that the structure of the strategy is the same throughout the organisation. If you can achieve that, then you’re going to get synchronisation kind of as a side effect to that. There’s a bit more to that, but in kind of simple terms, that’s what you’re looking for.

[01:27:54.440] – Andi J

Marketers operate kind of below the global business strategy. And, you know, and we have our probably one-year increments of marketing strategy and things like that, which Actually, that fractality explanation probably makes sense then, because if you are trying to reflect the business strategy that is being filtered down to you, then you probably need to be that small piece of broccoli that looks like the whole. Fantastic. What do you see when you drop into the marketing world? Because I feel that you have a passion for marketing, but also frustration with the marketing world, perhaps. So what are the good things you see marketers do in that sort of strategy place for marketing strategy? And what are the things that have you whacking your head into the desk going, why are we still doing that?

[01:28:43.160] – JP Castlin

I’ve said this before, I think that marketing is the single most important business function, right? That is because in an ideal world anyway, marketers are quite creative people, kind of can think about how to sell stuff and market stuff and solve business problems and overcome obstacles and maybe provide, as the cliché goes, the customer’s view in the C-suite or on the board or whatever. And they do that stuff, good marketers do that very well. What I wish that marketers didn’t do was to— well, there are two things. The first thing is that I wish that they would stop taking credit for stuff that isn’t their— the result of their work, right? And the reason why I don’t like that is— I know I’ve used this example before, many times before, I’ve written about it— but Airbnb’s turnaround is a good example of this. So Airbnb, was it a few— 4 or 5 years ago, something like that, they had this turnaround where magically, suddenly, they managed to go into the black, right? Rather than being in the red all the time. And a lot of people, famous columnists, heads of agencies, whatever else, they said, oh, this is all down to the fact that they’ve now started doing brand building advertising.

[01:30:05.010] – JP Castlin

Even though brand building takes years and years and years, magically this is because they got this new brand platform. And Marcus kind of rejoiced and went, yes, this is it. And I spoke to the CFO about that and she basically went, yeah, that’s all horseshit and just means we cannot really trust Marcus because what really happened And again, this is all out there if you want to look it up. But what really happened was that as the world kind of turned after COVID, a couple of things happened. The first thing, of course, was that countries opened up, but not only countries, but city centres, which kind of during the pandemic were off limits. So that played into Airbnb’s hands. Not only that, but the dollar was unusually strong, which basically meant that Americans could fly on the cheap. That played into Airbnb’s hands. And then there were a couple other things, but perhaps the biggest thing in this was that once that started happening, what Airbnb did quite cleverly was that they took that cash that people paid them and they reinvested it in certain kind of financial instrument. These instruments were tied to the American interest rate.

[01:31:11.000] – JP Castlin

And as some of you may recall from that moment in time, the American interest rate just went straight through the roof. So if you actually look at Airbnb’s figures at that time, they made a profit of— they were something like $117 million in the black. Great. $124 million of straight profit came out of those financial instruments. What does that mean for the rest of the organisation? Well, they were in the red, right? And so I’m not— again, I’m not saying that marketing didn’t play a part. Of course it did. I’m not saying that the brand platform didn’t play a part in it. Of course, it did. But there were a lot of other things happening. And when our marketing takes credit for stuff that it doesn’t do or shouldn’t take credit for, the rest of the organisation basically goes, ‘Yeah, so you’re trying to steal my ideas and my work now,’ right? And because marketing has an issue these days anyway of being reduced into, well, effectively comms— that’s marketing promotion, right? I just don’t think that’s a great way forward. I think they would be better off actually kind of trying to build bridges with the other departments as opposed to burning them, which is what those things tend to do from my experience.

[01:32:22.960] – Andi J

Yeah, I think I would probably agree that there’s a lack of depth to some marketing thinking. Not everyone. Some people are great at going in depth into detail, but I’d probably call it, in a badly made-up world, the Instagrammization of thinking when it comes to this, where people just look at what they see and then just take it at face value and go, all right, well, Airbnb invested in brand, they’ve made some money, therefore it must have been brand that did it. Or, you know, company has done this and therefore it must be marketing that, that happened without ever digging in or interrogating it. And then somebody writes about it and nobody ever dives into it any further. And all of a sudden you’re into this place where these things are now true because it’s been written about a couple of times or someone’s posted about it on Instagram. My favourite irritation is the attention spans are now the same as a goldfish or worse than a goldfish. When if you spend more than about 30 seconds looking into that particular stat, which came from Microsoft. No, it didn’t come from Microsoft. No one can ever prove where it came from.

[01:33:30.720] – Andi J

And if you talk to actual scientists in attention span and stuff like that, they’re like, This isn’t how you measure attention span. I don’t even know what you’re talking about when you give me that quote. It’s just entirely made up. But when you go to as many conferences as we do, I think I hear that stat once a conference from somebody everywhere.

[01:33:48.870] – JP Castlin

Yeah, I mean, to his credit, Ferris Jacob has been making that point for— I mean, I think he made it— we did a talk together and I think it was 2018 in Mumbai. And like he was making that precise point then and people just aren’t listening. Another one of those is, you know, all these days attention is all the rage in marketing. People talk about attention, this, that, and the other. So what do we know from science about attention? Well, what we know from science about attention is if you’re looking at something, in other words, if your eyes are physically scanning something, you take in 3 to 5% of what’s in front of you. That’s it. If you’re Asian, it’s slightly higher based on how they write and the kind of signs they use and so on. So you’re typically around maybe up to 10%. Anything above that, you’re typically autistic. That’s part of what autism is, is this inability to kind of separate signal from noise, and so you become overwhelmed. So if we take in 3 to 5% of what’s in front of us and we go, oh, it’s all about attention and where eyes are focusing on this thing over here.

[01:34:54.510] – JP Castlin

Really what you should be going for is just like, no, you need to establish your distinctive brand assets so that if you take in 3 to 5%, you still recognise the brand. But that part is never really mentioned. It’s just about, no, we need high attention advertising and this, that, and the others. It’s like, yeah, but there’s a lot of waste, scientifically speaking anyway. But I also think to your previous point about social media marketing and what one might call this kind of fundamental attribution error, maybe at scale, is that it also ties it back to this conversation that we had earlier about complex systems versus ordered systems, because this assumes that there was order. In other words, Airbnb did this thing A, which led to this thing B, and it was only this thing A that led to that thing B. It wasn’t actually a lot of things, and that’s problematic. And this is an issue that we see in the management side of strategic management, even in marketing. So these days, of course, you have a bunch of specialists. So you have your social media marketer, you have your— maybe even it’s a TikTok marketer and an Instagram marketer.

[01:35:58.190] – JP Castlin

And you split down all these various pieces. And there are a bunch of assumptions around that. First one being that so long as we can optimise these parts for a better whole, so we can just hire someone who’s better at that thing or replace them with an AI and the overall output will be better. That’s not actually how it works.. But the other thing which is rarely spoken about is the fact that these people, a) they’re easier to hire and place but also of course easier to replace, but they all speak slightly different languages. And as a result, as an organisation, you get people who cannot speak to one another because they all speak different languages. So, each kind of person has their own, oh, it’s this attribution thing or click-through rate or this, that, and the other. And then, they keep talking to one another and there’s not that cohesive strategic, here’s the direction which we move. And you get, you just get a bunch of people who cannot speak to one another. Right. And that’s also one of the reasons why you lose that kind of synchronisation across your marketing departments, because you have a bunch of specialists, but no one is actually able to speak to anyone else.

[01:37:02.940] – Andi J

And when you’ve got the better marketers and the better CMOs, marketing directors, they do manage to pull that together. And I look at Currys in the UK at the minute who are doing a stellar job on— they’re getting all the plaudits and all the flowers are coming their way for mostly social, TikTok. They’re doing really, really well by not overly trying to control it as a brand platform, but leaning into being really native on TikTok. And their TV ads have gone up a level by some changes they made, and they’re flying. And that’s what they’re getting all the praise for. But if you ever hear Dan Rubell talk about it, if you read him on LinkedIn, he’s always really clear. And, you know, he’s, as well as sort of praising the people behind it, probably every third or fourth post talks about what the business impact this is having and the change it’s having to sales figures and growth. And if you look at what they’ve done on their share price, tremendous. But he’s doing that by pulling everyone together, the sort of conductor of the orchestra, and everyone is pulled towards that same goal.

[01:38:02.930] – Andi J

And that some great stuff happens when you manage to get that together. I imagine it’s not easy, you know, trying to pull a team that size to get everyone pulling in the same direction. But when you see it work and you see it in action, it just looks so simple. You know, you’re like, why wouldn’t everybody do this? But it’s back to that simple can be difficult, can’t it?

[01:38:20.410] – JP Castlin

Yeah. And it also requires that kind of broad view, which is not necessarily something that people will take these days because, I mean, there are a lot of silo issues and whatever else. But I think A few years ago, I wrote a piece called The Gravity of E-commerce together with James Hankins about digital D2C, but e-commerce in general. And what we found was that there was a negative correlation between online penetration and profitability. So in other words, the more stuff you sold online, the less profit you made. And the reason was effectively because The traditional retail model, in other words, when you had a store, was a many-to-one model. So your customer would come to you and thereby incur the cost of transportation and so on and so forth. And while they’re in the store, you can also rent out a piece of that store to cost a coffee or whatever. And you can make— there are a bunch of ways in which to monetize that. When you shift to a digital DTC model, which is cheaper early on because you don’t need that massive distribution and store and so on, what happens is you switch that model to one-to-many model.

[01:39:26.380] – JP Castlin

So instead of your customers coming to you, you have to go to them. And that It’s a massive cost. And then, of course, instead of the truck going to the one store, it has to go to individual customers. But also on returns, that’s also a cost. And what we found was that companies like Next, for example, like to your point, they already know this stuff because they understand the business of it. Hence, they have an omni-retail model whereby they encourage people to actually return goods to their stores. And if they’re in the stores, they’re more likely to buy something else. And again, you can rent it out, Costa Coffee. Like, there are ways in which to monetize this. But if you have that fragmented bunch of specialists, you have the acquisition specialist who just goes, no, no, no, it’s all about selling stuff online. And then you have someone who’s optimising this bit and this bit and this bit, not realising that their work actually has detrimental impact on the overall value. Another example of this is there’s quite a famous Swedish furniture store which is called the Nordic Gallery. And basically, it’s really, really expensive furniture, right?

[01:40:35.390] – JP Castlin

Designer furniture, the most expensive stuff you can find on the market, basically. And they’ve gone from a kind of a physical, you have to come to us model to it now. Well, it’s a hybrid model, but they’re really high on on digital. And that meant they’ve hired people who come out of digital from kind of traditional brands. And now magically or tragically, it’s all about discounts and acquisition and always subscribe to a newsletter, you’re going to get 10% off. Their profitability has just fallen through the floor as a result. The revenue hasn’t improved that much, but profitability is really, really bad. And again, it’s because I think that they don’t understand that, which is ironic because maybe it’s a generational thing, but they’ve kind of lost that understanding of the whole. And this is the thing about complexity. It’s all about the whole, not the parts. And ordered systems is all about the parts.

[01:41:31.720] – Andi J

Tell us about your new book, because by the time this episode comes out, the book may well be finished, about to hit shelves or finished. Yeah, there we are.

[01:41:40.000] – JP Castlin

I mean, it’s funny because I think the last time we were on, I was talking about writing the book then and What turns out is when you’re writing, especially running with someone and you happen to have two kids along the way, right?

[01:41:54.280] – Andi J

Bad timing, JP. Bad timing.

[01:41:55.540] – JP Castlin

Yeah, I mean, you tend to push deadlines. I wonder why that is. No, but so the book is called What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do. And it’s about adaptive strategy. But what it does is it creates this argument where we talk about essentially the past, present, and the future. So, we talk about the past. In other words, How was it that we came to think in the way that we currently think? What are the central ideas that we see in economy or economics rather, and strategic management strategy? Where does it all come from? What are the flaws and stuff like that? And what we discover along the way is that there are a lot of assumptions that have been made. There are a lot of things that have been put in there essentially just to make the mathematics work. So the idea of a rational man being one such example, it’s just like, okay, so we cannot make utility theory work unless we make these assumptions and you get this idea of all else being equal. If everything else is equal and we just do this thing. Yeah, but in reality, that’s never really the case.

[01:42:57.380] – JP Castlin

But then, okay, so that’s the first part. And then the second part goes into, okay, how does this manifest in reality? So we go through some of the conventional strategic ideas from planning to emergent strategy, that’s Mintzberg, to this idea of strategy being a way in which to solve problems, which is actually quite problematic when you dig into it. We criticise Rumelt, we talk about Where to Play, How to Win, all kinds of things. And we kind of prove that these frameworks oftentimes make similar assumptions and these assumptions fall down in reality because insert reasons here. And then so we kind of deconstruct strategy in the second half of the book, second part of the book. And then in the last bit—

[01:43:39.450] – Andi J

Just before you move on to the last bit, I love, so casually during the second half of the book, you’ve taken a potshot at two of the great thinkers in the strategy world.

[01:43:48.270] – JP Castlin

Oh no, no, no, way more than that.

[01:43:51.290] – Andi J

Basically everybody in strategy has had it. Yeah.

[01:43:53.750] – JP Castlin

Okay. Yeah. I mean, do you want the sort of headline grabbing, the quick thing?

[01:43:59.150] – Andi J

So, I mean— Listen, let’s get the clip. This is going on, so clip it all.

[01:44:04.050] – JP Castlin

So, with Michael Porter, actually, we go back to scientific management and Taylor. So, scientific management is the idea that we can time everything and optimise everything. Taylor himself was basically making shit up as he went, and there’s historical evidence to demonstrate that that’s the case. We then have things like MBO, which is Peter Drucker, who’s hailed as the great kind of strategic management thinker. I tend to disagree based on what I’ve actually read about him and the stuff. And the main reasons are twofold. First, that he kind of rose to fame criticising Taylor. And then he realised that when he was trying to sell MBO, which was his approach, managers didn’t like that. They liked the Taylor stuff. And then he just changed. He did a full 180 when, oh, actually, no, he wasn’t wrong all these years. He was just like the greatest thinker in strategic management, like the greatest thinker since Newton. And you go, well, hang on a second. Are you just saying that because you’re you want to sell your stuff or not. And then so you end up with MBO, and MBO turned out to then be scientific management disguise, really, if you look at it.

[01:45:09.780] – JP Castlin

We go into people like Porter. What Porter did was— Porter did a lot of good things, but also his assumption that markets are based on competition, that’s not rooted in reality. We kind of think, well, it sounds good enough, fair enough, right? But effectively, it came out of his own background as being very good at sports, American football and golf more than anything, or baseball, I think, as well. He’s just annoyingly good at everything, Porter, but that’s a different thing. But then, and you see that when you go to things like Where to Play, How to Win, which is Roger Martin’s work. And I vaguely know Roger and I like him. But so he worked closely with Porter. In fact, they both worked in the same company. I think he studied under Porter at Harvard. And you see the kind of histrionics between Porter and Where to Play, How to Win. And where to play, how to win. And I’m not saying this is his intention, but this is what tends to happen when you use that in practise, is it becomes a cascading strategy. So up top, we define where we play and how to win.

[01:46:07.490] – JP Castlin

If that’s off by a fraction of a millimetre, that will cascade like rings across the water, across the organisation. The fault at the very bottom will be massive. And then he uses things like supporting management systems that kind of lock those falls in place. What they do in practise, what tends to happen in practise, is that it basically means that any signs of success will be accelerated throughout the organisation and any signs of failure will kind of be suppressed or ignored. This leads to strategic drift over time. So, that’s problematic. And then you get questions like, well, how can we define the best place to play and where to win ourselves? Is that not relative to something else, what other people are doing and how to change? And again, to his credit, and I want to make this clear because I’m sure this will pop up on socials, I don’t think that’s Roger’s intention because he actually understands a lot more about complexity than most people do. I’m just saying that that’s oftentimes how it’s taken to be in practise. But then we have on the other side of the scale, we have people like Henry Mintzberg, Emergent Strategy, which is all adaptive and whatever else.

[01:47:15.920] – JP Castlin

Well, even then, you have to assume that there must be something before the emergence, right? Because emergence strategy is defined as a pattern in action taken over time. That’s the definition of emergence strategy, not the kind of stuff that we actually do in practise. But the only way to separate that signal from noise or identify that pattern must be against something else. So there must exist something else before then if you’re going to do the— and so you get that kind of stuff. And you you can find similar issues with all kinds of strategic management thinkers. That’s what this part is. But to be clear, it’s not just about the frameworks. It’s also a lot to do with how companies act in reality. What are the patterns that we see in organisations and how they behave? And we kind of explain why that is and why it’s sometimes problematic and why people face the problems that they face. And then the third bit is once we’ve done that, you know, quite lengthy deconstruction, we go, okay, so what if we instead rebuild off of complexity science, cognitive neuroscience, and, you know, actual proper science, and we don’t throw all the other stuff out, right?

[01:48:27.850] – JP Castlin

But we try to learn from it and go, okay, so actually what works, what doesn’t work? And the question then is not how can complexity work into, work within or under what we already know, it’s How does that stuff actually work once we realise the world is complex? And off of that, we build then adaptive strategy and strategic frameworks like the ABCD framework, which is mine, which is the one I mentioned before. And the big benefit for the reader is that this is all research to the nth degree because if I’m calling people out or we’re calling people out, I need to kind of, A, I need to be nuanced in my critique, but also I need to kind kind of have a good reason for criticising them. I need to have some kind of evidence. That of course invites the same kind of critique when it comes to my own contribution. So that’s another reason why it’s taken so long to write. Everything is researched like hell. Now you won’t see that necessarily on the page, but trust me, every word is researched like hell. Oh, I believe it. So anyway, that’s the book.

[01:49:32.730] – Andi J

Excellent. So look, if the book is out when we launch, maybe. But what we’ll do is we’ll put a link to your newsletter because I’m sure there will be links in your newsletter when you launch the book. So, yeah, I’m looking forward to it coming out and the debate which will spiral after it. Well, look, JP Castlin, I think we’ve come to the end of the road today. Well, thank you very much for your time.

[01:49:56.990] – JP Castlin

Oh, thank you for having me. That’s probably the least coherent podcast.

[01:50:01.850] – Andi J

What was I talking about? Uh, yeah, I don’t, um, golf. No, it doesn’t matter. So you have the links to JP’s newsletter, which you absolutely should sign up for, are in the show notes. And LinkedIn, still the best place to contact you?

[01:50:15.770] – JP Castlin

Yeah, either that or via— I was gonna say my website, but yeah, LinkedIn is easiest.

[01:50:22.330] – Andi J

Yeah, perfect. All that’s in the show notes. And, uh, do catch up and follow JP, especially on LinkedIn. It’s a great fun thing to see. So brilliant. JP, thanks for your time.

[01:50:31.730] – JP Castlin

Thank you very much for having me. It’s always been a pleasure.