After imagination, laundry

"We all know that after the honeymoon comes the marriage, after the election comes the hard task of governance. In spiritual life it is the same: After the ecstasy comes the laundry." These words from Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield capture a universal truth: peak experiences and breakthrough moments don't exempt us from life's everyday challenges. Whether it's enlightenment or election victory, the mundane tasks of existence - taking out the rubbish, paying taxes, dealing with anxieties - remain stubbornly present when we descend from the mountain.

This gap between transformative moments and everyday implementation plays out across many domains. In politics, it's perfectly captured in the final scene of Michael Ritchie's The Candidate, when Bill McKay (Robert Redford), having just won election to the United States Senate, turns to his political consultant and asks bewilderedly, "What do we do now?"

The challenge of turning vision into reality is particularly acute in public policy. Francis Fukuyama observes that many policy failures stem not from poor design, but from weak administrative capacity and implementation challenges. While economists and policy experts focus on getting the policy "right," they often underestimate the complexity of executing these policies through bureaucratic institutions. This gap between policy promises and implementation is so significant that entire disciplines - economics, project management, and public administration - have evolved to bridge it.

The military theorist Colin S. Gray emphasized the interconnected nature of the different dimensions of military strategy, describing the "complex interdependencies" that underlay what he saw as the  fundamentally non-hierarchical concept of strategy. In fact for Gray, the sheer complexity and diversity of agents, agencies, and processes on which strategy relied on to to have effect in the world amounted “more to chaos than to order in any sense.”

The business world isn't immune either. In his Harvard Business Review article ‘Creativity is Not Enough’, Theodore Levitt delivers a withering critique of idea generation without follow-through: "A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action... Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is their implementation.” Levitt is particularly critical of “so-called creative people”, and he quite clearly has more than just those with ‘creative’ in their job title:

“The major problem is that so-called creative people often (though certainly not always) pass off on others the responsibility for getting down to brass tacks. They have plenty of ideas but little businesslike follow-through. They do not make the right kind of effort to help their ideas get a hearing and a try… Many people who are full of ideas simply do not understand how an organization must operate in order to get things done, especially dramatically new things. All too often, there is the peculiar underlying assumption that creativity automatically leads to actual innovation. In the crippled logic of this line of thinking, ideation (or creativity, if you emphasize the idea-producing aspect of that term) and innovation are treated as synonyms”

Strategy begins with a leap into a better, more desirable, more valuable, more meaningful future. But this imaginative leap is only the beginning. The real work lies in determining how to make that future real: What conditions must we create? What must we start or stop doing? What resources must we gather? What politics must we navigate? What collaborators do we need? How will we finance it all? Strategy is ultimately a practical, pragmatic undertaking concerned with change in the real world. While imagination is essential, it's only the first step. After that comes the hard yards of implementation - or to paraphrase Kornfield, after imagination comes the laundry.

Brand strategists who don’t grasp (or avoid) the simple truth that if it’s not embodied in action it’s just not a strategy, who don’t have a wide enough lens to see all surface areas of a business that brand strategy shapes, who don’t appreciate that this kind of strategy can only be done with and through a process of negotiation and dialogue with powerful and opinionated stakeholders, and who don’t have the patience, resilience and humility to do that shouldn’t bother.