Your marketing strategy is probably just improvisation

[Read me if you'd quietly prefer your CEO never sat in on a Wednesday standup.]

It's Friday afternoon and your new content marketer starts Monday. You send the onboarding pack early so they can read up over the weekend, because that's the kind of company you are. The strategy doc is in there covering personas, channel mix, content engine, publishing cadence. Wednesday 9:30, and they attend their first standup. Someone on your team owes a webinar deck that's now two sprints behind. Someone else is rewriting the pricing page because sales asked nicely twice. The CEO needs his LinkedIn thought leadership post by 14:00. Your new content marketer waits for a gap in the conversation and asks when the keyword research happens, because the doc says topics start with keyword research. The silence is short. Everyone hears it anyway.

If reading that gives you flashbacks, congratulations, your strategy document just got its first cover-to-cover reader. The person who started Monday. Your marketing strategy, the real one, is what your team does on Wednesdays in the standup. The document titled "Strategy" goes back to its virtual cave, never to be seen again.

Back in Edition 1 of the Gossamer Loom, I briefly mentioned a pillar of my research as being for anyone whose processes work but never crystallise. They get the job done, they just always need the founder or marketing leader in the room to do it. This is that research, let's get started.

When I went back through my 13 thesis interviews with B2B SaaS marketing leaders, I looked for the distance between the marketing each leader described and the marketing they actually did. I found it in all thirteen. Not most. All. The leader who told me "brand first, absolutely brand first" then acknowledged brand wouldn't survive a serious budget cut. The leader who described the ideal, "you track everything, your cost, your internal investments, make it all very tangible", then described running their CRM as a side job. These were not the strugglers. These were the most strategically literate people in the sample, with the best documents. The documents were describing a different company.

I've got my own stack of dusty strategy documents. Earlier this year I helped one of my Fractional CMO clients onboard a new growth marketer. She was core to the growth strategy we promised our board, and without her capacity and capability we weren't going to hit growth targets by the Q2 review window.

Below is a screenshot of the message I sent her on her first day:

"Strategy doc is on Google drive here. Don't pay too much attention to the ICP section, it doesn't match up with the looker dashboard numbers because we tweaked the industries to also include Finance. Let's talk through this at 15:00."

That was 4 months ago, the strategy doc still hasn't been updated. The Looker dashboard numbers are still wrong. Q2 growth review with the board happens in 3 weeks…

One of the leaders I interviewed has been running account-based marketing at the same company through multiple iterations. Fifty to sixty enterprise target logos, sales cycles north of twelve months, advice arriving from what they called "a lot of gurus" along the way. Every iteration produces something recognisable, a pattern you could watch and describe. What it never produces is a process that runs without them. Their own verdict, after years of trying: "I don't think we have found a real kind of a model or a structure which I could say really works." Notice how that sentence is not a leader without a process, it's a leader whose process needs them in the room, every single time it runs. And how will they manage that in the agentic AI era where autonomous agents run 24/7, burning tokens in the wrong direction?

So here's the claim that will annoy people. The strategy document was never for your team. It's for your board, your investors, your next VP's interview prep, and the part of your own head that needs marketing to look governable. It's just theatre. I don't mean that as an insult. Theatre has a real function, it's how a company looks fundable and hireable from the outside. And the people teaching you to write better strategy docs are not wrong about what a good document looks like. The disagreement is about what the document does. One of my thirteen interviewees put it bluntly: "The power of politics surpasses the power of data by far, even for data-driven organisations like ours." The dashboards run. The reports get generated. The decisions get made somewhere else.

Knowing this doesn't fix it, because the strategy document and the Wednesday standup answer to different pressures. The document gets revised quarterly, calmly, with the board in mind. The Wednesday standup gets revised hourly, under pipeline pressure, with whatever is on fire in mind. Write a better document and you've produced better theatre. The research behind this goes back to two organisational theorists, Feldman and Pentland, who showed that the process you describe and the process you actually perform are different things in every organisation, always, and that the space between them is where new ways of working get built. That last part is the bit nobody tells you. Your Wednesday improvisation is not your strategy failing. It is your actual strategy, the one your constraints wrote, the only one that has ever shipped anything. The deck describes the company you planned. The standup is the company you have.

What gets people out isn't a better document. It's watching the Wednesday standup on purpose. For one week, sit in your own standup and listen for the deck. Count the decisions that reference it. Most leaders who try this get a number they don't repeat out loud. That number tells you how much strategy you actually have and where it actually lives. What to do with the gap once you can see it, how a pattern that needs you in the room becomes one that doesn't, is a whole edition on its own, later in the series. Diagnosis first.

The full pillar, Marketing Routines Under Constraint, covers how these half-built processes survive for years and the four distinct ways working routines die. It lives at Marketing Routines Under Constraint on gossamergrowth.com. (About 4,000 words. None of them about your deck.)

While you were reading this, your new hire finished reading the strategy doc you sent through. They'll arrive next Monday knowing the personas, the channel mix, the cadence, and by their third standup they'll have stopped mentioning any of it, the way everyone before them did, and started learning the real strategy instead. The one that lives in whatever survives the Wednesday. You could update the document to match. Nobody would notice. They're not reading it. They're watching you.