NORTHERN PLANNER

The old man on the wheel

Getting older is an excellent way to discover how much energy you used to waste. Age and treachery will overcome youth and skill

Consider the older cyclist on the club run who shows a touching interest in how strong you’re feeling. Strong enough, perhaps, to spend a little longer on the front. Then, near the end, he comes past. He has borrowed your legs for most of the ride and saved his own for the bit you will remember.

Our industry keeps few of him. Only around 8 per cent of agency people are over 51. A peloton of young legs and very few old heads.

The second curve

The legs do go. Recovery takes longer. Some days, getting your socks on feels like sufficient preparation for breakfast.

But having less to spend makes you careful about where you spend it. You start to notice the effort that achieves something, and the considerable amount devoted to looking busy.

Psychologists split intelligence in two. Fluid intelligence, the quick stuff, fades early. Crystallised intelligence, the accumulation of wisdom keeps climbing for decades. Strategy is played on that second curve. It rewards the person who knows this client meeting is the same one as in 2014, only with different biscuits.

The ropes

The older rider has learnt to watch. Who will chase anything? Where does the wind change? The young rider’s need to prove he’s strong can be put to work.

Kinshasa, 1974. Foreman is twenty-five and hits like a falling wardrobe. Ali is thirty-two and a step slower. So Ali leans on the ropes and lets Foreman prove how strong he is, until by the eighth round there is nothing left to prove it with. Then the old man knocks him down.

Sometimes, of course, the youngster simply rides away. Age guarantees very little beyond eligibility for certain insurance products. But it can teach you to find a contest you can win.

Dirty strategy

We are strangely attached to the idea that winning means being better at the same things as everyone else. But if a competitor has more money and a head start, accepting their definition of the contest is an expensive act of politeness. You don’t owe them that.

Let someone else pay to establish the convention. Find the awkward little opening it creates. Get there before they can turn round. McDonald’s spent decades putting a restaurant on every corner, so Burger King geofenced 14,000 of them and offered a one-cent Whopper to anyone ordering on its app within 600 feet of one. The rival’s estate became the media plan: 1.5 million downloads in nine days.

There’s room for a little human deviousness too. Sometimes an idea gets further if you let somebody else feel they discovered it.

Be decent with people and unreasonable about the terms of competition. Lying to customers is a miserable substitute for finding a clever way in.

The rules

The hard part is knowing which rules can bear a little bending. You have to play properly first. Learn what a method is trying to protect. Write the brief and discover which minor omission sends everything off in the wrong direction.

At fifteen, Picasso painted a thoroughly conventional sickbed scene that won an honourable mention in Madrid. He could take the rules apart later because he knew where every screw was.

The impatient beginner sees the expert skip a step and copies the omission. Unfortunately, the bit that made it possible took several rather inefficient years. Try rope-a-dope in your first fight and you are just a man on the ropes, being hit.

The shortcut

I like a shortcut. Most people with a finite life and an inbox do. But saving yourself some work is not the same as removing the experience through which you learn to judge the work.

When MIT researchers had students write essays with ChatGPT, 83 per cent couldn’t quote a single sentence of what they had just handed in. A small, early study, but the shape is familiar. The hard way in is often the only way a thing stays in.

If strategy is going to earn its keep through judgement, always being handed the answer is a curious apprenticeship. Borrowing someone’s conclusion doesn’t give you the judgement that produced it.

The scars

Judgement needs something to work on. You make a call. You discover that the objection you dismissed was the important one.

The failed idea keeps the details the successful case study loses. The client who said yes in the room and no in the car park. The question you were too pleased with yourself to ask. Useful scars, provided you look at them properly. Otherwise you can spend thirty years protecting the same mistake and call it experience.

The old rider knows the bend where the drain cover sits. Nobody told him. He found it with his elbow.

Not knowing

After enough practice, judgement becomes hard to explain. Ask someone very good how they do it and you get a shrug. They saw an opening. The timing felt right.

Sian Beilock found the same with golfers. The ones who putted well often couldn’t say what they had done, while the ones who missed were watching every step. The decisions are still happening. They just don’t need announcing.

Listen to that instinct, but check it. A familiar feeling can carry an old mistake as easily as an old lesson.

The bike

Learning to ride a bike is still the strangest example. At first there is too much to remember. You steer towards whatever you’re trying to avoid. Someone tells you to relax, which seems unreasonable given the evidence so far.

Then one day you are riding. Yesterday the whole arrangement ended in a hedge. Today you can turn, keep going, decide to go somewhere else. All that effort has bought you the freedom to look up.

And if the legs aren’t what they were, you might still spot a turn that somebody stronger rides straight past.

Let them.

You don’t have to win on their road.