Why Your Strategy Is a Dead Fish

I’m excited to be joined by Shruti Rai today on The Match. Shruti is Strategy Partner at GHO, an independent design, experience and strategy consultancy. Shruti, thanks so much for joining us. To kick things off, maybe tell us a little more about GHO and the work that you do.

We’ve been proudly independent for 25-plus years. We’ve had the pleasure of working with big end of town businesses such as CommBank and Allianz, right up to early-stage startups. Our motto is good humans only. And we believe there’s always a better way of doing things, so we’re always looking at how we can take our offering, and our partnership with our clients, further through design and creativity.

Fantastic. And I know you yourself trained as a designer — design is your background — but we’re talking about strategy. How does your background as a designer lead you to think differently about strategy?

I always joke that my career has been a path of pivots. I trained as a visual designer, but I was always just a very curious, nosy person, so I would always find myself in rooms where some of the decisions and the thinking were being made. And I’ve had the pleasure of working with some really smart strategists and good thinkers throughout my life in agency land, and through that craft I’ve kind of found myself in strategy land.

But I think what’s always been — I want to say my little secret weapon — is that because of my design background, I always feel the need to take language and all the words that have been talked about and simplify it into something more visual. We’re humans; our brains are very visual. We learn and understand through storytelling. So I think a lot of my design background translates pretty well into simplifying complex ideas into something that’s a simple story.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense, and I’m sure it’s something you’re going to build on through our discussion. I know you want to talk about dead fish — I wasn’t sure where you were going with this when you told me, but I think you’re onto something. You’ve said the strategy deck — which is kind of the main artefact, the thing our industry sells — is actually the problem, in terms of strategy not always landing inside organisations, or being adopted, or being taken forward. So tell us more about the dead fish problem.

So, in terms of the way we think about strategy, we think 90-to-200-page PowerPoint presentations, with some of the smartest thinking in them. As a designer, I’d always think, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing.’ But then, as someone who’s been handed that document and asked to make sense of it and start building something from it, there was always a disconnect.

Now it’s a problem, because we’re here in 2026 and we’re still just buying strategy as decks and PowerPoint presentations, and there must be an evolution. So if you think about it from a dead fish perspective — okay, if I ask you, Robin, draw me a fish, what do you do?

You want me to draw one? Yeah, okay — see my terrible drawing here?

I’m going to get your kids to judge this — they’ll laugh. That is an interesting species, they’d be very proud of you. But if you look at that, that’s essentially a dead fish. A fish isn’t supposed to be static and dead.

We tend to draw fish like that because of the medium — it’s paper. Paper only allows us to do that. But when you think about strategy, the reason we have these 200-page documents is because we’re thinking about how we’re going to communicate these ideas through a PowerPoint.

A fish is supposed to be alive. It’s supposed to be mobile, it’s supposed to move — it’s reactive, it has water, it’s dynamic. When we went from paper to computer, we could actually animate the fish. As designers, I know I did — I learned, oh God, back then it was Flash — we used to write ActionScript, and we could make things bounce and move. We started thinking about the medium differently, and that dictated how we executed.

Now, if you apply the same thing to strategy — basically, our 90-page documents are very expensive artwork, because they’re beautiful, they’re smart, they’re good to look at. But are they alive? I still think there’s a role for a lot of our research being presented in documents, but it has to go beyond that. When does that fish come alive and start to be mobile and dynamic?

Think about the amount and richness of information that goes into those strategy documents — we’re speaking to businesses, to stakeholders, to customers, doing market research. All of that richness then boils down to ten flat pages. All of that richness boils down to one dead fish.

So if you’re thinking about how we make sure all the dynamism, the movement, the richness of the information that goes into creating that strategy actually lives better for your clients — that was the initial thesis behind why we started GHO Collabs. We’re a bunch of thinkers and makers at GHO; most of our strategists used to be designers, or are designers with much more of a strategic lens.

So instead of a 200-page document that just hands you the strategy, we do some initial research, then work with the client, cast the key people from the team, co-create with them, prototype, and test. What would otherwise have been a dead-fish strategy deck is now a working prototype — tested, and brought to life as a business case.

Yeah — it’s got real momentum and ownership behind it as well.

That’s right. And it’s actually quite imperative in today’s climate, because gone are the days where you had the luxury of going away for six months to do intense, deep research, then coming back to present exactly what you should do for the next two horizons. I don’t think many businesses have the luxury to wait and marinate in that thinking before they execute. So I think we need to rethink the way strategy as a function works, to keep up with the moving landscape.

So, developing strategy which is alive.

That’s right. I think dead fish as a concept comes from — in my old avatar as a designer, I came across, gosh, I think it was ten years back, a video — anyone who sees this should go check it out — by a guy called Brett Victor. He was trying to show people how to build animation on computers, and he talked about how the medium shouldn’t dictate the output — paper shouldn’t be the reason we design dead fish. We should be thinking about how the computer, as a medium, allows us to draw and move and make the fish alive. But don’t forget the person interacting with it is also alive — so how do you orchestrate a performance between two live creatures?

If you take that from a strategic point of view: what’s the right way to bring strategy to life so that the other live humans — your clients and their teams — can interact with it in a way that helps them make clearer decisions, at speed and at value?

So once you’ve experienced this way of working, I’m sure it’s pretty hard to go back to the more traditional approach of developing a static, dead-fish strategy. How do you make the case, though, within an organisation for working this way? Maybe one way to look at it is: what’s the cost of not working this way, and of developing dead-fish strategy?

Yeah, I mean, look — we’re not going to rip the Band-Aid off overnight. It’s a bit of a learning curve. The way we’ve been working, we’ve now conducted, gosh, 50-plus Collabs across clients like CommBank and Allianz. And what used to be a bit of a sell is now something clients reach out to us for — ‘Hey, can we do a Collab for this?’

The more ambiguous something is, and the faster you need clarity and alignment across your team, that’s where you need strategy to move faster. The pace at which businesses are changing is much more dynamic than it used to be. If you think about what businesses used to do — you’d find something that worked, there’d be a market for it, and you’d optimise and scale. Six Sigma, all of that used to be the playbook. That playbook doesn’t exist like that anymore, whether you’re a huge, complex organisation or an early-stage startup — you have to move fast, and you’re building a team of smart decision-makers. So you need something that’s executable. You need something with behaviour baked into it — something dynamic that can change as things shift within or outside your organisation.

Look, there’s still a place for deep research in certain organisations — say, government — where you need a lot more rigour to show for every decision and hypothesis. There’s a case for that; take your time and get the detail in. But for many, many cases, you’re better off looking for a live strategy that brings the hypothesis to life faster, quicker, and in a much more tangible way — rather than telling your stakeholder, ‘This is what the hypothesis was.’ Show them, ‘This is what we built and prototyped, and this is how our customers reacted to it.’ That’s a very hard thing to say no to, because you’ve validated value, viability and feasibility within a short span of time.

And you’ve got momentum, because there’s a movement happening in the organisation to take this forward.

That’s right.

Let’s talk about some examples. I know you’ve taken the Collabs approach with some of Australia’s biggest companies. Have you got an example or two you could talk to, around how you’ve taken this approach?

Yeah — the interesting thing is there’s sometimes an assumption when we hear a brief that, ‘I’m not sure this is the right problem to solve with a Collab.’ The reality is we’ve addressed everything from much more ground-level questions — like, ‘How might we be relevant to the youth of today?’ — to, ‘We’ve got a conversion funnel problem,’ to, ‘We think we need this new pillar within the business — how do we bring that to life through a new service?’

One of the key features for us, from a Collab perspective, is to co-create with the client’s teams, and what that creates is a ripple effect within the business. It doesn’t just give momentum to the project at hand — the people involved in helping you build it take something away from it too.

One example that comes to mind is a Collab we did with CommBank’s retail team, a few years back. The question was, ‘How might we be relevant to the youth?’ They were losing the halo effect of the audience that grew up with the Dollarmites program, and they had younger audiences who’d never heard of it — they saw CommBank as something Mum and Dad had. They wanted something fun and more relevant for them, as they were learning about money.

So we went through the Collab process — did initial research, brought the right people in, co-created multiple solutions, brought it to life with our designers into a prototype, and tested it with young customers. The feedback was so interesting and so valuable — and it wasn’t just, ‘We need to build X, Y features,’ or, ‘This is the percentage of customers we can grow.’ You suddenly saw what value actually meant for your customers, because when you ask them, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, I want an app’ — but you already have an app, so what’s the problem? It was really about how they thought about money, and how you help them learn the fundamentals of money from the start.

A lot of the prototype we built in that Collab, the product team involved in the process started saying, ‘Oh, that should be on our roadmap.’ And what came out of that was a feature that got released into the app within the next few months — so it accelerated the feature roadmap for another team, while the marketing team found the value proposition to go to market with. An alive strategy should be something everyone around the table can take from — not just the team that commissioned the work.

Yeah — very different from the static, long strategy deck that lives on a shelf somewhere.

Exactly — like I said, it’s very expensive art. Very, very expensive art.

Thanks, Shruti — that was a great example of how you build clarity, conviction and momentum around a new customer proposition or product. I love that example. What about if you’re looking to develop a new strategy for where a whole business is going — what the future vision for that company looks like? Would you take this approach as well?

That would build an even stronger case — the opposite of dead-fish strategy. What comes to mind is one of our clients, SG Fleet, a fleet services company. They’d built a business strategy with the ambition of becoming the new way of mobility services — making the leap from being asset providers, giving you 200,000 vehicles, to becoming mobility providers. What does that mean — from how they talk about the service, to what it means for the experience, to what it means for the market?

So we took a similar approach: research, and a couple of Collabs, because their offering spanned B2B, B2B2C and B2C — we took each audience as a Collab and looked at what that future vision looked like. When you time-box yourselves and have the right mix of people and decision-makers in the room, you’d be surprised how good a hypothesis you can get to. Over those three Collabs, we built out what that future vision looked like as a prototype, and brought it to life in online and offline experiences. We tested it with employers and employees, and that whole strategy was then presented to stakeholders — it made it so much more tangible what it means to be a mobility provider.

If I compare that to a 200-page document only shown to the most senior stakeholders, not co-created from the bottom up — that would have taken much longer to cascade down to, say, the BDM, or the person talking to the customer service team. Because we brought all of these people together to co-create the vision, you already had champions of change within the business who helped it move faster and smarter, and who could own that strategy — it was already showing them how to make it execution-ready.

Good strategy should be something everybody can see themselves in, and see how they’re going to play a role in bringing it to life.

This is all really compelling, Shruti — I can see all the benefits. But I’m sure you need some prerequisites in place to make this type of approach work. What are the ingredients? What do you need in place to be able to deliver a strategy that’s alive?

That’s a good question. We’ve done this for the big end of town, who sit on mountains of research that can be leveraged, versus startups. I think what you need is a good understanding of who your audiences are and what you want to achieve. Sometimes clients just need a little help defining the problem to solve — we help them get there, to make sure we’re solving for the right problem.

Then, making sure there’s some pre-work done — because as partners, we’re coming into a problem that you’ve lived in, so we need to get up to speed. But honestly, the magic happens when we come in with an external point of view. We’re not experts in your business, but we are domain experts in the process. You need to understand the problem, understand the audience you’re solving for, understand the why — and then bring in the domain experts from within.

Have the right people in the room.

Exactly. We’ve had people come into a co-creation session on day one and go, ‘What am I doing here?’ In many complex organisations, there are people who’ve never met each other — it’s the first time they’re working together, and even that by itself creates a chemistry and a need that adds so much value in the end.

And the ownership of that outcome.

Absolutely. Because in a business, you need the legal team to work with you to get a new service out, you need the customer service team — because most of us sit in ivory towers, and it’s the customer service team who know exactly what the audience’s pain points are. That’s quite the magic skillset.

Okay, excellent. So let’s get into some practical takeaways for a leader inside a big organisation who’s sitting on a months-long research project at the moment. What would you tell them to do instead?

I’d take a step back and say: look at your last strategy document. Really look at it, and ask yourself — was it dynamic? Did it hold true for the factors that shifted since it was created? Did you actually achieve outcomes, and did the teams understand what those outcomes were meant to be? And was it executable? From a principle point of view, strategy is supposed to give you a framework of choices — was it successful in helping you make the right choices through that process?

If the answer is no, then you can either frame it as a nice piece of artwork, or look at how you make sure you’re not repeating that later in the process. I think when people think about research, they think they need every detail and every answer to be perfect — deeply dived into. But the question is: can you get to a good enough hypothesis to start executing, bring it to life, and then iterate and shape-shift as you go? Most likely, the answer is yes.

Okay — so if that realisation is there, and there’s an openness to approaching the next project differently — as a strategy partner to large organisations, what would your message be to clients and those big companies, about how they should buy strategy differently in future?

We were talking about this — everyone’s going, ‘AI, we’re going to design with AI.’ And when people think about AI and strategy, they think, ‘Oh, I can crunch these numbers, I don’t need a strategist.’ I think they need to ask whether what they really need is someone to come in and solve problems. When you’re thinking about buying strategy, you’re not buying a document — you’re buying a way of bringing a solution to life, at the pace your business needs, and in a way that brings your whole team together, rather than handing something off and saying, ‘Now it’s your problem to execute.’

Yeah — this theme of ownership and momentum has come through the conversation. That’s what you’re talking about: momentum and confidence in decision-making.

Yeah, I think that’s pretty key as well.

Bringing our conversation to a close and looking forward — there’s a lot of talk about AI at the moment in design. I know you’re more interested, even though you’re a designer by background, in how we use AI in strategy development. What does that mean to you, and where do you see things going at GHO?

We’ve been asking ourselves this question for a while. When we had Figma, for example, that was a turning point — a lot of people saw it as a turning point for design, but I saw it as a turning point for strategy, because our Collabs could bring an alive strategy to the table — it wasn’t just a deck, it was a prototype.

So now, as people are asking what AI does to design, I’m asking what AI does to strategy. I think the literal answer is: now we can go from ‘here’s our thinking’ to ‘here’s our hypothesis’ to ‘here’s how we make it’ to ‘here’s how we build it.’ The promise is to go from thinking, to a built environment, to piloting it with a set of customers, really quickly.

That’s the basic promise. But we’re trying to explore what it means one step further. Going back to the start of this conversation, about the richness of information that goes into developing strategy — when we do brand strategy, for example, there are businesses who haven’t looked at their brand in ten-plus years, so it’s almost like reintroducing themselves to who they are as a business. There’s a lot of valuable conversation in there. How do we operationalise that in a way that’s dynamic and executable, no matter who’s picking it up — whether that’s three years after the strategy project has finished? How do you make that an alive piece within the organisation? That’s kind of where GHO is moving, and how we’re thinking about strategy going forward.

Thanks, Shruti — excited to see where things go at GHO, and in the work that you do. Really appreciate the conversation today, talking about how we make strategy alive. It’s been really interesting. And hopefully we never have to buy dead-fish strategy again.