
Future of Planning
Building Strategy that shows up
What are the questions strategists should be asking themselves? Well, Iva Johan, CSO for VCCP's digital experience agency Bernadette, offers a few to consider
26 August 2025
Strategy doesn’t live in the deck, it lives in the decision.
Not the big, sweeping, brand-defining one, but the small ones. The everyday ones. The ones that decide how something works, feels or behaves. That’s where strategy shows up.
The kind of strategy I do rarely ends in a strapline. It ends in a flow. A screen. A service decision. A moment of tension in a journey that needs to be resolved. It’s less about what we say and it’s more about what we make, and how people experience it. This kind of work doesn’t always look like “strategy". It doesn’t always live on a single slide. But it is the difference between a brand that promises something and a brand that delivers it.
Because what we build is what people believe. And strategy should be building more.
Working in digital, I’ve learned that the value of strategy is tested in use. Not just in the workshop or the pitch, but the product itself. Does it help? Does it feel right? Does it earn attention? Trust? If it doesn’t, the strategy isn’t finished.
That means that strategy can’t stop at clarity in a deck. It has to keep going. Into the edge cases. Into the handoffs. Into the backlog and the roadmap. Into what gets prioritised and what doesn’t. Sometimes the most strategic decision is deciding not to build a feature that sounded like a great idea, looked amazing in the prototype, but that we learned through testing people just won’t be used.
As a consequence, the questions I find myself asking the most, and think all strategists should ask themselves, and others, more isn’t the ‘what should this thing be?’ but ‘why does this thing exist?’ and ‘how will we make the experience people actually need?’ and ‘what does this choice signal about who we are?’
And that’s okay, that is still strategy. Just not always the kind of strategy that announces itself as such. I don’t think of this as better or more important. Just different. I care about how things work. How they feel. How they function under pressure. That is where I put my strategic energy. And that’s where I think more energy should be spent in the future.
Because that’s where brand lives, as our lives become more and more digital.
Not in what we claim, but in what we do.
Not just in the idea, but in the execution.
Not in the moment of inspiration, but in the long tail of delivery.
That’s the future of strategy that I want to see.
The kind that lives in the decision.
The kind that shows up.
Iva Johan is CSO at Bernadette, VCCP's digital experience agency