Going on the Offensive with Creative Strategy

Thoughts from Nudgestock 2025

Source: Roger L. Martin, 2025

I was invited by my friend Rory Sutherland to speak last week at Nudgestock 2025 and the audience seemed to really enjoy the talk. So, I thought I would reprise its highlights in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece called Going on the Offensive with Creative Strategy: Thoughts from Nudgestock 2025. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.

Overall Theme

The title of talk was Why the Best Defense is a Good Offense. It is a saying that most people attribute to a letter George Washington wrote in 1799 after his two terms as President, discussing his time as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. The direct quote was “offensive operations, often times, is the surest, if not the only means of defense.” However, Sun Tzu said something similar in The Art of War, believed to have been written in the fifth century BC: “Attack is the secret of defense; defense is the planning of an attack.” (It is a book I discussed in this video with over million views.) More recently it is attributed to heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Dempsey, who popularized the modern form of the expression: “the best defense is a good offense.”

Though the origins of the expression stem from war and boxing, it applies equally to the world of argumentation. In debating, if you concede the opponent’s premise and then try to defend your point of view on the playing field of their premise, you will almost certainly lose.

It is the case in every contentious political issue, for example US illegal immigration. The standard pro-illegal immigration premise is that America is a country of immigrants, and therefore we should be welcoming to immigrants — in fact we need them. If you are anti-illegal immigration and accept that premise, you will lose and end up arguing about how many millions of illegal immigrants per year we should accept. The standard anti-illegal immigration premise is that without enforced immigration laws, a country has no borders and thus has no sovereignty. If you are pro-illegal immigration and accept that premise — you will lose and end up arguing about the level of due process to provide during deportation.

It is the same for every contentious political issue from abortion to trade to income taxation, etc. Accepting an adverse premise and attempting to defend your alternative point of view is a losing game.

Application to Innovation

Nudgestock 2025 was a festival for marketers, designers, innovators, to whom I will refer using the umbrella term creatives — people engaged in an effort to change direction from the status quo to something else. My message was that in modern business, creatives are dooming themselves to high failure rates by accepting the dominant premise of modern business, which is that by objectively analyzing the past, you can predict the future. Furthermore, if you rigorously analyze the past using valid quantitative data collection and analysis, you can predict the future accurately. That means that you can forecast future revenues — and do so accurately enough to justify the spending to generate those rigorously forecasted revenues.

While that premise isn’t stated this baldly, it is what is taught in all business schools — and has been for at least 50 years — so everyone in business that has a business education has been taught this premise and every application they have learned — whether a marketing, finance, operations, or strategy application — is based on this premise. The premise is virtually identical in economics or engineering education — and together with business education that makes up the educational background of 80–90% of business executives in the modern economy. I will refer to these folks with the umbrella term analytics.

In business, all ideas are subjected to the premise that we should only take an action for which data analysis confirms will garner the necessary revenues in the future to justify the investment required by the action. Analytics are taught that their job is to enforce this premise strictly and pervasively — any deviation is reprehensible and dangerous.

Creatives have a strong tendency to attempt to defend their ideas while implicitly or explicitly accepting the dominant premise. “I know our data is qualitative, but we are confident that this is a good idea.” “Since this is a new thing, we can’t predict revenues precisely, but we believe they will be strong.”

Such defenses tend to be ripped to shreds by well-meaning analytics, who do exactly what they were taught: prevent non-analytic thinking. Creatives hold conferences and write papers about how to calculate the ROI on innovation — attempting to defend while accepting the premise of analytics.

So, What’s the Problem?

Because of the dominant form of training of business executives, many reading this will be asking: Roger, what’s the problem? Shouldn’t we be defending our righteous premise against any attacks by sloppy creatives?

The problem is the fundamental flaw in the premise of the analytics — and it has been pointed out by smarter people than me or anybody reading this.

Greek philosopher and father of data analytics, Aristotle, pointed out the limits of the technique he created. Data analytics is only helpful in predicting the future when we are fully confident that that future cannot be different than the past. Otherwise, according to its creator, data analytics is a deeply flawed methodology that should not be used.

The great American pragmatist philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, pointed out that no new idea in the history of the world has been proven in advance analytically. When analytics ask creatives to prove a new idea in advance analytically, they are asking the creatives to do something that has never been done in the history of the world — good luck with that!

At a more mundane level than these two historical geniuses, any modern statistician would tell you that to make any valid inference about a universe from a sample, the sample has to be representative. That is only the case when future is identical to the past — channeling Aristotle’s insight.

The problem is that analytics are taught a fundamental logical fallacy. To make decisions, they are taught to use a methodology that implicitly assumes that the future will be identical to the past while we definitively know that in business, the future is rarely identical to the past. But analytics enforce a methodology that assumes it is.

That is the single biggest problem in the modern practice of management.

Key Implications

There are three implications of this pervasive logical fallacy (per the slide above).

All Revenue Forecasting is a Fantasy

The object of strategy is an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action. But companies do not control customers: they will do whatever they wish. Analyzing past data to forecast the future behavior of people you don’t control is a fantasy exercise. That notwithstanding, it is taken deadly seriously. Analytics spend innumerable person-hours on forecasting revenue because they believe that they need that forecast to be confident in spending decisions — despite the fact that you can’t forecast what you can’t control. It is the great pacifier of modern business — revenue forecasting makes analytics feel good, even if it provides no more value than popping a pacifier in a baby’s mouth.

It is not as though you should ignore revenues. You should model them rather than waste your time trying to build up forecasts and hold employees accountable for a forecast of revenues over which they have no control. Instead simply model the revenues that you would need to earn a satisfactory return in order to make a bet on whether to make the cost investment to attempt to garner them.

It is Impossible to Defend Innovation in Modern Business

Despite the insanity of the dominant premise of business, it is impossible for creatives to defend innovation while accepting the premise of analytics. Analytics will ask for you to prove in advance that your idea will be economically attractive by forecasting revenues analytically, even though Aristotle and Peirce explain that it is a dumb and impossible idea. And because it is a fool’s errand, any attempt to do so will be laughable to analytics — and will fail. This is why creatives are so frustrated with the world of business. It is because they don’t realize that their approach is designed to fail.

For Innovation in Modern Business, the only Defense is Offense

To be successful, creatives must go on offense. They need to ask the analytics about the methodology of their forecasts for the business excluding your innovation — i.e. the status quo they are defending. Ask them how they can be sure that their data from the past will be sufficiently representative of the future to forecast revenues. How it is that they can be confident that the future behavior of customers they don’t control will be identical to their chosen behavior from the past?

Use the What Would Have to be True (WWHTBT) question to force the analytics to lay out the logic of their future forecasts of the status quo. Point out that the WWHTBT reveals huge leaps of logic. Show the many times in the past in your industry that customers have changed their behaviors. Ask then how it is that they could be confident that this time, customers will behave in the future identically to the past? Why, unlike in the history of the industry, customers will be so satisfied that they won’t change their behavior at all? Attack relentlessly!

Then insist that together you compare the WWHTBT for your innovation to succeed versus the WWHTBT for the status quo to succeed. Have a competition of the logic of your innovation versus the status quo, not a competition between your idea and a logical fallacy.

Practitioner Insight

If you are a creative, understand that you live in a business world completely dominated by analytics. It is an era — that took shape about fifty years and still dominants today — on which we will look back fifty years from now and wonder what were we thinking? And what on earth were we teaching?

It will probably take another twenty years for the current dominant business premise to be seen as utterly ridiculous. That may sound like a long time, but the world has a history of stupid ideas taking a long time to die — e.g. the world is flat; lead pipes are a great way to carry water; cocaine is good for you; smoking cigarettes doesn’t cause cancer; women don’t have the aptitude for business; shareholder value maximization is a terrific goal, etc. etc.

In the meantime, don’t defend your innovative ideas. Go on the offensive. The goal should be to get the status quo and your innovative idea put in the identical position. It isn’t a case of one being data-based and the other not. Both the supposedly safe and well-understand extension of the status quo into the future and your innovative idea lack any data about the future. Any forecast of revenues in the future is just plain made up.

There needs to be a competition of ideas, each with WWHTBT and Barriers to Choice. Pit them against each other in a fair logical fight to determine on which idea you will bet to compel desired customer action.

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As a reminder, I am doing a PTW/PI podcast series with friend Tiffani Bova. The tenth in the series will be on LinkedIn on Wednesday, July 16th at 12 noon EST and 9am PST. I will provide the link in next week’s piece. I look forward to seeing you there.