3.1
Formation
It might feel exciting in your mind, but if it isn’t shaped into something others can follow, it will evaporate just as quickly as it arrived. To make a solution work, your ideas need form. Not just creative energy, but conceptual architecture.
This next phase is about giving your idea a spine. About moving it from curiosity to conviction. From something people nod along to, to something they can build with.
We do this through a three-part structure:
Territory → Foundation → Activation.
It begins with identifying the space you want to explore. Then sharpens into a central belief. Then stretches outward again into real-world action. Each step builds on the last. Each adds strength, clarity, and momentum.
Let’s walk through each stage.
Think of a territory as a signal to your team: “Pay attention here. This space holds potential.” You’re not solving anything yet. You’re naming the conditions for what’s possible.
A territory could emerge from a tension you uncovered, a shift in the culture, a blind spot in the category. You might not know what the answer looks like, but you’re beginning to believe this is where it’s hiding.
The best territories feel directional but expansive. They open the door to exploration without closing it too quickly. And when you name them well—crisply, provocatively—they generate energy. They make your collaborators want to dig deeper.
In a project about revitalizing a legacy gym brand, for instance, the team could’ve chosen a safe path—aspiration, progress, or performance. But instead, they landed on something sharper: “The Disciple of Gym.” Not fitness as lifestyle. Fitness as devotion. Suddenly, everything feels charged. That’s the power of a well-framed territory. It reorients your attention. It sharpens your lens.
You’ll know a good territory when the team starts repeating it back. When it starts showing up in meetings and whiteboards before you’ve even asked it to. It sticks because it gives shape to a hunch people already had but hadn’t yet named.
This is the turning point in a solution. The moment when thinking congeals into a clear point of view. A line in the sand. A belief you’re willing to stand behind and build from.
A foundation is the core delivery of your work. The central idea that tells everyone what you believe, what’s changing, and why it matters. This might take the form of a positioning statement, a manifesto, a vision, or a brand platform. Whatever shape it takes, it should answer the question: “What do we now know to be true and what does that truth allow us to do differently?”
Writing a foundation is some of the most rigorous thinking you’ll do. You’re translating a mountain of insight into a single, precise perspective. It has to be bold, but defensible. Ambitious, but clear. It should feel inevitable, like all the signals were pointing here the whole time.
Often, it helps to define the shift you’re trying to make. What are we moving away from? What are we moving toward? In brand work, this might be a shift in tone, role, or cultural positioning. In innovation work, it might be a shift in mindset or behavior. But either way, the before-and-after frame helps make the leap concrete.
Here’s where you go from saying “Weird Wins” as a territory to declaring, “Memorability is more valuable than polish. In a saturated category, being odd is an advantage.” That’s a foundation. It says something specific. It gives people a belief to align around and a filter to judge future decisions. That one sentence becomes the nucleus of the strategy. It ties together the product, the brand, the philosophy.
Done well, the foundation becomes the moment people finally get it. It’s the aha. The spine. The thing that makes everything else easier from creative briefs to product decisions to brand behaviors.
If the territory is where momentum begins, the foundation is where it accelerates.
Activation is where the strategy leaves the deck and enters the world. It’s the phase where you take your core belief and ask: “What does this idea look like in action?”
Activation is applied thinking. It’s where the idea proves itself by shaping real choices—what you say, how you move, what you make, and what you don’t.
If your foundation is about embracing weirdness, what does that mean for how you name products, write headlines, or design experiences? If your foundation reframes back-office software as a strategic weapon, what kind of onboarding experience communicates that? What kind of visuals, language, tone?
Activation doesn’t have to mean finished output. It often starts with prototypes. Sketches. Demos. A reworked landing page headline. A new messaging hierarchy. A storyboard for a brand film. What matters is that you’re making the idea visible and testing whether it holds.
This is also the moment where the team around you begins to see how the strategy affects their lane. Design starts making moves. Writers find a new voice. Product leaders reconsider the roadmap. The strategy is no longer something that’s talked about—it’s something that moves through the system.
If you’ve done the earlier work right, activation feels like translation. You’re not scrambling to find what fits—you’re carrying the core idea forward and letting it speak in new formats.
Territory sets the focus. Foundation sets the belief. Activation sets the behavior.
Without territory, you don’t know where you’re going. Without foundation, you don’t know what you stand for. Without activation, no one else knows what to do next.
This is a practical path that helps you guide teams, build consensus, and drive work that has staying power. And it’s repeatable. Once you learn to move through these phases with clarity, you can do it again and again, across projects, categories, and contexts. It becomes your rhythm. Your Operating Logic.