LISA STORY STRATEGY
Strategy for problems that don’t sit in one place.
Former Chief Strategy Officer, now working independently across brand, reputation and communications: through consulting projects, fractional or interim leadership, workshops and focused sessions. I help leaders and teams simplify the challenge, set a clear direction and make good work happen.
Clarity replaces complexity.
Creative confidence follows.
THE PROBLEM I SOLVE
When good thinking isn’t adding up.
When you’re trying to move forward, whether through growth, a new direction or a period of scrutiny, it can be hard from the inside to see where to focus and what to do next with confidence.
You might be a CCO, a CMO or a Head of Comms at a large organisation. You might lead an independent agency and want senior strategic thinking without the overhead. Or you might run a smaller business and simply need the right person in the room.
Whatever the scale, I help you step back, see the whole picture and move forward with real momentum: earning trust, staying relevant and creating value for the audiences and stakeholders that matter most.
Our communications are organised in silos, but our audiences don’t experience us that way. How do we join everything up?
How do we sharpen our proposition so it stands out, gets found and stands up to scrutiny?
People trust creators and their communities more than they trust us. How do we earn our way into those conversations?
We’ve got a big moment coming. How do we cut through without creating the wrong kind of risk?
WAYS I HELP
Someone has to hold the whole idea.
I work at senior level, but not at arm’s length. I can write the brief, run the workshop, design the plan and build the framework: strategy and execution, not strategy instead of execution. The result is work that is not only more effective and joined-up, but more enjoyable to deliver.
01
CLARIFY DIRECTION
Business & brand
Clarity where the brief crosses boundaries. Direction grounded in what success requires.
Propositions, strategies and narratives that connect business ambition to audiences, stakeholders, communities and action.
02
DEVELOP THE WORK
Creative & communications
Sharper thinking from brief to execution. Rigour and inspiration in equal measure.
Integrated strategy, creative platforms and practical plans that make better work possible.
03
IMPROVE HOW IT GETS DONE
People, process & capability
The internal conditions behind the work.
Stronger integration and capacity to innovate.
Ways of working, team alignment, operating systems and new skills that make good strategy land.
And if you get the strategy right, across both risk and opportunity, things become simpler. Complexity gives way to clarity and generates the confidence to push creatively. When the groundwork has been properly prepared, there is room for boldness and ambition to thrive.
A DISTINCTIVE COMBINATION
Complexity isn’t the problem. Disconnection is.
Most organisations are not short of expertise, ideas or activity. The problem can be when they sit in different places: brand apart from reputation, marketing apart from communications, strategy and creative apart from execution.
The external challenge and the internal conditions behind it are usually connected. I work on both. Fix the internal conditions and the external challenge becomes more manageable.
The strategy, story and creative platform that has to land across stakeholders, audiences and channels, and stay coherent wherever people touch it. The integrated campaign. The participation movement. The brand that needs to stand out, get found and stand up to scrutiny. The reputation challenge shaped as much by what others say and what AI systems surface as by what an organisation says about itself.
EXTERNAL
The structures, relationships and ways of working that determine whether good work actually gets made. The siloed function or inherited way of working that was designed for an earlier communications landscape, and now needs connecting up. The team with capability but not alignment. The new leader who needs the function reset around them.
INTERNAL
Proof across strategy, systems and delivery.
I’ve led strategy across PR, media, creative and digital, in agency, consultancy and non-profit environments; designed the processes; and built the teams that make it all work. I served as Chief Strategy Officer at Burson (formerly BCW) for nearly a decade. Across all of it the same instinct has persisted: join the disciplines, improve the systems that turn strategic thinking into something teams can actually use - and which inspire - to grow the value of the work.
EVIDENCE OF THE WORK
SENIOR STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP
Advising and leading work for top ten Global, EMEA and UK agencies and for organisations including HSBC, Unilever, Microsoft, Gilead Sciences, Sport England and the British Council; alongside charities, NGOs and smaller, growing businesses. Complex, multi-stakeholder environments, and teams who need to move fast.
WORK THAT MOVED PEOPLE
Strategic foundations for This Girl Can; behaviour-change strategy for London 2012; Are You Chris?, the Gold SABRE-winning hepatitis C campaign for Gilead; embedding a health and wellness purpose across Unilever’s ice cream business in 40 markets. Movements, campaigns and culture-change programmes that gave clients ideas they could stand behind and shifted what people actually did.
METHODS WITH PROVEN VALUE
One of the industry’s pioneers in strategic planning, with a sustained record of creating named, deployable agency/holding company frameworks and tools including Wildfire (IPG), Advocacy Ignition (Weber Shandwick), Incite (MullenLowe), Embrace Disorder (Fishburn Hedges) and the AI-enabled integrated OS I am building now.
The result is work that feels both simpler and stronger.
SENIOR COMMUNICATIONS
LEADER, GLOBAL FINANCIAL SERVICES
WHAT’S CHANGING NOW
The landscape no longer holds its shape
The structures that once gave communications a relatively stable shape have become less fixed: institutions, channels, audiences and accepted sources of authority. Trust moves fluidly between people, platforms, creators and communities. Influence no longer follows a straight line from organisation to audience whether employee, consumer or stakeholder.
At the same time AI is commoditising output, which makes senior judgement worth more rather than less: the challenge is no longer producing the work, but knowing which work is worth producing.
This is what led me to cultural currency: a lens through which I evaluate how brands and organisations earn and sustain relevance, value and influence when the context keeps moving. It is no longer just the domain of marketing, but of communications and corporate affairs too.
BEHIND THE WORK
One persistent question:
How can we do this better?
Plenty has changed across my career and continues to. What hasn’t is the question I keep returning to: how do we do this better?
Much of what arrives looking like a break with the past turns out to reinforce good practice rather than replace it, and GEO is the current example. The work is holding on to strategic judgement while the ground moves. I write about those shifts, and the practical questions they create for the leaders and teams doing the work
THINK PIECE 04
Cultural currency: beg, borrow, earn.
Why integrated influence demands more than integrated infrastructure, the meaning of cultural currency, and what brands and organisations need to do next.
WAYS TO WORK TOGETHER
Bring me the problem before you write the brief
A complex brief simplified, a sharpened story, a team that needs better connection; or simply a question that warrants deep and wide interrogation.
Project consulting on a defined brief | Fractional or interim strategy leadership | Where an organisation needs CSO-level judgement without a permanent hire | Workshops and focused sessions | Advisory support for leaders who want someone senior to think with.