Designing Tomorrow: Creative Strategies for Social Impact
Designing Tomorrow explores a new playbook for modern social impact leaders and brands to reach their true impact potential.
Why do some social impact brands thrive, while so many others fail to get traction, build support for their cause, and make meaningful progress? Imagine your impact with truly sustainable revenue and resources. With deeper community engagement and relationships. With more influence in your social impact category.
Hosted by Eric Ressler, Founder & Creative Director of Cosmic, with co-host Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, each episode dives into the strategies, mindsets, and behaviors top social impact brands use to play and win in the attention economy. Go beyond high-level concepts to specific tools and tactics you can use today.
Watch on YouTube or listen to new episodes each Tuesday.
Let’s design a better tomorrow, together.
Designing Tomorrow is a Cosmic Production. Learn more at https://designbycosmic.com/
Designing Tomorrow is a registered trademark of Design By Cosmic, Inc.
Designing Tomorrow: Creative Strategies for Social Impact
WTF Even is Strategy?
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Everyone claims to be strategic. But what does that word even mean anymore?
In this episode, Eric and Jonathan dig into a question that comes up constantly: what actually separates strategy from tactics, and why do so many strategic plans end up collecting dust? Eric makes a bold claim — that strategy, at its core, comes down to one word: conviction. Not frameworks. Not 200-page documents. Conviction about who you are, and more importantly, who you are not.
The conversation gets personal when Eric admits he lost that conviction at Cosmic, drifting toward service expansion before recognizing the pattern he'd seen in dozens of client organizations.
If you've ever sat through a six-month strategic planning process that ended in a fizzle, this one's for you.
Episode Highlights
[00:01:49] What the fuck even is strategy?
[00:03:58] Eric's answer: conviction
[00:04:30] What you're saying no to
[00:06:40] Strategy vs. tactics
[00:09:32] Eric lost conviction at Cosmic
[00:15:15] Photography as extractive art
[00:16:06] Near enemy: stubbornness
[00:25:47] Longer plan = more useless
[00:28:58] Passion is not a strategy
Notable Quotes
"There is a very strong conviction about who they are, but even more so who they are not." — Eric
"The impulse I find for most people is to go tactical. And to call it strategy." — Jonathan
"The longer your strategic plan is, the more useless it is." — Eric
"If you don't know what to say yes and no to, you don't have a strategy." — Eric
Resources
Good to Great by Jim Collins: https://www.jimcollins.com/books.html
Minimum Viable Strategy episode: https://designbycosmic.com/podcast/how-to-stop-planning-and-start-doing/
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Thank you for all that you do for your cause and for being part of the movement to move humanity and the planet forward.
