We Keep Mistaking Improvisation for Agility

"Build the plane while you're flying it."

It's one of those business phrases that's usually said with a smile. It suggests speed, adaptability, momentum, and the ability to figure things out as you go.

Sometimes that's exactly what's happening.

But I've started to wonder if we've confused two very different ideas.

Agility is adapting when reality changes. Improvisation is making decisions on the fly you should have made before the work began.

Marketing sees this confusion more than almost any other function.

A request comes in to promote the business.

Maybe it's a campaign.

Maybe it's an event.

Maybe it's a webinar, a landing page, a sales deck, or partner content.

The work begins.

Then the questions begin.

Who is this really for?

How are we different?

Why would someone care?

What are we asking them to do?

And what proof makes any of it believable?

They're good questions.

They're just arriving at the wrong time.

Those aren't questions promotion should be answering. They're questions marketing should have already answered.

Decisions Don't Disappear

Once the work begins, unanswered questions don't simply disappear. Someone still has to make those decisions, and usually it's the people responsible for bringing the business to market.

The copywriter chooses what the company stands for because the brief never said. The designer decides what deserves the most attention because no one agreed on the hierarchy.

The partner marketer invents relevance for a specific audience because the strategy was written for everyone. Sales rewrites the story because customers keep asking questions marketing never anticipated.

None of these people set out to define the strategy. They're simply trying to finish the work in front of them.

But strategy has a habit of finding an owner.

If leadership doesn't make the decisions, someone else eventually will—not because they should, but because the work can't move forward without them.

When Promotion Becomes the Strategy

We often talk about strategy and execution as though they're separate phases.

First we think.

Then we do.

Reality is messier.

When strategy is unfinished, execution doesn't wait politely for it to catch up. It starts making strategic decisions instead.

Every campaign becomes a positioning exercise. Every sales deck becomes a messaging workshop. Every webinar, landing page, event, and partner program starts answering questions that should have been settled before the first asset was ever created.

The work still gets done. It just gets done by the people furthest downstream.

Promotion slowly becomes something it was never meant to be: the place where strategic decisions get made.

Promotion is supposed to communicate those decisions.

It's not supposed to make them.

Why It Keeps Happening

Organizations keep falling into this pattern because promotion is visible.

Campaigns launch. Events happen. Content gets published. Sales decks get updated. Dashboards fill with numbers. There is something to review, approve, critique, and measure.

Strategy looks very different. It looks like difficult conversations, tradeoffs, choosing one audience over another, saying no to opportunities that don't fit, and committing to a point of view before there's proof it will work.

Those conversations rarely feel productive because they don't produce anything you can launch.

But they're the decisions every launch depends on.

When they're avoided, they don't disappear.

They simply become someone else's responsibility.

Promotion Was Never Meant to Do This

By the time promotion begins, the most important strategic decisions should already exist.

Promotion can clarify those decisions. It can adapt them for different audiences, make them memorable, and carry them consistently into the market.

It cannot responsibly invent them.

Businesses need agility. Markets change. Customers surprise us.

But promotion should never become the place where the business decides who it is.

Promotion tells people about your business.

Marketing decides what deserves to be told.