Positioning is deciding

What if a byproduct we’ve always thrown away is actually the most important deliverable in the positioning process?

Within the first 15 minutes of my first conversation with a CEO, I can predict how well positioning work will go with near 100% accuracy.

It comes down to just one thing. Their ability to make decisions.

If the leader is capable of leaning in, fully examining decisions, and making them with conviction, positioning work goes well.

If the leader wants to lean back and let positioning work happen to them, or flit from decision to decision based on the latest sales call or investor meeting, then positioning work doesn’t go well.

This is true regardless of the product, the market, or the circumstances.

Why decisions are the unit that matters

Every action in a company is an echo of a decision.

Businesses, products, teams, initiatives. Everything from the inception of the company itself to the Slack message someone sent you two minutes ago happened because someone decided it should.

Positioning is what I’d call a meta-decision. A concentration of major strategic turning points to clarify the thinking that defines how a company addresses its market.

But the “positioning industry” (the thousands of agencies, solo consultants, and consulting companies selling positioning, including me) has worked very hard to turn positioning into a thing. A noun. A deliverable.

The positioning industry sells two things, and neither one is decisions

“Decisions” is hard to sell. Workshops and copy sprints aren’t.

So if you hire someone to do positioning, you’re going to get a workshop, a copywriting exercise, or both. Lord knows I’ve done plenty, still do.

But in the bald light of day, both approaches have serious problems.

Workshops turn into alignment theatre. Performances dominated by loud voices, power dynamics, and groupthink. Copy-based positioning degenerates into wordsmithing posing as strategy. You might get incrementally better words, but they rarely come with the buy-in that makes them stick.

And with both processes, the thing that truly moves the needle—the moments where leaders make decisions and commit to their ideas—are just exhaust. Comments. Slack messages. Things we throw away.

Positioning lives in your CEO’s heart, not a consultant’s brain

I confess.

I have run countless workshops and copywriting exercises. I cared about each of them immensely. Every time, I wanted to be the perfect facilitator, the copy ace who nailed the headline.

But when I stopped to examine what was really working and what wasn’t, I had a tough moment with myself. My need to perform, to be the star, was getting in the way. I was a salesman selling ideas, not a true critical thinking partner.

The thing that made strong positioning happen wasn’t my performance or word magic. It was conviction. My clients’ ability to fully own their decisions and commit.

So I started making some changes. I took a hard look at my positioning process to identify all the critical decision points from beginning to end. I left no stone unturned.

I wanted to map a single, seamless chain of logic, with every link accounted for. I started using my map immediately, without telling anyone. I ran it in the background as a checklist and a constant reminder to keep me honest and on-task.

The difference was immediate. Conversations got richer and moved faster. The downstream work crafting messages and brands ran more smoothly. And most importantly, the results were better.

Bigger deals. Better launches. Stronger fundraising.

Decisiveness is powerful.

I put my entire approach into a single tool: The Positioning Decisions Audit

The centerpiece of my consulting work is no longer a workshop or a copy deck. It’s an audit of all the decisions involved in positioning, the inputs to the process, and the status and content of each decision.

It’s a beast. There are 31 decisions across eight topics.

I use it as an end-to-end guide for every positioning project I do. It’s a forcing function that keeps me from skipping a step and makes sure I run conversations that get to the heart of every important question.

Decision-based positioning isn’t a reinvention of positioning.

Positioning is still the act of teaching a market how to perceive a product, rooted in clear perspectives about category, market, buyers, and differentiation.

Decision-based positioning is a different way through it that forces active thinking and ownership of the process.

When you look at positioning this way, you can’t be a passenger. And that dramatically changes the results.

It’s not just a checklist. It’s a constitution.

As I piloted and tested the audit, I quickly realized it was much more than a background tool.

As it turns out, the context and record of decision-making are insanely powerful in combination with AI. It’s an amazing substrate for AI-assisted thinking, both for using AI as a thinking tool and for building thinking tools with AI.

AI is great at ingesting conversations and making sense of them. Not just summarizing, but finding gaps and surfacing tensions.

I’ve found that in combination with the Audit, AI went from a pretty good positioning thought partner to an incredible one.

After every session, AI helps sharpen the next one. The breadcrumb trail makes the thinking compound.

Once the work is done, the audit (along with the transcripts and data inputs that shaped it) fully captures not just what was decided, but when, why, by whom, based on what, and how it evolved.

All of that information can go into a repo, with the decisions and the reasoning behind them fully understandable and useful for AI.

And when you do THAT, you have something more powerful than any positioning deck ever written.

Positioning as software. An evergreen constitution that the whole organization (and its AI tools) can reference and work with daily. With smart, active stewardship and a dash of process, positioning can become a living thing that you use every day, monitor carefully, and optimize over time.

Not a deck in a drawer. Not a cool homepage you noodled with a freelancer. Not a semi-annual leadership offsite.

We are entering a world where we work with and through AI. If your positioning isn’t understandable by AI, then it’s not really positioning anymore.

This is a meaty topic. I have a lot more to say about it. I am building the content as I go, while also running a very busy solo consulting company. But keep your eyes open. In my next newsletter, I’m going to break down the positioning audit in its entirety. Then, I’ll get into how I’m using it to do things I never dreamed were possible.

Thanks for being with me.