Miriam Plon Sauer is a seasoned Strategist at AKQA (Global Chief Strategy Officer), with over 20 years of experience, currently helping teams navigate the new frontiers of AI and creativity.
We kick off the conversation discussing her concept of “One Stunt Shops” and how the industry’s obsession with tactical plays has evolved in the age of AI. We debate why the real value of these tools isn’t just about accelerating the same old playbooks, but imagining entirely new possibilities.
Here are some of the areas we explored:
☝ The 5x vs. 50x Mindset: Why we need to move beyond using AI merely for efficiency (the 5x) and start using it to unlock expansive imagination (the 50x).
🤘 Femininimity & The Fear of Laziness: We dive into Miriam’s honest talk on women in the workplace and discuss the skepticism strategists feel toward AI-specifically the fear that outsourcing thinking to a “black box” will make us intellectually lazy.
🤟 Lifelong Kindergarten: Drawing inspiration from the Nordic education system, we discuss why the future of strategy requires a “childlike” willingness to experiment, fail without consequence, and get comfortable with the uncomfortable.
🖖 The Death of the “Big Reveal”: How the agency-client relationship is shifting from “work-present-iterate” to a constant state of co-exploration from day one.
🖐 The Trap of the “Easy Average”: Why “good enough” is losing value. If everyone has the same tools to reach the average, the only value left is in the edge cases.
🤝 Strategy x Creative Convergence: Why the old model of the “smart” strategist handing off to the “wacky” creative is dead - today, strategy must be creative, and creative must be strategic.
👊 Discipline: Miriam argues that for the next generation of talent, the most critical new skill isn’t prompt engineering, but the discipline to stay focused amidst endless possibilities.
We are three episodes in, and there are some clear, consistent threads appearing. Last week, Jude Pullen spoke about “Incurable Curiosity,” and Scott Wilkinson touched on how we need to explore in a way that unlocks our more human side.
Miriam builds on this perfectly here. She discusses moving past the comfort of frameworks and “data truths” to embrace the uncomfortable. It’s about not stopping when you think you have the answer, but using AI as both a divergent and convergent partner to push your learning mindset further.
Check out Miriam’s talk that we referred to in the chat below - "Fear of Femininity. The Hidden Reasons Behind the Gender gap":
Also so I wasn’t throwing out random made up thoughts, some of the data points around women and men when it comes to AI usage:
