The Syntropy Marketing Development Matrix: How to Evolve Your Role from Executor to Signal Creator

Every marketer hits a point where effort no longer compounds. You’re delivering campaigns, content, and metrics—but the impact stays flat. You’re operating efficiently, but not evolving.

That stagnation is a form of entropy—energy spent without progression.

To escape it, you need syntropy: the deliberate creation of clarity, structure, and compounding progress.

The Syntropy Marketing Development Matrix helps you see where your energy goes, what creates signal, and what should be redesigned, delegated, or deleted. It’s a tool for marketers who want to stop being busy and start being strategic.

The Foundation: From the T2D3 Development Matrix to Syntropy

The original T2D3 Development Matrix asks two simple questions:

1. How good are you at a task?

2. How much do you enjoy it?

That creates four quadrants:

• Perform: High skill, high enjoyment

• Develop: Low skill, high enjoyment

• Fix: High skill, low enjoyment

• Avoid: Low skill, low enjoyment

A simple model, but in a syntropic world, “skill” and “enjoyment” alone aren’t enough. We also need to know how much clarity or leverage each task creates.

Some tasks create signal—they produce knowledge, structure, or scalable value. Others consume it. The syntropic version of the matrix adds that lens and provides a process to evolve your role based on it.

The Four Quadrants of the Syntropy Marketing Development Matrix

X-axis: Enjoyment (Low → High)
Y-axis: Ability (Low → High)

1. Perform – Optimize and Amplify

Tasks you love and do well. These are your highest syntropy activities—work that generates momentum and clarity for yourself and others.

Examples:

• Designing campaigns that scale

• Writing content that consistently converts

• Leading workshops that clarify strategy

Syntropic Action: Optimize. Make these repeatable, scalable, and visible. Turn mastery into a multiplier.

Who not How: Teach others how to do this through documentation, templates, or mentoring. Protect this zone; it’s where you create the most signal.

2. Develop – Learn and Grow

Tasks you enjoy but haven’t mastered yet. These stretch your abilities and expand your future signal.

Examples:

• Experimenting with AI-assisted design or analytics

• Learning attribution modeling or storytelling frameworks

• Exploring new platforms or creative formats

Syntropic Action: Standardize. Commit to learning and documenting the process.

Who not How: Find a mentor, coach, or peer already great at this. Borrow wisdom before building muscle.

3. Fix – Templatize and Delegate

Tasks you do well but don’t enjoy. They create stability but not growth.

Examples:

• Building repetitive reports

• Running weekly campaign audits

• Editing other people’s content

Syntropic Action: Templatize. Build automation or hand it off to someone energized by it.

Who not How: Don’t ask, “How do I make this tolerable?” Ask, “Who loves doing this?” or “Who can own this as their Perform zone?”

Delegation here isn’t abdication—it’s syntropy. You create order by letting energy flow where it’s naturally generative.

4. Avoid – Eliminate Entropy

Tasks you neither enjoy nor perform well. They drain creative energy and signal.

Examples:

• Manual CRM updates

• Endless Slack thread maintenance

• Tracking vanity metrics

Syntropic Action: Productize or eliminate. Either automate fully or design it out of the system.

Who not How: Find someone—or something—that can permanently remove this entropy from your orbit. Often, this means rethinking the process entirely, not assigning it.

The Center: The Syntropy Zone

The intersection of Perform and Develop is your Syntropy Zone—the work that gives energy and creates leverage.
Everything you do should migrate toward this center.

Tasks move clockwise through the matrix as you evolve:
Avoid → Develop → Perform → Fix → (Templatize/Delegate) → back to Develop again.
That’s syntropy in motion: a continuous cycle of improvement, leverage, and learning.

How to Run the Exercise

1. List Your Workload
   Write down 10–15 tasks you do every week. Include recurring meetings, reports, creative work, and administrative items.

2. Rate Each Task
   Use a scale of 1–10 for three criteria:

   • Ability (how well you do it)

   • Enjoyment (how much you like it)

   • Syntropy Impact (how much clarity, progress, or leverage it creates)

3. Plot on the Matrix

   • X-axis = Enjoyment

   • Y-axis = Ability

   • Bubble size = Hours per week

   • Bubble color intensity = Syntropy Impact

4. Interpret and Act

   • Perform: Keep, optimize, teach.

   • Develop: Learn intentionally.

   • Fix: Automate, delegate, or templatize.

   • Avoid: Eliminate or outsource.

5. Apply “Who not How”
   For every Fix or Avoid task, stop asking how to do it better. Ask who can do it better, faster, or with more energy.

   • Who already finds energy in this work?

   • Who has a system for this?

   • Who can take it and improve it further?

6. Review Quarterly
   Track how tasks migrate across quadrants.

   • Develop → Perform = growth

   • Perform → Fix = stagnation

   • Fix → Avoid = entropy

     Avoid → Deleted = clarity

      

Example: Demand Generation Manager

With “Who not How,” the Fix and Avoid quadrants become growth levers, not burdens. Someone else’s Perform zone is waiting to absorb them.

Team-Level Application

As a marketing leader, run this exercise across your team quarterly:

• Each person fills their own matrix.

• You review as a group.

• Redistribute tasks based on energy and syntropy, not titles.

You’ll spot natural delegation opportunities, training needs, and entropy hotspots immediately. The conversation becomes about alignment, not performance management.

Why It Matters

Syntropy is about compounding clarity.
Most teams optimize for output—how much got done.
Great teams optimize for energy—what kind of work made us better.

The Syntropy Marketing Development Matrix lets you see both.
It replaces vague career planning with actionable clarity.
It’s the bridge between “how do I grow?” and “who can help me grow faster?”

Closing Thought

The smartest way to level up your marketing career isn’t to do more. It’s to decide what only you can do—and design everything else to happen without you.

That’s syntropy. That’s “Who, not How.”

Related reading on the Syntropy Blog:

• Time Is Your Mirror: What Marketing Agencies Can Learn From Law Firms About Tracking Work

• Stop Being Ashamed of Using AI

• Assessing AI Readiness of Marketing Tasks

• Publish or Be Forgotten