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 original T2D3 Development Matrix asks two simple questions:
How good are you at a task?
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.
X-axis: Enjoyment (Low → High)
Y-axis: Ability (Low → High)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
List Your Workload
Write down 10–15 tasks you do every week. Include recurring meetings, reports, creative work, and administrative items.
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)
Plot on the Matrix
X-axis = Enjoyment
Y-axis = Ability
Bubble size = Hours per week
Bubble color intensity = Syntropy Impact
Interpret and Act
Perform: Keep, optimize, teach.
Develop: Learn intentionally.
Fix: Automate, delegate, or templatize.
Avoid: Eliminate or outsource.
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?
Review Quarterly
Track how tasks migrate across quadrants.
Develop → Perform = growth
Perform → Fix = stagnation
Fix → Avoid = entropy
Avoid → Deleted = clarity
| Task | Ability | Enjoyment | Syntropy Impact | Quadrant | Next Step |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Designing inbound nurture flows | 9 | 9 | High | Perform | Optimize and document process |
| Building reports in HubSpot | 8 | 4 | Medium | Fix | Delegate or automate |
| Experimenting with short-form video | 5 | 8 | High | Develop | Learn and practice weekly |
| Manual CRM tagging | 3 | 2 | Low | Avoid | Automate or eliminate |
With “Who not How,” the Fix and Avoid quadrants become growth levers, not burdens. Someone else’s Perform zone is waiting to absorb them.
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.
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?”
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