I had a conversation recently with a leader on our content and SEO team. We were reflecting on how Syntropy—the discipline of adding uniquely human superpowers to AI so the sum is greater than its parts—shows up at every level of value creation.
Too often, people assume syntropic work happens only at the strategic level. They think of it as asking the big questions—Who’s it for? What’s it for? Why does it matter? That is certainly part of it, but it’s not the whole picture. If you limit syntropy to strategy, you’re missing two-thirds of its power.
In practice, syntropy can happen at three distinct levels: strategic, tactical, and operational. And the truth is, each level matters just as much as the others.
Let’s break it down.
1. Strategic Syntropy – The Why and Who
At the top of the stack is strategic syntropy. This is the level where clarity of purpose lives. It’s where you answer the foundational questions:
• Who are we serving?
• What problem are we solving?
• Why does it matter right now?
This is the “who’s it for” and “what’s it for” filter I’ve written about extensively. When you get this wrong, everything downstream decays into entropy. Every fuzzy persona creates dozens of wasted campaigns. Every vague value proposition spawns hundreds of confused sales calls.
Strategic syntropy means investing the time to anchor in high-fidelity inputs—customer interviews, leadership alignment, and honest positioning work. It means saying no to busywork and shortcuts that look efficient but only create noise.
A practical example: I’ve run workshops where we extended a planned three-hour strategy session into three full days. Why? Because until we had sharp personas, validated value propositions, and a clear narrative, any marketing we shipped would just be entropy at scale. The clarity saved hundreds of wasted hours later.
Strategic syntropy is where you create coherence that will endure. It is the gravitational center that holds everything else together.
2. Tactical Syntropy – The How and Where
But strategy alone doesn’t win markets. The second level is tactical syntropy—decisions about how and where to act.AI is fantastic at listing options, ranking probabilities, and generating “playbooks.” But it doesn’t have intuition. It can’t read a market’s mood, sense timing, or notice the undercurrent of a channel’s fatigue.
That’s where humans step in. Tactical syntropy is about applying judgment to guide choices:
• Which channel is right for this campaign?
• How do we sequence content so the signal compounds instead of decays?
• When do we accelerate into a new tactic—and when do we wait?
Consider channel selection. An AI might tell you to invest in SEO, LinkedIn, and Google Ads equally. But a seasoned marketer notices that the LinkedIn algorithm is rewarding long-form storytelling this quarter. Or that your competitor’s PPC activity is driving up bid costs unsustainably. Or that the conversations from your latest ABM experiment contain insights too rich to ignore.
That human pattern recognition turns tactical choices from generic to syntropic.
Another example: the order of operations. Too many teams start drafting web pages before interviewing customers. Then the real signal arrives later, forcing expensive rework. Tactical syntropy means insisting on sequence: extract the human signal first, then scale it with AI.
Strategy sets the direction. Tactics determine whether the ship moves smoothly or spins in circles. Tactical syntropy is how you make the map usable in the real world.
3. Operational Syntropy – The Craft of Execution
The third level is the most overlooked, but in many ways the most accessible. Operational syntropy is where human superpowers make the difference in everyday execution.
This is where AI, left alone, tends to generate entropy. Prompts multiply into generic outputs. Content decays into sameness. Campaign assets remix themselves until they’re indistinguishable from competitors.
Operational syntropy is when a human steps in to:
• Add context to a prompt that turns a mediocre draft into a sharp one.
• Repeat or reframe instructions until the AI output reflects the nuance that matters.
• Spot the detail that an algorithm will never see—tone of voice, cultural nuance, or ethical risk.
Think of it like editing. AI is the tireless junior writer. It can produce a hundred drafts before lunch. But without a human editor-in-chief, all of them are just noise. With a skilled editor, one of those drafts becomes a powerful asset that moves markets.
The value here isn’t volume; it’s refinement. Operational syntropy is the difference between content sludge and a blog post that actually resonates. Between a campaign that feels like every other company’s, and one that cuts through.
Every marketer has the opportunity to create syntropy at this level. You don’t have to be a CMO or strategist. Even as a content editor, a campaign manager, or a designer, you can turn entropy into signal with a well-placed human decision.
Why All Three Levels Matter
When you see syntropy as a three-level discipline, its true scope becomes clear:
• At the strategic level, you prevent entropy before it starts.
• At the tactical level, you steer execution with judgment and intuition.
• At the operational level, you elevate the daily work from generic to valuable.
The three levels reinforce each other. Strategic clarity without tactical judgment creates rigid plans that collapse under real-world pressure. Tactical excellence without operational refinement still produces sloppy outputs. Operational brilliance without strategy is just polishing entropy.
Syntropy compounds only when all three layers are present.
How to Apply This Framework
Here’s a practical way to bring this into your team’s workflow:
- Audit your current work.
Ask: which level of syntropy are we strongest in? Which are we neglecting?
- Name the level in every project.
When reviewing a campaign, label whether the issues are strategic (fuzzy personas), tactical (poor channel sequencing), or operational (weak editing).
- Assign responsibility explicitly.
Navigators protect strategy. Managers sharpen tactics. Practitioners apply operational syntropy. Every role contributes differently, but all are essential.
- Capture and recycle insights.
When you spot syntropy at any level, record it. Add it to your signal repository so the value compounds instead of decays.
Closing Thought
The beauty of syntropy is that it democratizes value creation. You don’t have to sit in the boardroom to be a syntropy creator. You can create order from chaos in the way you phrase a prompt, in the way you time a campaign, or in the way you define a market.
Entropy is automatic. Syntropy is a choice. And that choice is available at every level of marketing—strategic, tactical, and operational.
The marketers who thrive in the AI age will be those who don’t limit themselves to one layer, but who learn to create syntropy in all three.