Some briefs are high-stakes: reputations on the line, big moments, complex stakeholders; others simply deserve a sharper answer than they’ve been getting. I've worked on both, across large corporates, agencies, charities and NGOs. Here are some examples.
The Work
Sample case studies
The work behind the work
The thinking that would have made the work better is nearly always already in the building. It just doesn’t reach the brief in time, or in a form anyone can use.
Every agency I have worked in has had some version of that problem, and I have spent twenty-five years on it: not as a side interest, but as the thing I kept being asked to fix.
What stops the thinking arriving is rarely one thing. Sometimes it is a system, or the absence of one: no shared method, so every team starts from a blank page and the quality of the answer depends on who happened to be in the room.
Sometimes it is structure, with real expertise sitting in separate parts of a business and nothing designed to bring it together. Sometimes it is the story an agency tells itself, which quietly decides what work it believes it is allowed to make.
And often it is culture and incentive, which is the hardest of the four, because people are usually doing precisely what they have been rewarded for doing. The work is to find which of these is load-bearing before changing anything: fixing the wrong one is expensive, and it looks like progress.
At Weber Shandwick it was a system. Advocacy Ignition started from a position that looks ordinary now and did not in 2007: that influence does not travel from brands to people so much as between people, through those they already trust. The system built that into the planning sequence rather than bolting it on at the end; define the winnable outcome, find where advocacy actually lives, build the platform from there. It also made a point most campaigns still avoid, which is that advocacy runs in both directions. I named the other direction badvocacy, which is an appalling word and exactly why it stuck.
Underneath it sat Cracker, which answered a problem of structure: expertise that was unusually good and unusually scattered, which is a particular kind of waste. Cracker is a structured session built on the principle that a diverse group reaches better decisions than its cleverest member, provided the process stops the loudest voice winning. Individual thinking first, then collective aggregation, then consensus; run once at the level of insight and again at the level of strategy. It is not a brainstorm; in most respects it is the opposite of one.
At Fishburn Hedges it was the story. Embracing Disorder was the agency’s own positioning: the argument that the fragmentation everyone was bracing against was in fact the condition to work with, and that brands would increasingly hold standing rather than own messages. Changing what an agency believes about the world changes what it is willing to propose.
At Carat it was culture and incentive. A media agency that gave its thinking away and was paid only for the transaction, trying to become one that was paid for both. Redefining the Value of Media was the plan: new structure, new consultancy products, new vernacular, and a three-year set of measures that mattered to the business rather than to the industry. The strategy was never the hard part. Persuading several hundred people who had been rewarded for one thing to become good at another: that was the hard part.
The internal conditions decide what the external work can be
A system, a structure, a story and a set of incentives. All or any of these could be contributing to problem.
The barrier to good integrated work is rarely talent or ambition; it is the absence of a shared language. When skilled people from different disciplines have no common framework, they default to working in parallel rather than together, and what comes out is the sum of the parts rather than anything greater than them. Give the same people a simple, intuitive structure and you do not merely improve the process: you release creative and commercial potential that was already there.
I am an industry magpie by nature, and each of those settings taught me something different about how good thinking actually gets made: where briefing goes wrong, how to get the best out of a mixed room rather than the loudest person in it, how to keep a framework light enough that people still use it under deadline.
The ones that work share three things. They are simple enough to be remembered without the document. They are flexible enough to run a two-day sprint and a two-year programme. And they are built with the people who will use them rather than handed down, because an operating system nobody helped write is a document, not a system.
That is the work I am continuing now, in my own practice.