Month: June 2026

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One Thing Better

When I’m faced with a situation that I am seeking to improve in some way, I often look for one thing that would help. By help, I mean make things clearer, make things better (improvement) or make things easier to control (process).

Recently I’ve been involved in two projects that demonstrated that something is missing from agency-client relationships: how to critique and feedback on work.

Both projects have clear objectives that have been agreed by everyone. Both projects are producing the same outcomes, albeit slightly skewed towards each individual client’s audience and needs. Yet one project is almost done with the strategic side of the equation and is motoring into the creative exploration and design phase. The other has been stuck in strategy for four months.

Four. Months.

This is unusual only in that it’s not the agency seeking to make $$$ by dragging things out during what is the most expensive part of the process (in terms of how effort is measured). If I wasn’t on a fixed price contract this would have already gone wildly over budget. As it is I’m down to below minimum wage, but that’s another story about self-employment, fixed fees and what happens when someone else is controlling how quickly you can get things done.

The problem is, in the main, that the client has no idea what they are looking at, how it helps them, or in some aspects what they want and what they need. The agency is doing its best to help, but when the client is quiet for weeks on end it not only means momentum drops off, it also means when they do come back their feedback is poor.

By poor I mean that it doesn’t address the point in a way that helps shift things back into gear. They are focused on details that matter less and can be easily ironed out. This has the effect of causing more hold ups, more hours talking to them on Teams calls without a real sense of purpose or clear outcome. Motivation drops to zero. Other work takes precedence.

I’m still not convinced it’ll be done by the end of next month, which will mean a full five months of work for what should take about six weeks at most. And there is still the design stage to go. That September launch is looking shaky from where I’m sat.

This business does not employ ‘creative’ people. That’s not to say the people in the business are not creative or able to think deeply about a challenge. On the contrary, they’re very much those kind of people. What I mean is, the more intangible elements of creativity like ideas and the execution of those ideas to enable them to hit their goals or meet their revenue targets.

Slowly, they’re coming around. They’re starting to see how engaging with the process brings its own rewards. They’re starting to see what works for them and what needs a tweak (even if they often want to start all over again). They have more than one perspective on what this work will realise for them, how it greases the rails of their business. It’s taken them a long time to get there.

Could we as a group have made it easier for them? Sure. We could have ditched the agency process and pushed into phases in new ways, creating multiple workstreams and showing how and where they do or could overlap. We could have coached them (oh, really, coaching is something that all senior creative leaders need to start selling to these kinds of clients), or we could have been more explicit about how these intangible elements become tangible.

We didn’t. We haven’t. Somehow it’s started to happen. Yet, I’ve been in situations before where it hasn’t, or wouldn’t. In these cases I was the creative not the strategist and therefore my role had a boundary I wasn’t allowed to cross without being disciplined in a corporate sense (stepping on toes is one other thing that we really should address in the agency world – teamwork means blending skills and knowing when your expertise is needed and when anyone can point towards a solution that removes hurdles; again, something for another blog post).

Anyway, I’m still tweaking things that should be signed off. Still in meetings that I don’t need to be in. Still wondering if this will stretch beyond six months and the project that started in early June will already be finished.

And it could have all been a lot simpler if we’d not followed the process so tightly.

How do we learn to flex when things get too rigid?

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Seeing in a single dimension

I’ve seen this before, the ability to only see something as literal. One dimension. A view that everything is a nail and considering the strategy as a hammer.

Yes, strategy should be clear – this not that, there not here – but it shouldn’t be thought of as a single answer to every question, not without taking context into consideration. Sometimes it’s implicit, a way to design behaviours or flows; sometimes it’s incredibly explicit and is the underlining of a campaign. It has it to flex within its constraint.

It’s like saying a brand colour must be applied to everything, liberally. No. It should be used to convey meaning, to highlight something that adds a conceptual layer to a message, or to point people towards a piece of specificity.

Choice. That’s what makes strategy work. The application. The execution.

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A week is a long time in politics

Also in my life. And the extent to which I am able to hold on to thoughts that are not created in exchange for Great British Pounds (I will also work for other currencies, fyi).

I’ve been busy writing up my thinking, but it’s for sale and not free. It’s not dumped into a text box on a browser-based publishing platform with no real effort going in to what it is I’m writing or even a why I’m writing it. This is a loose cannon (and canon) of words. Mostly it misses.

Yet, it’s almost halfway through the year and on occasion I’ve written every day for a week, even when I was in hospital for two weeks. I could have written this week but I forgot until my laptop was closed down and I thought I’d remind myself the next day to do the same thing. And then forgot again.

This is a bit like morning pages, which I have done before but didn’t stick with because I’m not a morning person and I like to sit with coffee and then walk the dog. Writing would be an unnecessary distraction that would likely lead to caffeine withdrawal and dog poop on my floor. So, I need to find a new way to remind myself, to get into the habit of writing even if what I produce isn’t great. I need the rhythm.

I also need to get back to playing my guitar more often. Back to playing my vinyl records in the day. Back to analogue stuff. Not all the time but regularly enough that it becomes meaningful to me.

Anyway, I’m working on that. Let’s see how it goes.

What I have done this week is kick off the production of the next Unspun Heroes release. Contracts are signed. MCPS licence fees have been paid. Designs have started. Press releases are in the works. Emails chasing confirmation of mastering and lacquer cutting are drafted. In short, shit got real. And my bank balance dropped a few thousand.

I also bought some books. Fiction. All but one of the six are slim volumes. Several are translated. I also have Strategy Is A Verb by Martin Weigel to start reading. I’m ashamed I’ve not managed to get on to that yet as it’s something that appeals to me in the sense that it’s not a ‘how to’ book, but more of an emotional response to thinking strategically. The kind of book that proves useful when you least expect it. A book about a subject you know well that is going to teach you how someone else does the job you do. A learning opportunity.

Any opportunity to learn is one that is worth taking, so I intend on settling down to some educational reading. Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow and write it up later. One can hope.

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Rushed Or Right?

Speed. Apparently it’s driving the world in an unprecedented way. We’re going faster than ever, and therefore we need to come up with answers faster than ever. It’s the only way to be visible, to feel seen. Slow is for losers, those who will be left behind or crushed beneath the wheels of ai and its capitalist masters.

What rot, I say.

Yes, there are times when speed should be the primary driver for action, but those are mostly life-saving (or corporation saving). Rushing causes disruption. Sometimes due to unforeseen consequences; sometimes because we don’t understand what it is we are actually dealing with; sometimes because disruption is being necessitated by those who benefit most from uncertainty.

Being right, or at the very least taking small steps rather than big leaps, leads to better outcomes. Almost always. Even innovation, the one thing we’re constantly told requires massive leaps and the breaking down of barriers, is often glacially slow. It’s tiny baby steps by many that are then pulled together by one or two. Even ai isn’t new in that sense, it’s just that we now have the infrastructure to enable its rollout. And it’s being done at speed. Those unintended consequences are lining up, though.

I have some deadlines which are so spicy I shouldn’t be spending time writing a blog post about being fast or being right. Except I should. Because I want to be right much more than I want to be done. Being right means confidence in what I’m doing – my own confidence that I’m saying the right things and asking the client to take the right path; confidence in the agency paying me and their client in my strategic choices and the agency they’ve entrusted to help them. Right beats rushed. We’re not saving lives, as the saying goes.

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Work, Shop

Last week was mostly spent doing the day job, working out what an organisation really does and finding ways to interrogate this with a group of senior people within the business. Then a half day of doing that work with them.

It was enormous fun and a really engaging and engaged group who, rather brilliantly, were able to admit they didn’t know all the answers and were willing to try and find them. We landed (as the common workshop parlance goes) on some interesting ideas that I don’t think I’d have considered had we not had the open and honest discussions needed to get there.

On the music side of my life, I grabbed a Mark E. Smith garland to hang up, courtesy of Hey Kids Rock ‘N’ Roll. I managed to buy some records, too, which came in the post. As ever, I spent a few hours rummaging through crates of vinyl to try and find some albums I’d like to listen to. As ever, I came up empty handed, but also dug out some tunes to listen to in the shop which is always a delight. It means you can test some music out that you don’t know and can’t hear well on a mobile phone speaker.

Having a break on the Friday to mooch around some shops following a day of quite hard brain work and facilitation is the cadence I am most happy with.

Work, then shop. Work-shopping, then.

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From Stupid to Not Stupid

It’s a feeling.

Yesterday, I felt really stupid. The same the day before. Like I wasn’t party to the ‘way of doing things’ and that my suggestions were not just wrong but stupidly wrong.

Today it was the other way around. What I was suggesting was not just accepted but almost lauded, that I’d put forward something that was going to get everyone – the client team and the agency – exactly where they needed to be.

This sort of oscillation is something I don’t enjoy. However, I don’t know how to avoid it. I’m not someone who enjoys templated ways of doing things. I’m conscious that the boundary templates set excludes as much as they include and, as someone who is paid to think about a problem situation and find ways to ameliorate it, this doesn’t sit comfortably with me.

Then I remember that I’m not being paid to break conventions, I’m being paid to make sense of disparate pieces of information and find the thing that unites them. Not so much strategy but more strategic herding of organisational norms, accepted wisdom and internalised personal beliefs. A place where keeping ‘senior people’ happy is considered the right approach.

Perhaps this is why things don’t really change. More that a different facet of an organisational personality takes the lead on expressing itself.

I don’t have to like it, or even truly believe it. I just have to make the people paying believe it. That’s really what I’m being paid to do. Keep people happy and make them think they did the hard work along the way.

I won’t feel quite so stupid from now on.

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Flaming June

I don’t like being quiet, with nothing to do and a routine. I don’t like routine.
This month I’m not so sure I enjoy being busy. Or perhaps I don’t enjoy short timescales and late nights and weekends of working. I left all that behind in 2012.

Partly this is my fault. If I want to be paid I need to complete the work. I’ve always been bad at saying no. Although I learned to get better with the negative person. I still ‘stew’ on those days.
Anyway, this week has been long days of thinking and working and rethinking and reworking. I even did some hours at the weekend. The rest of the week looks the same.

Friday, though, I’ll be seeing a physio and learning how badly my bones in the shoulder are. It’s hardly something I’d swap long days and tiredness for but this time I have no choice. This month has me cursing.

The weather isn’t helping. Storms aplenty, and not just climate-related.