Tag: work

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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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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.

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You Can’t Handle The Truth

The famous line uttered by Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men. A film about finding the truth. A film about the law, surely the upholder and arbiter of truth? Not in 2026.

Mainstream media (MSM) is frequently seen as having an agenda that is turning us all into sheep. Or something. Nonsense by dint of the fact that all media, fringe, mainstream or otherwise, has an agenda. A perspective. It’s how well it pressing the ‘cognitive bias’ button in your brain. Best to take as many viewpoints as you can and then orientate.

Which is what research does.

Why is this of interest to me? The reason I’ve not been writing is that I’ve been reading, researching and understanding how the gap between the gatekeepers of (alleged) truth – academia – and those who peddle (alleged) lies – the media – has closed in recent times.

The Times newspaper, once the mouthpiece for the Murdoch-loving elite – and perhaps still is – has recently arrived with a new campaign. It’s got a snappy line that will resonate, and it positions them as the arbiter of truth. Or at least trust.

And then there’s the Financial Times, or the FT as it’s known. They are also positioning themselves as the arbiters of truth with their brand campaign that suggests they are the journalism to trust. Source: FT (see what I did there?)

They’re certainly more trusted than, say, Washington Post and many, many other media outlets in certain Western ‘democracies’.

Truth is a difficult word because it involves bias and perspective, and at least a smidgen of critical thinking. Three things in short supply in the age of the internet. Add in LLM hallucinations and it’s getting harder to know what’s what and who’s who. Google is most definitely not your friend.

The work I’m doing butts up against this idea of truth and trust. Not so much the what but the how. How do we demonstrate we speak or write the truth and can be trusted when no one trusts the truth anyway?

I don’t have the answers, yet. Perhaps I won’t. However, it’s a really lovely brief to think about and despite the lunatic deadlines given to me to think about it in-depth, I’m really rather enjoying the intellectual challenge.

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Hotting Up

After actively avoiding work for a few years, I’ve dived back in. And I’m actually enjoying it, mostly. Some bits of it I’m not, but most of what I have to do I am finding good fun. Well, fun in the way shilling your skills for dosh is fun.

Now, I’ve also had to learn someone else’s process along the way, which hasn’t always been as much fun. However, as I believe all processes are mostly a start and end point, what has been interesting is the messy stuff in the middle. How what I call something is not the same as someone else calls it, and if we do call it the same thing then why oh why doesn’t it mean the same thing? Oh, the joys of nuance.

As such, I feel like I’ve made some things more boring than I would normally have done and wish I could go back and switch things around and be more ‘creative’ about how they’re presented. Equally, I now realise I shouldn’t be beholden to how it’s done if I want to retain my own personality and abilities. Which is why I’m happy to have been asked to do more work and why I’ll be upping the creative effort and downplaying the need to be corporate and everyday.

It’s not the language that’s doing it, it’s how that language is presented.

Another thing to note is how the constraint of the online presentation software dictates a certain aesthetic. Verbal and visual. It’s not necessarily a good thing even if it’s how we’ve all come to know presenting.

Lastly, I seem to have become a victim of hayfever and my nose is streaming more than a gak-infused right-wing Yaxley-Lennon wannabe. And the sneezing? Yeah, I’m over that.

Oh, a post script. I decided to continue the vinyl label odyssey (or idiocy, perhaps) and sign up for another album. The writer of the sleeve notes who begged to do them and said they’ do so for free has now decided they can’t do them. So, now my budget is fucked and I’m without the words. Cue me sending some begging emails and crossing my fingers. Let’s hope someone takes pity on me and doesn’t want £££ for 300 words (although I must stress I’m always willing to pay, but I am not rich).

It’s the bank holiday here in the UK, which means Monday is not a work day. And it’s due to be sunny and hot, like Greek island hot. Sadly, this also means men who should know better taking their shirts off in public. Ah well, it can’t all be good I suppose.

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Trust Me

Trust. A word that’s so overused that it’s lost its meaning. Or at least it’s lost its power. It’s been highjacked by grifters, and politicians (some are both, I know) and so if someone says ‘trust me’ many people will become wary.

So how do you say trust without saying trust?

I think if you give someone confidence or make them ‘famous’ (I mean famous in the sense that the person’s boss sees them as amazing and rewards them) then I think with the right context it’s a better way to say it. It shows you can be trusted even if you’re just saying is because you have to clarify ‘how’.

Clients, though, love the word. Like they love ‘quality’. I’ve got some convincing to do as this project I’m working on starts to move towards finishing (finally!)