Articles & Opinion

The same process-led thinking that stops agency teams from adding client value beyond delivery makes their growth frameworks fall flat. Anyone who knows me knows I love a good process. Followed well, process delivers consistency and reliability, without which good work is hard to scale. But one of the biggest learnings in my agency career was to stop confusing the completion of a well-developed process with the creation of client value. Process creates a baseline, not a ceili

I was reminded of this recently after telling a therapy client that some problems genuinely do go away if left alone and therefore aren't worth the effort of trying to fix. A relatively throwaway comment, but one that led him to experiment with how he handles a difficult situation with his boss, and transform how he sees disappointments at work more broadly. This from an idea I had believed for years, but never before thought of as being intrinsically valuable to someone else

It's a distinction that's easy and expensive to miss. At some point in every conversation I have with agency leaders, we reflect on how growth stalls when teams treat clients like projects to be managed rather than relationships to be nurtured. "The map is not the territory" is a useful analogy here, because like the problem it describes, it's easy to overlook the real meaning behind the message. Projects are like maps with directions and edges – briefs, timelines, deli