Do you stay "safely right" or risk being "enthusiastically wrong"?

The best client partners I meet are willing to be enthusiastically wrong. In hindsight, I spent most of my agency career trying to be safely right.

What does "safely right" mean? Excellent delivery: a well-executed version of an output that meets the brief. But excellent delivery is no longer enough. It's just resting at the new baseline.

To reach higher, we give multiple options, each more innovative and outcome-focused than the last. This feels like going beyond safe, and in some ways it is. But it's still moving along the same axis – better answers to the existing question.

Contrast this with creating a new possibility that puts something on your client's agenda that was never on it; something they weren't striving for and didn't know to want.

A new possibility isn't a better route to the same end, so can't be sold on need, because there's no need to meet yet. What creates the wanting is enthusiasm – from you, caught by your client: a sense of "I want what you've got".

This enthusiasm has to be for them and the possibilities opened up on their path, not for the cleverness of what we've made. Being good at our work and believing in it is a baseline for agency business. Being excited for our client's possibility is something else entirely – fundamental to building trust in a different future.

Without it, the work falls back on your client. They have to feel that new possibility unaided, and find their own way to experience something they can't yet imagine. Mostly they won't. You haven't taken them there.

So how could this enthusiasm end up feeling wrong? Because while all clients ask you to go beyond the brief, they often flinch when you do. The dreaded "this isn't what we asked for", or "you haven't stuck to the brief".

But revealing a new possibility can't be wrong – it can only feel wrong. This feeling of wrongness, or even the risk of it, is a nettle to be grasped, not a sign you're making a mistake.

Giving options that are 'safely right' still matters because most clients arrive with a challenge and a fair idea of how they want it met. Meeting the brief creates the trust needed to risk looking beyond it. Enthusiasm conveys what the new possibility might create.

Only when I stepped away from the agency's concerns could I really experience what a client feels – the seduction of another's enthusiasm for a new possibility that was mine. Impossible to realise from the inside, while focused on being safely right.