Week Notes // 5th February
Sometimes these posts resemble long lists. Sometimes clear themes and thoughts fall out of the stimulus of the week just gone.
Work this week has revolved around workshops. On Monday and Tuesday a group of us did remote workshops with the Australian and US offices of a client, respectively. On Wednesday I travelled to Barcelona for workshops with a different client.
To the point of identifying a theme - it feels like the last couple of weeks seem to have had a distinct process vibe to them. Not just the work, but also Life Sentences and American Fiction and this week’s internet wormhole: Stephen Hendry’s Cue Tips. Weirdly, all have focussed on process. About how the people involved work. About how they practice and improve. About how they produce.
One of the best parts of working in an agency is the opportunity to look inside the different companies you work with. And whilst your main point of contact is the marketing function, you often get exposed to the other departments and functions eventually. All of which ladders up to a sense of the wider corporate culture and the type of decisions that are made: what things are prioritised, what standards are set, how things get done, who signs off and how hierachical a company is, where the centre of gravity is…
When you start to understand how things are done, you start to understand why things happen in a specific way - and more importantly and profoundly, why things don’t change. I’ve been ruminating alot on a recent Matt Webb blog post where he makes the observation that “corporations come to resemble their materials in the same way that dog owners come to resemble their dogs. For some companies, by luck or design, this also aligns to success”.
An extension of this might be to ask a client what business they think they’re in. You know, beyond the functional. I did this once with a client in the gaming category. They didnt suggest they were an entertainment business or even a technology business, both of which might have been valid answers. Instead, they said something much more instructional. “We are experts in managing liquidity against the backdrop of aggressive regulation”. In essence, closer to a bank or an accountancy firm than a gaming company. That answer informed every subsequent conversation I had with people at the company: it offered reasons why certain things happened, it informed briefings and informed the reasons why one idea won out over another.
Dan Hill describes the processes, regulations, culture of a business as ‘Dark Matter’ - these things aren’t written down or easily observable, but they inform everything - the 95% of ‘dark matter’ is observable in the 5% of matter (the things which are produced by a company). More and more, it feels like the best thing for any form of agent or consultant to do is to get comfortable understanding how to diagnose how that dark matter works - and think about the ways it can be influenced, rather than repeatedly attempt to create change from the outside. Offering a new organ to a body that will inevitably reject it.
Talking about ‘context assembly’, Dennis Pilarinos echos this sentiment: “You’re almost always inheriting a code base that’s been around for a long time, so the hard part isn’t writing the code to implement the feature or fix the bug. It's trying to understand why the application works the way it does, who the best person is to talk to, when these changes were introduced, and contextualizing all that to move forward”. In this instance, the reference is software and code, but the metaphor works for any type of organisational change. At a certain point, having good ideas is easy - it’s the ability to make them happen which is the hard part.
