Project services
Coaching
Audit and diagnosis
Inspirational workshops
Visual identity design
Product design
Our brief
Our client was the VP of Strategic Business Unit within a global consumer products business. He had a team of 12 and a roster of well-respected brand design, communication and activation agencies. Together, they were responsible for driving for the global growth of two new brands in an emerging product category.
But this small team was fighting a monster: complexity. Our challenge was to break a cycle of complexity which was resulting in burnt-out client and creative teams, overspend and paralysis by analysis.
What we did
Audit & diagnosis
Our first steps were to properly diagnose the problem, to identify the causes of complexity and the barriers to change. We talked to team members and agency partners, we looked at examples of work and we mapped structure and processes.
This was a new category and the environment was extremely fluid. Consumer behaviour was rapidly evolving, product innovation lifecycles were short, regulation changing and the brand landscape was very fragmented. The rules of the game were not established.
The fluidity of the category environment was in direct opposition to the corporate culture our team operated within: one that was designed to maximise efficiency around a fixed product, requiring certainty and stakeholding at every decision point.
This cultural clash resulted in complexity that became overwhelming. Decks and meetings mushroomed, briefs were reactive and the sheer volume of analysis became paralysing. The result was a team in constant fire-fighting mode, exhausted by long hours and dispirited by the frustrations of getting decisions made.
The malaise of complexity was beginning to spread from the core team to their key design and communication agency partners. The quality of creative output began to drop as the focus became managing complexity instead of connecting with the consumer and their needs.
Inspirational workshops & coaching
Our approach was to align client and creative teams to create a simple-friendly culture. To create a shared understanding of why Simple was important, what it looked like and a commitment to making it happen with a common set of tools.
We delivered a series of coaching workshops called ‘As Simple As Possible’. This brought team members and agencies together to call out the enemy of complexity and commit to 6 steps to Simple: Defining a Shared Team Vision, Improving Structure & Decision Making, Improving Brief Writing Discipline, Fixing Fundamental Strategic Frameworks, Calling out Complexity and Celebrating Simplicity.
Every “Simple champion” received a Simple Stick after the workshop and over the next 3 months, we facilitated the implementation of the 6 steps to Simple.
Complexity is the default state of the corporate, commercial machine, an inevitable by-product of complex ecosystems of decisions, interests and incentives.
It takes an almost cultish obsession with simplicity to fight this monster. Simple will only happen when it’s an integral part of the company culture. Everyone from the top-down needs to commit to the cause and align on the what, why and how of Simple.
To simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary. So, getting to As Simple As Possible requires a crystal clear understanding of what is necessary for each and every piece of output. In other words, a brief, which answers the questions ‘Who is this for?’ and ‘What does this have to do for them?’
‘What is necessary’ will vary greatly from output to output: so Simple doesn’t always look the same.
For example, what is necessary for the headline of an internal strategy presentation may be very different from what is necessary for the headline of a piece of consumer facing collateral. One may have to explain, the other may have to entertain.
Without this insight, we get it wrong – removing too much, or too little. We use the Simple Stick to fight against complexity, but it is not a blunt instrument: it must be used with precision and care.
