Agency Adaptability
Process, innovation, and finding your inner skunkworks
To sustain and improve within an ever-shifting economic landscape, creative agencies need adaptability. It is the currency of competitive advantage. Let’s look at what adaptability really means and how we might build in behaviors and beliefs that can allow it to flourish.
Certainly Uncertain
Our world is unpredictable and as a consequence, all businesses are subject to more exterior uncertainty than our internal process and mechanization can account for. Creative companies of all sizes seek to monitor, absorb, and then adjust to the ever-changing winds of interior and exterior change in an effort to do great work and sustain an ever-growing and reliable uptick of revenue and margin.
Yet, we may be at a foundational impasse in late capitalism where this struggle will be seen for what it is: an outcome that is forever incompletely knowable and therefore always just out of reach. As Albert Camus reminds us in The Myth of Sisyphus, there is a cyclical absurdity to life and our human compulsion to stay on the grind.
When it comes to our jobs, much of modern work often feels like a Faustian Bargain tied up within a kind of Gordian Knot of process, expectations, and corporate chicanery. Data capture, while extremely helpful, has given us a posture of empiricism that does not really exist. Episodic work cycles, market fluctuations, and global shifts make revenue reliability a phantom ship — glimpsed but never fully grasped, always in fear of crashing on the shoals.
As people, dysfunction is native to all that we do. Things break, get confused, reconsidered, and rethought. Our best-laid plans can often disintegrate or evolve. Project slippage is inevitable, and to track it is ultimately an exercise in probability monitoring. How can we stay inside the lines of a hypothetical ideal project state that we drafted with partial information months ago? The answer is we really can’t. Not completely.
Another word for adaptability is innovation. Innovation requires going off script, trying new things, iterating, learning, failing, embracing ambiguity, and an ability to have passionate and productive arguments. Yet none of these things fit nicely within billable processes, spreadsheets, or the rigor of modern work. There is a degree of absurdity in fully grasping that having adaptability is a competitive advantage, yet there is no way to objectively operationalize adaptability to reliably gain advantage from it.
What we can learn from books like The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is that when you want to build something and you are small, making micro-bets on what to focus on and learning through iteration by prioritizing lean thinking and customer-centric innovations gives you the fuel for forward progress. In the context of creative agency work, when you are three people for example, you can bob and weave based on what you are seeing and doing and your own free will. As a creative organization begins to grow and gain traction, you start to codify what you are doing to capitalize on what is working and to replicate behaviors to accelerate growth. When this begins to occur, our lean thinking, malleability, and customer first mindset can begin to dissipate and we can become more procedural and inward facing.
Imagine yourself in college, rigorously keeping track of your grades but never giving yourself time to interrogate and then change your study habits to improve your performance in the future. This is what happens in businesses all the time — we have insight but not the adaptability to change because that would mean the processes we have built and understand would be at risk. Unlocking the value of past insights can only take place if we can translate them into actionable ways to change the way we work to inform future decision-making.
As makers and thinkers within creative organizations, we often vacillate between client-centered optimism (we are going to make this awesome for them!) and studio-centered pessimism (we must protect our team because the client might ask to much of us!). Operating by presupposing and protecting for the worst outcome is the easiest path but it does not put the customer, the person paying you, first. Optimism, despite the potential challenges of a project, is the hardest way yet the most powerful muscle to build in the long term. Mettle, grit, and perseverance are the hallmarks of innovation and adaptability for an organization at any scale.
Genuine progress is non-linear, yet businesses continually strive to be linear because that is what the financial armature of business requires. Creative work is a Jevons Paradox: when we work to increase the efficiency of creative resources, we often increase the consumption of them, leaving people with less time to explore, adapt, and innovate.
Finding freedom within the machine
How can a budgeted scope of work that has been drafted around a variety of assumptions made with limited information be executed perfectly, empirically tracked, and then made more efficient over time? I would argue it can only occur if we accept all highly valuable feedback and project data as useful qualitative inputs to help us make better-educated guesses later. No matter the size, scale, number of MBAs, coaching, optimization, or radical change an organization might have or undergo, absolute operational efficiency can never be achieved. We are humans and we are imperfect first and foremost. Businesses naturally morph over time due to the inevitable evolution of culture, crisis moments, business needs, and technological change.
Inspired by Immanuel Kant’s ideas in his work Critique of Judgement, we can embrace the notion that true innovation requires human will. Human creativity and free-will allow for new causal opportunities. This human will is agnostic of the business or life framework it sits within, in some ways, human will can prosper despite our context or situation.
What we end up doing in creative businesses is we often tend to not act on the causal insights born out of individual creativity to change the operational laws of the business. The reason we do not act is that the new causal chains that come to light are nearly impossible to fit into the operational predictability of the financial instrument of the business. The true puzzle to solve is at this precarious intersection of individual creative agility and business predictability.
Build the perfectly imperfect machine
The operational regularity of the financial instrument of a creative business should be constructed in a way so that it can be self-adapting based on client, project, technological, cultural, and market inputs. Running in tandem with this, the new causal insights gained from innovation and new ideas needs a framework within the creative business so they can be captured, reviewed, evaluated, tested, and implemented back into the predictable part of the business model.
To do this, leaders that control the creative business have to be open to change, risk-tolerant, and develop ways to keep the revenue aspect of the work steady while also finding the right people and orchestration to implement new ways of working.
In the early 1980s IBM was behind the ball on the personal computer revolution. Their bread and butter was mainframes and the company was built around the processes to facilitate them. This made IBM a slow moving company and process heavy. To develop its own personal computer, IBM had to go off script. An independent team in Boca Raton, Florida was given the freedom to work outside of the rigid IBM system to solve the PC problem. In 12 months they did it by using available materials and partnering with Microsoft.
What we can learn from this example is that given the right mindset and context, change and adaptability is possible for any business of any size. For small organizations you don’t have to wait to a point where you might be behind or your business is at risk of losing market share to become adaptable. You can adopt this mindset immediately at the individual level and support it as a team.
Finding the space between the spaces.
Small creative studios do not have the scale or revenue to carve out separate innovation teams. Even if they could, siloing innovation makes no sense anyway. Innovation and adaptability are not physical objects that can be purchased. Its a belief system and an ideology that can be grown and embedded in your life, work, and business.
The key to finding the space to innovate is captured in the Greek term Kairos (καιρός). Kairos embodies the idea of finding the right moment to act within the flow of existence. Part of our jobs as humans is to find the right moments to act in ways that enrich our lives. The question that arises is why would someone working at a vocation under a specified job description and wage be inclined to use any free time they can cultivate on the job to do something speculative that may down the line make the company better or more profitable? What is in it for the individual?
I would argue that if one is able to leverage some portion of their optimized time at work to both learn, self actualize, and experiment, then that is a more rewarding and beneficial use of one’s time than filling that same time with busy work, operational myopia, more process, or some other distraction.
Within each of us there is a battle raging between wanting to only give what is required and going beyond our own limits. This goes for everyone in an organization, not just creatives. Leaders, managers, creative technologists, and creatives should all be sense makers and lean thinkers, putting yourself in the shoes of the audience and clients to see through their eyes and measure what you do against your own biases. True agency adaptability and agility comes down to building an environment that allows individual self-will to blossom and be supported so that each one of us can tap into our inner skunkworks.
In creative agencies, If we are to be proverbial athletes working as a team, with the best players in each role, then each person should cultivate the self will to lock in their own Sisyphean adaptability program. Not just for the businesses benefit but for our own actualization and enlightenment. Enriching our inner work life with stories, beliefs, and ideas is a fundamental ingredient to growing, learning, and evolving as people. Regardless of the role you play within an organization, it is your own ability to thrive, evolve, and progress, and to instill this drive in others that makes adaptability an innate dimension to everything you do.
AI tools have given every person a supercharged way to ignite an entrepreneurial mindset that can be interwoven into the mechanics of our work and life to make it more interesting, valuable, and enjoyable. For the most successful creative studios, each individual can bring this mindset to the equation allowing adaptability to be a part of an organization’s DNA.
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Adaptability: The New Competitive Advantage
