The OODA loop for creative teams
A fighter pilot's four-word diagram explains more about agency work than most marketing books. The team that learns faster wins, even outgunned.
Process
26 Articles
Ask for the counterargument
Everyone in the room loved the concept. That should have been the first warning sign, not the finish line.
Work expands. Cut the container.
Parkinson wrote it as satire in 1955 and agencies have been proving it earnest ever since. The size of the vessel decides…
Consistency beats efficiency
The efficient way is the wrong first question. Nothing compounds until you've proven you'll still be doing it in November.
Onboarding a client is onboarding a team
When you join a company, someone shows you where things live and who to ask. We expect the same of ourselves in…
The maintenance mindset
Nobody writes case studies about the outage that didn't happen. We'd like to say a word for the quiet work.
Small rooms make big decisions
Every person added to a meeting subtracts something from the decision. There's a better way to be inclusive than a calendar invite.
Handoff is a myth
The baton pass from strategy to design to development looks clean on a process diagram. Batons don't carry context. People do.
The second project is the real one
Project one is a first date where everyone remembered to iron their shirt. The interesting part starts after.
Post-mortems without blame
A retro where everyone is polite is a retro where nobody learned anything. Getting the truth into the room is a design…
Write the launch email first
If the announcement can't be drafted on day one, the problem isn't the copywriting. The project doesn't know what it is yet.
The client is not the bottleneck
Before blaming the approver for a stalled approval, look at what got sent. Five stakeholders, no deadline, and a "thoughts?" is not…