Agree with much of this, from my former occasional WPP collaborator Siobhán Woodrow.
Strategy, brand, marketing, content, media, delivery, and stakeholder reviewers all tend to optimise for their own objectives/needs, while trying to minimise their team’s risk at the point they hand work to someone else. That’s where the delays, rework and hidden costs creep in – and keep going up, like compound interest.
Too much important nuance has always got lost in translation between teams – I saw this clearly back at Microsoft as we tried to build global collaboration and coordination between markets and disciplines. Today, AI can help with interpretation as well as execution, but effective governance systems are vital (and remarkably hard to design, as they tend to need to adapt and evolve over time or risk being bypassed altogether).
I’ve been thinking about and working on this a lot very the last few years.
Many processes make perfect sense when viewed one step at a time, but become much harder to justify when you look at the whole chain end-to-end. Others sound great in theory, but are so annoying in practice that people just skip them.
And some are based on methods designed for an entirely different era – like the old double space after a full stop convention, created to avoid mechanical constraints on a typewriter, and before word processors introduced automated kerning and rendered manual spacing unnecessary. Without looking at the details of how a system operates it can be very hard to identify legacy ways of working like this that should no longer apply.
Creating an effective system is often about getting the basics right down in the details and building back up from more effective building blocks, with fewer gaps between them for efficiency to get lost in.
But, understandably, few organisations want to reimagine their operating models and value chains – even though, to get the most out of AI, this kind of fundamental rethinking and process / governance redesign may well be essential. And can often be very revealing about things you’ve been doing inefficiently for years.