How I lead.
The practice behind the cases.
I didn’t stop directing, I went back to the tools alongside it. What I believe about leading a practice comes down to what you give away and what you refuse to get comfortable with.
The work
Seeing the need behind the need, the system that’s weak, the seam that’s tripping things up, and growing teams to see them and fix them too. None of that lives in a deck. It lives in years.
How I think about it
The eye gets faster than the hands — accept it, work with it. A wrong call never gets to go quiet either. Cinnamon taught me that early: leave the room without the call named and it costs you later in the project. It’s on the lead to raise it, and to give the thought behind why.
The standard I hire to is what I want people to believe and hold themselves to — theirs to keep, mainly for themselves, so they keep reaching and keep growing. The credit for what they do, how they do it, and the thought that goes into it is theirs. What I’m meant to do is build the foundation around them: make sure the trust is there, the thought is there, the quality is there, the bar is held.
Knowing what quality is means we walk into rooms with the foundational things already there. There’s trust in the bank — but that means we have to keep earning it, and live up to the quality and the name that comes with us. When I came back to the Delta work, we could just go: directions that years before would have needed a business case attached. Neither of us had gotten braver. The trust had made space that hadn’t existed before. On the first day of an engagement we know what the bar is, and the idea is to keep raising it: to make the work better than it could have been before we showed up.
The long versions live in the writing.
How I do it
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Go and look at the real thing at the moment I feel most entitled to skip it.
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I draw the decision before I argue it, paper finds the hole first.
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Described work can hide. Rendered work can’t.
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I tend to write, and rewrite things, until only the necessary is left and it has a nice punch to it.
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Not good, not great — world-class.
A project file shows what was made. The practice that made it possible doesn’t fit the case template.
AKQA · 2008 → Present