Stop putting out fires: How Thinking in Systems Revolutionizes Operations in Creative Agencies, part 1
Do you know the story of a monkey banging on a keyboard? If you give that little guy infinite time at some point, he'll pound his way to Romeo and Juliet. If you put more monkeys in that same room, you can increase the odds of reaching "Parting is such sweet sorrow" in a shorter time span. We are marginally more intelligent than monkeys - if you put enough designers, editors, accounts, and project managers in a room, they will bang out a process.
As with chimps, so goes operations (lowercase "o") in a growing creative agency. People develop their own methods to get specific tasks done. Over time, these specific methods get bundled into processes that transform into Operations (now with a cap "O"). And this becomes the framework for running a business. But the thing is, how good are those processes? We create processes haphazardly and without regard for whether they work or not. Wouldn't it be better if we could be intentional with our processes so that we could solve systemic issues? Doing that makes you run a faster, more efficient business with better ROI. I want to explain why this is important and give you some tools for solving it.
Let's go back to our monkeys. They don't know the difference between "To be or not to be" and "xoiuenbskqmh j!" It's the job of the human to say, "Brilliant!” They act as a gatekeeper. But in a creative agency, without operational intention, there is no gatekeeper to determine if the building blocks of your processes - or the processes themselves - are built with a solid, best-practices foundation. This is the genesis of systemic issues - you never know how effective these bundles of processes are. Issues inevitably arise, leading to attempts to fix specific elements believed to be the problem. But then new issues may surface elsewhere, creating a cycle of constantly putting out fires. Replace the typewriter with a comically oversized mallet, and that monkey transitions to Whack-a-mole without a second thought. The monkeys - and us - don't know the difference.
I don't mean to insult anyone or insinuate that Creatives are monkeys. I'm a designer. This is just to say that it's extremely easy to build systems that have problems baked in. Is this the reality of agency life? It doesn't have to be.
Before we proceed, I want to make my position completely and utterly unambiguous: Constantly extinguishing fires is merely "busy work" and should never be mistaken for business growth. The real cause (and solution) lies in understanding that we operate within complex systems. Let's go back to those bundles of processes. If even a tiny issue exists within them, it can compound into significant and disruptive problems. To address these problems, we must continually peel back the layers and ask "why" at each stage. There are no simple solutions or smoking guns. What may appear as mere incompetence or someone being "bad at their job" may have deeper systemic roots. If we assume someone is "bad at their job," we might take disciplinary action, even going as far as terminating their employment. However, if the issue is systemic, the individual could actually be competent. And if that's the case, we lose a potentially valuable employee while failing to solve a problem that will continue manifesting.
Consider the time and effort spent on misidentified problems: meetings between managers and senior management, developing performance improvement plans (PIPs), implementing PIPs, and the resulting churn caused by the "bad" employee. Conservatively speaking, this process takes around four months, if not more. Let's break it down:
Three 30-minute meetings involving at least two senior-level people discussing the issue, costing $450 ($150/hour per person*).
Creating a PIP, taking one hour at $150.
Meeting with the employee for discussion and check-ins (assuming an initial meeting plus two check-ins), each lasting 30 minutes. Considering a senior-level rate of $150/hour and a junior-level rate of $100/hour, the total is $375.
Accounting for the churn caused by the employee's mistakes, let's assume one mistake per round per project, taking 60 minutes each for everyone involved (editor, creative lead, and the designer). Supposing a blended rate of $100/hour per person for three hours per project, the total churn amounts to $300. If the employee handles three projects simultaneously, the total churn reaches $900.
*All monetary values are averages that include non-salary overhead such as equipment and benefits
In this scenario, the grand total of lost value amounts to $1,875.
However, what if we approached the problem differently? What if we started by asking "why"? Why does the employee make these mistakes? Perhaps the creative brief fails to specify whether a job is print or digital. What if we are inadvertently setting our people up for failure? By diving deeper and repeatedly asking "why," we can begin to uncover systemic connections.
So if we start from the premise that we cannot solve problems in isolation, how do we address systems? This is the spot in the TV show where it cuts to black and the credits roll. However, i won’t make yu wait until next season (and a writer’s strike). Instead, tune in next week for a process (because, of course) and tools to quickly get to the heart of a systemic problem in your studio.