It’s hard to read the label frominside the bottle.
and diagnosis
I come in from outside.
I started in charity fundraising, which is a good
place to learn, because eventually somebody counts
the money. A stranger gets a letter and either gives or doesn’t. No brand tracker to hide behind, and no use explaining that everyone internally had loved it.
It got me interested in the distance between people understanding something and people doing anything about it. That question followed me through employer branding, B2B, health and pharma.
The subjects kept changing.
People were annoyingly consistent.
They stay with what they know, they worry about getting
it wrong, and they’ll agree that something is better while deciding what they’ve got is fine.
Most briefs turn up with the format already decided.
A campaign, a rebrand, a website. Sometimes that’s right. But a brief is only one reading of the problem, and when you’ve lived with something for a year, that reading stops looking like a choice.
I’ve almost never found a hidden fact. What I find is a more useful way to look at the facts everyone already had. See the problem differently and you make different decisions about what to do next.
I’m good at that, but I don’t hand it over once I’ve found it. I’m a creative. The concept, the line and the art direction turn up together, so I make the answer myself, and stay on it, because good thinking gets quietly wrecked in execution.
Strategists can take a problem apart.
Art directors can build an idea into a world.
I work across both, because for me one leads
into the other.
It’s also why there are two ways to hire me.
The Diagnosis finds the problem. The Work makes the answer.
They’re separate because the Diagnosis has one job: work out what’s worth doing next. The answer might be a big piece of work, a small change, or nothing worth making yet.
TINY FORCE is one person, so the person who sees the problem is still there when the work is made.
Send me the problem as it is. We’ll work out where to start.