Intervention deck

Map the decisions that matter most in your agency — client, creative, commercial, people — and make explicit who owns each one. Not who gets consulted. Who actually calls it.

Audit every recurring meeting in the agency. For each one: what decision or output does it exist to produce? If nobody can answer that, kill it or redesign it.

Write down what each leader is actually responsible for — not their title, their territory. Where do their lanes overlap and where do they end? Most agency conflict lives in the gaps.

Map the journey from brief to delivery and find where work stalls, gets re-done, or loses ownership. Redesign the handoffs, not just the org chart.

Identify the people closest to the friction — team leads, senior practitioners, project managers — and give them a problem to solve, not a solution to implement. Set the direction, define the guardrails, then get out of the way. Change that comes from the middle sticks better than change handed down from the top.

Most agencies have a strategy that lives in a deck. Translate it into a handful of specific bets for the next 12 months — things you'll do and things you'll stop doing.

Define what good looks like in every role, not just at review time. Clear expectations reduce management overhead and make tough conversations easier when they're needed.

Create regular moments where leaders report back on what they said they'd do. Not to create pressure — to create rhythm. Accountability without cadence is just blame.

When everything is a priority, nothing is. Get your leadership team to agree on the three things the agency is optimising for this year — and make sure resourcing actually reflects those choices.

Culture isn't the values on the wall — it's what you do consistently when nobody's watching. Identify the two or three behaviours that define your culture at its best, then design rituals that reinforce them.

Build the muscle for harder calls — through peer coaching, external input, or structured reflection. Leaders who only make decisions inside their own heads get slower and more rigid over time.

How do you run projects? How do you give feedback? How do you onboard someone? If the answer is "it depends on who you ask," you don't have norms — you have folklore.

What you reward is what you get. Audit your bonus structures, recognition systems, and promotion criteria — do they reward the behaviours you actually want?

Stop hiring for roles and start hiring for outcomes. What does success look like in 90 days? In 12 months? If you can't answer that before you post the job, you're not ready to hire.

Every agency has work that's been "almost done" for too long. Assign a single owner, set a deadline, and create a forcing function. Stalled work is a symptom of unclear ownership or misaligned priorities.

Treat change itself as something you get better at. Run retrospectives. Name what worked and what didn't. The agencies that navigate disruption well aren't the ones who saw it coming — they're the ones who got good at responding.