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Agency Espresso

All the right notes

To truly become a great agency, the separate pools of knowledge in your team's heads must flow together to become the agency's knowledge.

A shared way of working that is your brand at its best.

This means your business needs a way of 'knowing' things — having the experts on the team add to the shared knowledge-base, train based on it, use it, and refine it over time.

But there's often a resistance to capturing and codifying agency expertise.

I think that's because we adopt the approaches of the manufacturing production line — "standard operating procedures" — and that makes people believe that having a shared knowledge-base is not aligned with being 'creative'.

They think it's about becoming a human machine. People just following checklists.

But that's not what is needed.

We should instead look to other talent-led professions, who all capture their knowledge and inspiration in a way that makes it easy to share, and easy to reproduce.

Actors don't just make films or plays up.

They have a script to follow. It means the key points of plot and characterisation that make that story are always there every time they perform it. The stories make sense.

But, on top of the script, the director, the actors, and all the other creatives involved can add layers of their own talent and flair to each performance.

Musicians have scores.

The audience who buys tickets for the Grieg Piano Concerto is going to get mighty frustrated if the orchestra roll onto the stage and start playing "all the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order".

But the audience will be wowed if they play the notes as written but imbued with their own interpretation and emotion, and with their talent shining through in the nuances of the performance.

Sportspeople have playbooks, chefs have recipes, architects have plans.

Recording knowledge is a vital part of being a talent-led profession.

We should embrace this — understanding that investing time in the 'professional' part of our work then frees up our energy for the 'talent' part, rather than constraining it.

How can you do more to gather the knowledge that lives in everyone's heads into a central brain for the agency?

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