This is a new website with more space for the Playbook. Pages are still being edited and moved.
Liberation
As your agency grows it will naturally accumulate lots of tiny things that, together, will slow you down.
Like barnacles on a boat each one is added unnoticeably, but over time the combined effect is to add friction.
There are multiple causes of this:
As you have more people, the lines of communication become more numerous and therefore more complex. This causes breakdowns in understanding and trust. It causes things to fall between the gaps.
When you add a management layer, you bring in people who feel authorised to say ‘no’, or to expect long email threads or meetings in the cause of reducing risk — but don’t feel as authorised to say ‘yes’ and be entrepreneurial with the risk/reward balance.
The longer your organisation lives, and the more it experiences, the more it develops an ‘immune system’. This system learns what causes problems and the signs to look for and act against in future. This can be a valuable protection against future problems, but — like the human immune system — it can also start to attack the good things. Just as your own over-active immune system means you’ll have allergies or inflammation, your agency’s over-active immune system could make you allergic to new ideas, to rapid action or to growth — with inflammation in your admin and management functions.
Therefore it becomes a key role of the founder/CEO, as the person with ultimate power, to be the one who is able to simplify and speed-up the organisation. The one who can give others the sense of permission and freedom to do it too. The one who can lead the charge when it comes to barnacle scraping.
This section covers what to look out for, how to liberate the agency from these slowing factors — and how to design the agency to be more naturally free and fast.
The effect of all of this will be to liberate your talented team members to do their best work and achieve great things — and that in turn liberates you from the day-to-day business (and firefighting).