Putting Your Foot Down

I am in charge of a client team - a bunch of intelligent people - but I get hacked off with the way our processes (and those at our client's) get in the way of delivering really innovative thinking. We often use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut - people are not thinking creatively enough. And clients add to the slowness and inertia. What am I doing wrong?

I know what you mean. Sometimes you can get frustrated that things are just too slow on a project or with a client dynamic. That tired old linear thinking is driving the dynosauric pace of change. You want to move fast and take people, whether your team or clients, along with you. You want people to get it and not just say they get it.

My only real advice is to dramatise what they are missing out on and what a fast moving marketplace you are operating in. What you personally need to do is physically demonstrate to those people how innovative thinking can get you to a different space. Or what the downside of staying in the slow lane will mean.

When Amelia Torode quotes the Life Moves Pretty Fast line from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, she is not wrong. What you need to give your clients for a test drive is your equivalent of the 1961 Ferrari 250GT California. Then they may get your urgency for speed or different thinking.

That's why I like Gary Hayes' social media, mobile phone and games counters below. They really bring to life the pace of global "media" change; they make me realise we need to keep adapting ourselves or we will meet a dynosauric demise.