Your Agency's Biggest Problem Might Be the Projects That Went Well

Good work can come from a bad process

Agencies are unusually good at rescuing work. They employ people who care deeply about the outcome, can improvise under pressure and will occasionally sacrifice an unreasonable amount of personal time to get something over the line. Those qualities are valuable. They can also disguise structural problems.

When a project fails, everyone wants to know what went wrong. When it succeeds, the questions stop. The late nights become a story about commitment. The last-minute strategic rethink becomes evidence of creative magic. Nobody asks whether the same result could have been achieved without burning through the team's attention and goodwill.

The financial cost is difficult enough to see. The other costs are even less visible: people become reluctant to challenge a brief, juniors learn that panic is normal, and senior talent spends time rescuing decisions that should have been made earlier.

The agency is rewarded for the final output, not for how it arrived there. So the process remains untouched.

The two decisions that disappear

Two failures tend to create disproportionate damage. The first is starting creative development before there is a usable strategic direction. The second is leaving decision ownership ambiguous.

A creative team can work brilliantly with a brief it can actually use. It cannot compensate indefinitely for a brief that keeps changing its mind. Nor should it have to decide which of three contradictory stakeholder opinions counts as the actual decision.

The result is familiar. Creative routes are developed against an unstable target. Work is presented, rejected and rebuilt. The strategy is rewritten to justify a promising idea, or the idea is rewritten to satisfy a late strategic objection. Everybody is busy. Very little of that busyness was necessary.

An agency can survive this for years, especially when the people involved are talented. Informal strategy can survive well beyond the point where it stops scaling. Survival alone tells an agency little about the quality of its system.

The BetterBriefs global research documents client-agency misalignment over briefs. It gives an agency a reason to examine the handover; it cannot tell that agency how much its own rework costs.

Give decisions a shared structure

This is where discussions about agency process usually go wrong. Someone proposes a more consistent way of working. Someone else worries that the work will become formulaic.

A shared set of questions gives the team a starting point. Each client still needs its own answer.

A good strategic process can ask the same fundamental questions on every project: What business problem are we solving? What needs to change in people's behaviour? What do we know, and what are we assuming? What will we choose not to do? What does creative work need from this strategy?

Different clients should produce different answers. That's the point.

A clearer way of organising strategic work gives people a shared understanding of which decisions matter and when they need to be made. It does not prescribe the campaign idea. Good strategists also know when a project requires an exception. The difference is that the exception is deliberate, rather than a symptom of everyone making up the process as they go along.

Look at how the result was achieved

Before celebrating a successful project, an agency should ask a few less comfortable questions.

When did the team agree on the strategic direction? How often was that decision reopened? Did creatives receive a brief they could genuinely work from? How many times did a senior person have to intervene? How much work was thrown away? Who made the final call when stakeholders disagreed? Include those interventions when assessing how much strategic capacity the agency needs.

None of these measures should become another bureaucratic scorecard. They help with measuring the quality of the process and distinguishing useful creative iteration from avoidable organisational chaos.

Some friction makes work better. A difficult debate about a positioning choice may be precisely what the project needs. Rebuilding the same presentation because nobody clarified who could approve it does not.

AI won't rescue a process nobody understands

AI can make research faster, organise evidence, explore options and help develop strategic work. It can also help teams reach a bad decision more quickly, with more convincing slides.

If an agency cannot explain how a client brief becomes a strategic choice and then a creative brief, adding AI to individual tasks won't necessarily connect those steps. It may simply increase the volume of material passed between them.

Before choosing another tool, look at a recent project everyone considers a success. Reconstruct how it actually happened. Include the rewrites, late decisions and weekend work that rarely make it into the all-agency presentation.

The most expensive process problems are sometimes hiding inside the projects nobody thinks to investigate.

For agency leads considering Mirel, a recent project is a useful place to test whether clearer strategic decisions would have changed the work.