For an agency that talks this much about complexity, having simplicity as one of our values probably needs a bit more explaining.
One of our values is “simplicity is our superpower”. I’ll admit it sits a bit oddly next to everything we’ve been saying this year about loving complicated briefs, and it would be fair question how the two fit together. It took us a while to put our finger on it, but it comes down to the difference between simple and simplistic.
What’s the difference between simple and simplistic?
Simplistic is what you get when someone takes a complicated situation, ignores the awkward bits and hands back a tidy version. It usually looks great in a presentation. Then it meets the actual organisation, where partners and practice groups all see things slightly differently, and it starts to fall apart.
Simple is what’s left once the work has actually been done. You understand how the parts fit together and who needs to agree, so you know what can safely be left out. What you hand over is clear because it’s been tested against the real thing, which is why it holds up.
The tricky part is that the two can look almost identical on the page. A simple positioning statement and a simplistic one might both be a single sentence. What separates them is the work that went on before that sentence was written, and you often only find out which one you’ve got once it’s being held to account.
How can you tell them apart?
Ask why something was left out. Every clear answer leaves things out, because that’s what makes it clear. With a simple answer, someone can tell you what didn’t make it in and why, because they looked at it properly and made a call. With a simplistic one, the awkward bits are usually missing because nobody went near them.
It’s also worth looking at where the complexity ends up. Simplistic answers tend to push it further down the line and onto someone else’s desk. In a professional services firm, that’s often the marketing team. They inherit a neat strategy, and the first time a partner in another office asks how it applies to their practice, it needs a caveat. Then another one. Before long it’s complicated again. A simple answer has usually had those conversations already, so it can handle the awkward question without wobbling.
Why do professional services firms get handed simplistic answers?
Usually because they’re asking for the right thing. Marketing leaders want clarity, and a firm working across a dozen markets, with partners who each have their own view of the brand, genuinely does need a simpler story. The quickest way to get one is to pretend half the complexity isn’t there.
To be fair, a quick answer isn’t always the wrong one. Sometimes a decision needs making and a good-enough version gets things moving. Simplistic also feels like progress. It gets through the meeting and gets signed off, which after months of going round in circles can feel like a real win. The cost tends to show up later, by which point the people who made the call have often moved on.
You can see it in positioning lines that could belong to any firm in the sector, because nobody wanted to have the argument about what’s actually distinctive. You can also see it in one global message rolled out everywhere because adapting it properly for each market felt like too much work. Neither is wrong, exactly. They just haven’t been through the hard bit yet.
What does earned simplicity look like in practice?
A couple of our own projects explain this better than I can.
Dynamic came to us wanting a new in-house project management tool. We could have built it, and it would probably have been fine. But once we started talking to their leadership and department heads, it was clear the tool was a symptom. The bigger issue was a set of legacy systems and manual workflows that didn’t talk to each other. The result was a multi-year technology roadmap covering every business unit.. It wasn’t what they’d asked for, but it was a much clearer answer to the problem they actually had.
A UK healthcare equipment provider we worked with had a brand architecture so tangled it was slowing decisions down and costing real money to manage. The quick fix would have been a new logo on top of the same structure. Instead, we worked out what each sub-brand was actually for and simplified the hierarchy around that. Their brand management budgets came down because there was simply less to manage.
Neither answer was available on day one. We only got there by working through the complexity with the people who live with it every day.
Where does compound intelligence come in?
After 25 years of complicated briefs, you start to recognise the patterns. You know which questions to ask, where the real challenges are likely to sit and what it takes to move things forward.
We call that compound intelligence. It's the knowledge and experience we've built across every complicated brief we've worked on. It helps us get to clearer answers faster, without skipping the work that makes them hold up.
And it's a big part of why we're happy saying yes to the messy ones.
