In our industry (extra points for someone who can tell me that that is in less than 2 pints worth of time), often what people say is the cover for what they are struggling to actually do.
A few examples;
Integrated. That’s another one that fits the same rule as ‘innovation lab’. “We’re integrated”. The sub-text is of course “we have no idea how to get these folks to work together, so we really need to focus on being more joined up internally so clients don’t thinks we’re schmucks who have no idea what each other does. But let’s make it a selling point!”
I fear the same for a lab. “it allows us to do thinking outside of client constraints and pass that back to our teams to do cool stuff with clients”. The sub text here is “we don’t really innovate in our client teams and all our teams are knackered just keeping the lights on. We’d better sort this out. Let’s build a lab and make it a selling point!”.
If i was a client i’d be a bit hacked off if the innovation was happening where i wasn’t paying for it.
The next one on from that is the ‘Agile’ (or the “silver bullet that will solve all your development problems, promise”) This is often hand-in-hand with the labs where they promise to work in an agile way to get proofs of concept out – quickly. The sub text on that one is ” Fuck, it takes ages to get anything done round here, let’s call it agile and how we iterate and release stuff quickly. Let’s make it a selling point!”
Now, don’t get me wrong, i like following BBH Labs on Twitter as much as the next guy, and i like a bit of agile delivery (when it is truly Agile and not lots of mini-waterfalls in disguise) and I can be partial to be a bit of integrated.
But please can we stop claiming all those things as something that is in someway a bonus for our clients when in fact they should be business as usual.
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