Forced perspective

Anyone who took an undergrad psychology class will recall, or at least recognize*, the Stanford Prison Experiment.

A refresher: a professor recruiter a group of students and randomly divided them into prisoners and guards. The guards took on an exaggerated version of the kind of behavior they imagines guards to show. The student-guards went to such extremes that, although, “Zimbardo had intended that the experiment should run for two weeks… on the sixth day it was terminated, due to the emotional breakdowns of prisoners, and excessive aggression of the guards.”

Work can introduce similar dynamics with only slightly less damaging results, exacerbated by adjacent groups with different points-of-view. It what we want vs. what they want, and it’s win vs. lose.

I wrote a few weeks about how good fences make good neighbors: having clear separation of responsibilities makes for more productive, more harmonious working environments than the smoothie approach of, “we all do everything.”

When done right those specialties support shared goals, even if norms (what you do) and incentives (why you do it) are different:

• Account management is responsible for running the business and managing client relationships.
• Strategy is responsible for finding a solution to the business problem that open up an opportunity to create breakthrough comms.
• Creative is responsible for coming up with unexpected concepts.
• Media is responsible for getting the idea in front of the right audience as efficiently as possible.

Together we come up with integrated ideas that help the client’s business and allow the agency to remain profitable.

As a strategist I felt (usually healthy) conflict with each other team throughout my 8+ years at agencies. But to clients, these roles all means to an end. The structure and roles are less important than the job to be done, finding new ways to grow.

Similarly, it took me changing lanes from agency to client-side to clearly see that what agency folks call “a client” is more like a complicated web of different types of marketers, each with its own norms and incentives that inform how they act.

It also changes how you orient toward ideas:

FROM how does this build my marketable skills as an agency person?

TO could this meet our objectives in a way that other marketers here will understand through their needs and get onboard with? (…and that I can claim some credit for later, assuming it goes well.)

Making this idea is way less important than finding a brilliant idea.

(This is just the far end of the spectrum of how a lot of great strategists work now. The difference is that in most client marketing orgs an Effie doesn’t really matter because they’re so advertising focused. In most creatively-led agencies, they also don’t matter… but for different reasons.)

No matter where in the web you sit, working to understand norms and incentives around adjacent jobs can turn frustration into a way forward.

*(s/o to the one person who gets this dad joke)