Protection is futile: let your people design what comes next

One of the questions from the floor in Boston (I flew in to talk to agency owners about AI) was what an owner should be looking to protect when they get back to the office on Monday. I said protection is futile, which got a laugh, but I meant it.

If you want to come out of this well you look forward rather than back, and the forward view comes from the people you already have. The decision in front of every agency owner is whether to run an AI business or a business powered by human intelligence, judgement, empathy, taste and a feel for the zeitgeist. If it's the second, then the people supplying those things are the ones who should design what comes next.

Everybody who works for me is smarter than me, so asking them to design the future is an easy call. The youngest, brightest, least jaded people in the business, given a brief that is about clients rather than about delivering SEO three hours quicker or tidying the workflow.

I got the room to do an exercise. Hold your left hand out. I push against it. Everyone, without exception, pushes back. We're hardwired for it, which is exactly why our people resist when we tell them to change, and why we sit there baffled thinking it's our company, they should just do it.

You can't push someone into pulling. You have to ask what they'd like to pull, how it would feel, what shape it would be if they built it themselves. Then they pull the thing they defined. If they invent the change, they'll want it. That was the whole trick to transformation long before AI turned up, and it hasn't changed.