It was a project I gave myself after reading about the management team at British Cycling who masterminded the mega haul of gold medals in Beijing largely through what they termed “the aggregation of marginal gains”. Their theory being that it is easier to improve 50 different things by 1% than one thing by 50%.

I wondered if a similar theory could be applied to our industry, and particularly our company, to deliver a better service for our clients and ultimately show in our bottom line?

What started out as simply looking into our processes and how they could be improved quickly led into an assessment of the people within the agency, how they interact with each other and how that impact’s the work produced – both positively and negatively. And needless to say, we found plenty of areas where we could make positive change.

But things got really interesting when we looked at how we were going to implement the changes. As we talked with staff about the changes we wanted to make, we asked them what changes they would make too. Everybody saw things differently which at first perplexed me a little. We have always prided ourselves on being a close knit team, so how could we all be seeing things so differently?

With a bit of time and reflection though I concluded that this was a healthy state of affairs and, indeed, has led to a significant change in the way we work. Because the truth is, everybody is different. People had so many different ideas because they are different to the person next to them, or across the desk. Yet of course they all ultimately had the same idea – to make the agency better. And we only found this out because we asked them.

Various things were put in place to help the agency run smoother, and hopefully they are all contributing their 1% to our growth and improvement as an agency. But the real breakthrough has been the embracing of multiple personalities within a project.

There are now a lot more meetings. A lot more. The idea of this is to get people talking more and thus contributing even more. We try to keep them short and sweet so they don’t become a burden on people’s days, but now I look out of my office and see people discussing work every day. Discussing briefs, discussing concepts, discussing client requests. And as they discuss it, be it as a department, the whole company or just a couple of staff, different opinions are offered, different interpretations and different points of view.

And this is important, because ultimately we are marketing a client to their customer – typically to many thousands of potential customers, particularly if they are a consumer brand. And guess what? Each of those customers is different. They have a different personality and a slightly different view on things.

So now we encourage people to offer opinions even more, and for those opinions to be taken in the right spirit and analysed, then acted upon if regarded as valid, it is important that they are not instantly dismissed, so as not to discourage staff from putting their head above the pulpit. They may be robustly debated, obviously not every idea is incorporated but they are all valuable, because they add context to what you are producing.

The key to doing this successfully and thus avoiding all-in fights every day is to make sure everybody understands why we are doing it. The person seeking the opinion is not asking you how you would have done it or for you to give them a ‘better’ idea, they are asking your opinion on what they are doing. Likewise, the person offering the opinion should not be viewed as ‘sticking their nose in’. It’s also very important to keep an air of positivity around, point out the positives as much, if not more, than any negatives. It’s also worth remembering that it’s a two way discussion, expect to be asked to justify your opinions and work together to understand what they mean in the wider context of the job.

And you have to leave your egos at the door.

It’s not always easy. Sometimes it works better as a big group, sometimes it’s easier to canvass opinions one by one. But we’re finding that along the way some key insights are being found that may otherwise have not appeared. And sometimes from surprising places, people with the least association with a project are often best placed to offer valuable insight.

Finally, at the end of all this interaction as a group of disparate personalities, it all comes back to the individual, who needs to assess everything that’s been offered, good or bad, and make the necessary judgement calls. It’s important that even after all the discussion the sense of individual responsibility remains, that changes are made due to insight gained rather than because someone told you to.

As the line says, it’s good to talk.