Examining the way most businesses and corporations work, FlashPointLabs recognized that otherwise intelligent people were ‘Planning to meet to discuss watching themselves not work; celebrating the rare occasion when their mediocre outcomes matched their mediocre projections.’

It sounds cynical, but this is how a lot of ‘work’ proceeds. Many work conventions are systems designed by geniuses, for use – sadly – by mediocre people.

Alternatively, many are arbitrary evolutionary upshots from internal adaptive pressures – which could include bad managers, personnel cutbacks, company mergers, politics and nepotism.

They are human beings made to play Twister with their tasks; without creativity, or enthusiasm, or rhythm, or custody, or purpose. 

But what if you had a kind of Gifted And Talented workplace? What could extraordinary people do, if left to work the way they wanted? Examining most work environments – 

• We found superfluous meetings; we found meetings that led to still more unnecessary meetings;
• We found unnecessary planning, when there were no project dependencies and the work was being done on mutable platforms that could accommodate immediate action;
• We found cumbersome monitoring deployed at the expense of productivity;
• We found projections taking the place of outcomes, and data models that were conflated with the performance itself, which was often sub-par;
• We found people earnestly working on accurate modeling, when the blueprint is not the building, and validated learning would come only from execution;
• We found groupthink and consensus-seeking subject to the whims and input from arbitrary team members;
• We found workers who were locked into repeating the same boring task or working within a limited scope – which is not how one maintains either enthusiasm or quality;
• We found processes that denied individual contributors their natural need for creativity, and the custody that comes from end-to-end work; 
• Similarly, we found the use of teams when an individual contributor could provide a more coherent solution with greater efficiency and fewer holdups;
• We found work cultures that espoused, engendered, or condoned co- and micro-managing;
• We found endless process interruptions and friction points that slowed momentum and damaged morale (documentation, permission-seeking, etc.);

To wit, we discovered smart people were mistaking the model of the thing (the plan) with the actual thing (the execution), planning and talking about work that could be executed on-the-fly, most shockingly when the only way to learn when dealing with a game-theory scenario (complex system with divergent interests and its own agency) is through executing and optimizing.

We adopt a ‘ready, fire, aim’ approach at FlashPointLabs, with cross-functional experts who are the single point person for a marketing engagement. They delegate to creative (ad) experts when necessary. It’s not a ‘rule by committee’, that yields mediocre and uninspired work over a period of months. 

At the same time, like many leading marketers, we became convinced that Internet search had changed the Buyer Journey; that buyers drive a journey that runs on the pursuit of buyer-centric (helpful, unbiased) content. So, if buyer-centric content drives the Buyer Journey, why was most of the content seller-centric (ads and brochures)? Most of the time, marketing was being done wrong, and, similarly, most of the time, consulting engagements were far less efficient than they could be. These insights were combined, tested, optimized, and realized in FlashPointLabs.