First attempts need foundations

Clients often come to us at the point where the existing approach has stopped working, but nobody internally wants to say it out loud yet.

The audience has changed or the language feels dated. The campaigns still perform well enough to avoid scrutiny, but not well enough to create momentum. The strategy isn't fit for purpose but everyone's worried about what admitting it might mean.

This gap between where the organisation is and where culture has moved to grows, yet large businesses are often designed to protect consistency, not necessarily built to encourage risk or innovation.

That's what makes first attempts so difficult inside many organisations.

A first attempt in a business usually arrives carrying years of legacy, internal politics, previous failures and commercial pressure. There are shareholders, reputations and quarterly targets sitting in the room alongside the new idea. Which is why I have a huge amount of respect for clients willing to move before there is complete certainty around the outcome.

As it's Pride Month, I've found myself thinking about this a lot. Progress only exists because at some point somebody decided the risk of staying still was greater than the risk of moving first. What interests me most, however, is what happens next.

Successful first attempts are built on strong foundations.

Looking back across our work, the clients who created meaningful change invested in understanding why the change was necessary.

With ITV, that meant developing a deeper understanding of how audiences consume stories across different cultures and markets. With HSBC, it meant equipping marketers with the skills and confidence to navigate complexity rather than avoid it. With Shelter, it meant interrogating assumptions that had quietly shaped decisions for years.

In every case study, the common denominator of the first attempt was that it was supported by insight.

The organisations that make successful first attempts spend time understanding the audience, pressure-testing assumptions and building internal alignment. They create the conditions for change before asking people to embrace it.

Without that foundation, first attempts become one-off moments that don’t have legs but. with it, they become catalysts.

There needs to be a strong commitment to learning before acting.

The organisations that stay relevant aren’t always the ones making the boldest moves. More often, they're the ones making the most informed ones.

If your organisation is wrestling with a challenge that no longer feels solved by the old playbook, perhaps the question shouldn’t be centred on making that first attempt, it should be about whether you've built the foundations that will allow it to succeed.