Your organisation’s identity
is the difference between
being chosen and being compared.
Most of what makes your organisation distinctive isn’t written down. When people leave, the context and knowledge they’ve accumulated over years leave with them.
What your people collectively know, and how they distinctively work, are your institutional intelligence and living culture. Together they are the sum of your organisation’s unique identity.
Everything else is replicable.
When AI is deployed without being grounded in your organisation’s identity, it makes your output generic. Your clients notice this long before any of your metrics confirm it.
The metrics of identity loss
Institutional
Intelligence
Is your organisation’s living memory
Many organisations have no means to measure and retain their institutional intelligence.
Processes aren’t set up to transfer learnings from one project to another. People leave without any historical context being captured. The fast pace nature of the work means that there is no time to share knowledge with new members of a team. These are a few examples where the need for short-term thinking is prioritised over developing long-term depth.
Photo by Brett Jordan
The consequences of continued short-term thinking are that it becomes the dominant thought process for how people think. Decisions are geared towards what serves the ‘now’ rather than what is better for the long-term. Duplication of effort, always building from scratch become accepted behaviours, and then repeated behaviours, rather than the exception. People lose access to context that they can build upon rather than work in isolation.
Without any means of retention, an organisation’s living memory erodes gradually, without anyone being aware of losing what makes them distinct. Without measurement, organisations cannot identify how much intelligence and identity is being lost, until the consequences are already visible.
Your living culture is a shared morality
Photo by Rob Curran
Living Culture governs how your people behave towards each other when they are under pressure and when no one is watching them.
It differs from your stated culture. Those are your ideal values, found on posters, websites and in how you onboard your people. A demonstration in how you wish them to behave.
Living culture shows up in how your people express themselves, in the ideas they create and how they collaborate. When your living culture is diminishing, the signs aren’t always obvious.
None of these signs show up in your performance data.
When the reasons for these problems become fully visible, the damage to your people’s well-being and ultimately your organisation’s identity has been building for months.
When AI is deployed without context
When AI is deployed without access to your organisation’s deep contextual knowledge, the output seems assured. But it masks the absence of any meaningful insight. Soon the confident and abundant answers AI provides replace the critical judgment and inputs of your people.
As this continues, your senior people stop investing in work they don’t develop themselves. The people below them produce senior-looking work but without the wisdom that your organisation spends time and resources investing in.
Without any senior correction, the work converges toward sameness, leaving your clients unable to distinguish your thinking from any competitor.
Measuring your institutional intelligence and living culture is the foundation your AI needs to be built upon.
Take my free ten-minute diagnostic which measures both.
Begin the diagnostic →Who I am
I’ve spent two decades in client and people leadership roles within some of the world’s largest marketing organisations, serving many Fortune 500 brands. How I’ve understood both organisations and people has also been shaped by what I learned in theatre design.
What looks effortless on the stage involves crafted orchestration, performers with hours of practice and a willingness to fail and start again. The audience has an equally important role. They are the lightning rod for the performers energy. An engaged audience can lift the performance to heights that the performers can’t achieve alone.
The result, for the performers and audience, is a shared experience. Both are totally in the moment, with no distractions, feeding off each other’s energy and creating a performance of meaning. I am inspired by the ethos of the relationship between an audience and performer, and I aim to bring this spirit in each relationship I have with my clients and my teams. Each of us has a role to play in improving on what exists or creating something new. This is my passion and what gives me purpose.
I’ve seen that an organisation’s identity works in a similar way. What makes an organisation worth choosing is built from the same sustained investment. Where freedom of expression is embedded in the organisation’s culture. And where great ideas, like performances, are remembered and revisited. Without retention of intelligence and culture, identity diminishes before anyone knows what is lost.
Organisations
lose their
distinctiveness
before any metric
confirms it.
Find out where your organisation stands today.
Example of what your report would look like
How often do short-term crises take priority over longer-term thinking?
What does your answer tell you?
The diagnostic groups questions like this across four broad categories that apply to any organisation regardless of how it is structured.
Each category reflects a dimension of how your institutional intelligence and living culture are being sustained or are eroding.
The report gives you clarity on the problems you have been noticing, and direction through the ambiguity around them.
The conversation after it is where we shape the plan to solve them, together.
It takes ten minutes to complete. Your report is generated in your browser and appears on screen as soon as you finish.
Your diagnostic data isn’t stored, and nothing you enter identifies you or your organisation.
Please answer based on your honest assessment of your organisation as it is, not as you would like it to be.
Begin the diagnostic →How I work
My ethos in how I work is threefold: transparency in pricing, bespoke engagements and measurement.
Transparency
Transparency is in how I price and scope the work I do. My pricing is always clearly scoped to the following:
- The problem I am solving
- The services that I will deliver for you
- The outcomes that you receive and when
- Clarity in how to measure those outcomes
Bespoke
I avoid a ‘cookie-cutting’ approach which is why you won’t see a menu pricing.
Every engagement I have has a clear proposal and scope of work, tailored exactly to your needs before any work starts. Depending on the scale and complexity of the work I rarely charge for a scope of work unless it is part of pre-agreed deliverable.
Measurement
Measurement runs through my work from start to finish. It is what keeps the work grounded in evidence. My first step is always to listen.
Depending on the size of your organisation and the inputs you need I perform diagnostics, full audits plus 1:1 and group listening sessions.
Each listening approach has a tangible outcome which gives you the evidence and insights you need to create an action plan that is specific and measurable.
To find out more about how I work and my methodology
please click the button below.
One diagnostic.
One global model.
Within six months, major client accounts had improved their commercial health. In one year the model became the proof of concept for a global rollout.
Read the case study →Testimonial
International marketing expert, C-Level Executive, Author and Speaker
ex-Ogilvy Germany: Chief Client Officer
ex-BBDO Germany: CEO
ex-72andSunny Europe: President & MD
“I had the pleasure of working closely with Ian when I was Chief Client Officer at Ogilvy Germany. What always impressed me with Ian was his ability to bring clarity to complexity. Rather than applying generic solutions, Ian starts by listening and understanding where the real problem begins.
His structured approach and relentless focus on measurement created transparency and accountability without ever compromising the flexibility required for outstanding creative work.
Ian has a rare ability to combine diagnostic rigour with a genuinely people-centred mindset. The result is an organisation that is now both efficient and genuinely future-facing.”