Can you share a success story where you made a significant impact for a client?
I love telling the story of when I created a visual for a global health insurance company. My client wanted to pitch to the board her vision of setting up an “innovation hub” on every continent. She was essentially asking the board for $50 million for this initiative!
She didn’t want a slide deck to tell her story. She wanted to hand out a visual to each of the board members. We created an A4 image that, on one side, showed an illustration of an organisation on life support. It painted a bleak future, should they resist changing. On the other side we created a map of the entire ecosystem: disruptors, opportunities, disciplines, and potential outcomes should the organisation be brave enough to lean into the possibilities.
A couple of months after I’d delivered these images, the client called me to report that not only had she been successful in securing the funding she was after, but the feedback on her presentation was that the visual she gave everyone was the single more influential part of her pitch. It gave clarity to something that the entire board had confused ideas over.
This happened about 10 years ago, and hearing the impact I’d been able to make (I now refer to that image as “the $50 million sketch”) completely opened my mind to the possibilities for what we do.
What challenges do you see your clients commonly face, and how do you help them overcome these?
The visuals we create for our clients help with a handful of problems:
- Clarity: they help people understand, especially if the content is dry or complex
- Alignment: they literally get everyone on the same page, and inspire them to get behind a message
- Engagement: they keep people involved and interested, especially at conferences or in workshops
What trends are you noticing in your field, and how do you adapt to stay ahead?
I get asked a lot about AI, and whether I’m worried if AI tools will replace the work that we do. It makes sense that people might think this: Generative AI is an incredible tool for empowering someone without visual skills to create something from nothing. I know a lot of creatives use tools like DALL-E and Midjourney to explore ideas, and to experiment with style and art direction.
We definitely do our best to keep across these tools and explore how they might save time for us or for our clients.
What I have noticed though is that the difficult conversations, the alignment activities, the collaboration: none of these can happen without humans. Guiding, facilitating, challenging, exploring… that part of the creative process is messy, and it’s human, and it requires relationships and rapport to work. It’s the part that we love, and we’re pretty comfortable that there will continue to be a demand for it into the future, regardless of how clever the machines become.
What is the most common mistake you see businesses make, and how can they avoid it?
I see a lot of founders and leaders who are capable of articulating extraordinary, inspiring visions, only to have them gather dust and get forgotten about by the rest of the team because they’re not visible. It’s such a shame!
If you can find a way to make your vision stick, beyond the “big reveal”, so that it’s constantly front of mind for everybody, then your team will make better decisions, gain traction quicker, and be less reliant on you!
