Geoff Clarke, Managing Director, Business Transformation, Omnicom Media
A famous quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald (“the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”) written nearly a century ago, could be describing the challenge facing agency leaders today.
Imagine a leadership team sitting in a boardroom, staring at a consultant's deck titled 'Transformation Roadmap.' Half the room is energised, ready to burn the boats and rebuild from scratch, the other half is visibly anxious, knowing the last 'big bang' initiative derailed three client relationships and cost two senior hires. Sadly, this isn't hypothetical it's a scene playing out in agencies across the country every week.
This tension manifests as two competing philosophies: the revolutionaries who demand wholesale transformation, and the evolutionaries who champion continuous improvement. Both have compelling arguments yet both have spectacular failure stories as well. The solution is whether your agency leadership team has the strategic intelligence to hold both scenarios in mind and action each where it's needed most.
Having spent three decades in this industry, I've watched brilliant transformation initiatives crash and burn not because the strategy was wrong, but because leadership underestimated the operational reality of executing it. They built the blueprint but forgot about the people who have to live with it. They mandated new workflows without training; they deprecated legacy systems before the new ones were stable.
I've also witnessed businesses slowly commoditise themselves into irrelevance because they mistook incremental tinkering for genuine evolution. The truth lies not in choosing one corner over the other, but in understanding different parts of the business require different approaches.
There are moments when the case for wholesale transformation is not just advisable, but essential. When a business’s technology infrastructure is so fragmented it is creating operational debt faster than the business can service it. When a business model has been fundamentally disrupted by technology convergence, evolution isn't fast enough.
I've seen businesses where the technology stack became so convoluted that client integration required custom builds placing an ever-increasing burden on resources. The only viable path was a complete platform rebuild, as the resource commitment to maintain the status quo simply didn't make commercial sense.
The revolutionaries among us understand something critical: sometimes there is a need to eliminate the option of retreat. When teams know they can fall back to legacy systems, they will especially when the new approach feels uncomfortable or unfamiliar. This is where wholesale transformation, designed to make reverting to old systems impossible, becomes necessary.
Now the case for the evolutionaries. In this instance, wholesale transformation is extraordinarily risky, and the failure rate is sobering. I've witnessed businesses embark on ambitious transformation programs only to discover they've destroyed more value than they've created. Why? Because they failed to recognise that certain aspects of the business, particularly those involving deep client relationships, institutional knowledge, and craft skills, cannot be rebuilt overnight.
As an example, let’s consider the existing client service model, the trust and understanding that senior account leaders have built with clients over years cannot be replicated via a shiny new platform. Attempting wholesale transformation of these relationships is like performing open-heart surgery while the patient runs a marathon.
This is where evolution excels, pilot programs drive change via test teams, allowing time to learn, refine, then roll out carefully, with early adopters acting as change ambassadors. Continuous evolution respects the human element of transformation, allowing teams to build confidence incrementally through agile workflow principles rather than being thrown into the deep end.
So which approach is right? Both are but must be applied with strategic discernment to different parts of a business. Technology infrastructure and data architecture often require wholesale transformation. The operational debt accumulated through years of band-aid solutions cannot be incrementally fixed. A clean slate and unified resolve is needed to implement it properly.
But when it comes to talent development, culture, and the protection of client value exchange, continuous evolution is far superior. A business cannot transform what researchers call 'psychosocial safety' via a memo or restructure, trust and high-performance environments built through consistent, incremental actions over time, are needed.
Consider another hypothetical, in this case an agency migrating to a unified data platform while simultaneously upskilling teams via reverse mentoring programs. They ran the new platform in parallel for three months, with pilot teams acting as change ambassadors. Six months later, operational efficiency improved as did their client NPS scores. Reason, they allowed for strategic ambidexterity, a concept developed by researchers Tushman and O'Reilly, as the platform provides the infrastructure, the people provide the IP, and one without the other fails.
This is where strategic ambidexterity becomes a competitive advantage: knowing which parts of the business needs revolutionary change, and which require patient cultivation.
As our industry continues to navigate technology convergence, economic uncertainty, and evolving client expectations, the temptation will be to pick a corner to become either transformation zealots or evolution purists. I say, resist that temptation.
Fitzgerald's test of first-rate intelligence isn't just about holding two opposed ideas; it's about retaining the ability to function while doing so. In business terms, that means building organisations that are ambidextrous, capable of revolutionary transformation where needed and disciplined evolution where appropriate.
Knowing which parts of a business needs which approach and having the strategic discernment and operational discipline to execute both with equal rigour, is the real competitive advantage. And that starts with an honest conversation at the next leadership meeting.