At Boston advertising agency MullenLowe, creative teams of 20-25 people challenge each other's ideas in combative but respectful sessions. The first concept pitched never reaches the client. This peer-driven process, built on shared purpose and mutual respect, produces better work through repeated refinement.
Finally, I want to leave you with this. This is a company called MullenLowe. I actually worked for them for a while. It's an advertising agency based in Boston. Note the logo. It's an octopus with boxing gloves. Let me be clear, this is exactly what it's like to go to work there every day. It's the most combative environment you can possibly imagine. The interesting part about it though, it's not combative because people are fighting one another. People actually have an incredible amount of mutual respect for one another. They're there because they can believe they can be part of an ensemble that can create the very best advertising in the world. And if they challenge one another enough, that's exactly what's gonna happen. So to give you a sense of what that looks like, they will have creative sessions, for example, right? They wanna come up with a campaign for a new client. They put 20 or 25 people in a room. Ideas start flying. Creative director's in the front of the room. They start getting a campaign down on the board. They take it about as far as they can, you know, with 20 or 25 people there, only to sit back and just kind of go, "Aren't we awesome?" I mean, in this like sickening self-congratulatory moment, you know, they just decide, "Aren't we just amazing?" But then that all gets wiped away. They do it a second time, a third, a fourth, and sometimes even a fifth time. And let me just say this, in all the times I ever participated in those sessions, The first idea that everyone thought was so great never made the cut to show the client. They realized that the more they continued to challenge one another, the more they cared about great work, the better the work got. And all of a sudden, that stuff they were doing early on wasn't even acceptable anymore. So pretty remarkable when you think about what people can do when they have a common purpose, what they can do together, and if they challenge one another in a way that comes from a really great place. Knowing that it's really about the best idea, about the best way to implement that idea. That's what it's really all about. Peer innovation is what happens when a group of people who share common values yet offer different perspectives and skills bring ideas to life. And what I want to do now is introduce— we have a couple speakers now who are going to talk about real-world examples of exactly what that looks like, about what it is when people come together and and the extraordinary things they were able to accomplish. Jennifer? Thank you. Thank you.
