The Overthinkers

The client agency relationship is often a love-hate relationship. In this episode, Rachel and Shann explore how clients can set that relationship up for success and extract as much value as possible from their agency partners.

Strategy can be a central part of the pitch process, but what are the best contributions? And how rewarding (or unrewarding) can they be?

Having to deal with underperformers is a reality for all leaders at some point in their career. What approaches work best, and how can the event be used as a constructive step for the talent in question?

Sometimes things like they're too much (or too little) and the dream of just dropping everything is a temptation many people in corporations go through. Can this be overcome, and could it even be used to your advantage?

Innovation is generally a good thing to stay ahead of the game, but in many instances it can have perverse effects on a business. This week, Rachel and Shann explore some of the things they have seen hurting businesses, from using the wrong KPIs to generate draining clutter for both your teams and your customers.

Most modern marketing is obsessed with data, and "data-driven" marketing has often been pegged as the future of our industry (and generally, still is). But there have been many voices clashing with this certainty that being data-driven was the only way forward for our practice. As a matter of fact, could this be the hill on which marketing loses one of its superpowers?

In the last two decades we've seen a huge acceleration of the number of specialists in marketing, to the point where being a generalist is often described as a "master of none". This has been a problem because we often end up with siloed views and practitioners that fail to understand how their field inserts itself in the grand scheme of things. The question is whether being a generalist is still possible, or even valued?

Founding a business is equally scary and hypnotic. In this episode, Rachel and Shann share their impressions after starting new companies, and what it's been like pivoting from head of strategy type positions.

Very special guest this week with JP Castlin, self-proclaimed strategy nerd and one of the most interesting voices in our community. The question that got us started led us to discuss many big tickets, from the definition of strategy to the ways complexity limits the potential of strategic planning, and even talking about the similarities with evolutionary theory.

Since the mobile phone, we haven't had much in the way of hardware tech that has transformed the way we interact with the world. As a matter of fact, it's kinda hard to imagine we're going to see something as disruptive anytime soon. In this episode, Rachel and Shann discuss what technologies they see potentially impacting experience design, and what excites them about these. Tune in for an unusual episode of The Overthinkers, taking a little bit of a science-fiction tangent.