Update from The Sharpened
I want to share something I keep noticing across the businesses I’ve been working with recently, because it’s surprised me how consistent the pattern is.
Most of the businesses I sit down with are good. Genuinely good. The people are talented, the work has substance, the commercial story is real. None of them feel like they’re failing. What they feel is that something has gone slightly loose. The leadership team is holding slightly different pictures of what the business is actually for. Decisions take longer than they should. The market is starting to read them as one of many, when they used to feel distinct. The energy that used to compound has started leaking instead.
It’s not a crisis. It’s a drift. And the strange thing about drift is that no single moment is responsible. There’s no decision you can point to and say that’s where it went wrong. Priorities diverged a bit, then a bit more. New pressures reshaped the agenda. The founding idea got buried under layers of context and compromise. One day the leadership team realises they’ve been working on slightly different versions of the company for a year and a half, and the cost of that has been quiet but constant.
Here’s the bit that’s been interesting me. The instinct, when this feeling arrives, is to fix the surface. Refresh the website. Retune the messaging. Run an offsite about values. I get why. Surface work feels productive, it produces something visible, and it’s the language most agencies and consultants speak. But what I keep seeing is that surface work, on its own, doesn’t hold. The artefacts look coherent for a quarter and then quietly stop doing anything. The drift hasn’t been addressed. So the surface work has nothing to anchor to and the business slides back to where it was.
What seems to actually work is going underneath. Treating brand not as a logo or a tagline or a set of guidelines, but as the operating logic of the business. The underlying argument that makes everything else cohere. When the operating logic is sound, the surface looks after itself. When it’s loose, no amount of polish fixes it.
This isn’t a new idea. I think a lot of people in and around brand have been circling it for years. What’s changed, for me, is realising how much of the work that calls itself brand work never actually gets near this layer. It stops at the surface, because the surface is where the deliverables live. The structural layer underneath is harder to access, harder to charge for in the conventional way, and harder to point at when it’s done. So most of the time it just doesn’t get touched.
The other thing I’ve been noticing is how relieved leadership teams are when someone goes there. There’s a particular quality to a conversation when you stop trying to fix the symptoms and start asking what the actual underlying alignment is, between what the business says it is and what it does, between the inside view and the outside read, between the ambition and the operation. A good leadership team can feel within an hour whether that conversation is happening or not. When it is, things start moving differently. When it isn’t, you can sense everyone going through the motions of a familiar exercise that nobody quite believes in.
I’ve been rolling all of this back into the way I’m running engagements, and the methodology is sharpening with each one. That feels like the right way round. The pattern is more interesting than any single session, and the next session is sharper because of the last. I’ve just rewritten the site to reflect where the thinking has got to, in case anyone’s curious to read the more structured version. But the thing I really wanted to share was the noticing, because I suspect a lot of people reading this recognise the drift in something they’re either inside or close to.
If you do, the most useful thing I can offer is the question itself. What’s the operating logic of the business actually doing right now, and where has it stopped holding? It’s a question that’s hard to answer honestly, which is usually a sign it’s worth asking.