Running the agency · Area 08
Your People · Rung 2 to rung 4

Everyone learned AI alone. Now the whole team learns from each other.

Scattered private experiments become shared methods. What one person figures out on a Tuesday, the rest of the team can use by Friday. The craft stays yours. The drudgery goes.

BeforeSix people, six habits

A strategist has a prompt that reliably sharpens a brief. A designer found a way to speed up alt text. Nobody else knows either one exists.

Week oneThe good bits get written down

You collect what already works and turn it into a small set of plain playbooks, named by the job they do, not by the tool.

Week threePractice by role

Strategists, writers, designers and account leads each get short sessions on the patterns that fit their work, plus the lines they should not cross.

OngoingThe playbook keeps up

People flag what helped and what flopped. The methods that hold get kept. The ones that don't quietly drop out.

Representative scenario. It shows the shape of the work, not something that happened at a named agency. These beats are illustrative. They are not a client result.

What gets built

Three plain tools. One useful change.

01

Methods That Work

A small shared library of methods that actually work, in plain language.

Each entry names the job, shows the pattern, and notes where it fits and where it does not. Short enough that people read it. Living enough that people trust it.
02

Hands-On by Role

Short, hands-on sessions built around each role's real work.

A writer's session looks nothing like an account lead's. People practice on their own tasks, with their own examples, so the patterns stick to the work they already do.
03

Reusable Prompts

Reusable starting points for the tasks your team does again and again.

Not a magic script. A tested structure people can adapt, with notes on what to check before the work leaves their hands.
How it stays honest

The system prepares the work. A person still decides.

Clear lines, in the open

Everyone can see where AI helps and where a person decides. The boundaries are written down, not guessed at.

People own the output

The method speeds up the work. A named person still reads it, judges it and puts their name on it before it goes anywhere.

Not a monitor

This measures whether shared practice is spreading, never who typed what. It watches methods, not people.

Kept honest by use

A pattern stays in the playbook only while it earns its place. If it stops helping, it comes out.

What gets measured

Effort and time first. Outcomes later.

01Methods shared across roles, not hoarded
02How many teammates use a given playbook
03Time spent on drudgery, not craft
04Confidence in where the lines sit
05New patterns coming from the team itself

The first signals are about shared practice: methods moving between people, roles picking up patterns that fit them. Broader signs, like less time lost to repetitive work, show up more slowly. I do not count raw usage. Busy is not the same as better.

What this area needs from a person

Once a month people answer a short pulse on what is working, and someone reads the answers. Drop either half and you have a survey nobody reads, which tells you less than asking nobody at all.

The stepAnswer the short pulse, and read the answers
How oftenMonthly
See how the Lookout works
Your People · Rung 2 to rung 4

Get your team learning together. Not everyone rediscovering the same thing alone.

I start with what your people already do well, turn it into shared methods, and give each role the practice to use it. The judgment your clients pay for stays exactly where it belongs.

Ask about this rung moveSee the Systems Ladder