The Cost of Competence

Okay, let’s talk about money for a minute, as I suspect we are all feeling a pinch. 

The England kit is £135 for a shirt. It’ll cost you thousands to watch a 90-minute game, hundreds of millions to host, and the most polluting World Cup had a single match estimated to cause around 44,000 to 72,000 tonnes of CO2. However if you ask any questions about this, boarder entry, the war, morality and you’ll probably be told you just need to chill and relax.

The US being US aside, I love football, and here is the pinnacle. But what is the price of football? Or its value for that matter? 

Have you seen the latest series of Welcome to Wrexham? I love it: warm, funny, and it tells some wonderful stories about a community that has embraced a football club and vice versa.

They’re onto the fifth season now, I think. There’s less of the “two funny American owners” and more heartstrings being plucked now, which leaves me feeling a little more manipulated because underneath all the heartwarming moments sits a fairly simple truth.

If Messrs Reynolds and McElhenney hadn’t turned up with deep pockets and global visibility, Wrexham would almost certainly still be a non-league outfit like our beloved Torquay United. 

The story works because investment, attention, expertise and ambition arrived at exactly the same time. At this point, I suspect if Ryan Reynolds bought my local Co-op I’d watch six seasons of that too.

While football is the mechanism, money is the outcome, people are still the story. Perhaps “social washing” will be the next buzzword on everyones tongue.

It is estimated that ending extreme global poverty would cost somewhere around $300 billion. Depending on the day you look, Elon Musk is worth more than double that.

I’m not clever enough to know what to do with that information and I’m certainly not suggesting one man should solve the world’s problems. I just find it fascinating that we have somehow created a system capable of assigning that much value to a single person, and I struggle to imagine looking at a world with so many obvious problems and deciding that Mars feels like the priority.

Money rant over.

Okay, whilst I am on money, lets draw the line with status (sorry), it reminds me of a great bit in Ricky’s new stand-up, Mortality.

If you can’t watch that clip, he was talking about status, and his point was that for most of human history there were two obvious ways to become valuable within a community. You could be virtuous: kind or wise. You could be competent: hunt or craft.

If you were genuinely useful, people knew who you were. Today, things feel a little murkier. Social media has created a world where visibility and competence can sometimes look remarkably similar from a distance. I’m sure we can all think of examples where the loudest voice in the room has become the most influential, regardless of whether they are the most knowledgeable.

There are now entire industries built around appearing knowledgeable whilst being sat in a dark bedroom with an oversized microphone.

But when I think about the people who have impressed me most, they are almost never the people with the biggest audience. They’re the people who became indispensable when things mattered. They were virtuous or competent, or even better, both at the same time.

The virtuous duo

Two examples immediately spring to mind.

The first was when my mums partner died. It was out of the blue and one of those moments where the whole world zones into on one timeless room. 

There are conversations happening, decisions to make, people arriving and emotions everywhere. You’re trying to process something enormous while simultaneously dealing with practical realities.

I remember feeling completely unequipped…And then I watched my now wife come to life.

As a nurse, she glided naturally into a situation that I was wading around in. She knew what questions needed asking, what support people needed, when to speak, when not to speak, and how to move everyone through an incredibly difficult situation with care and compassion.

I remember standing there thinking how extraordinary that was. Wife material, that.

Fast forward some admiring glances and a few years and the second example was at our wedding.

We got married at The Green in Cornwall. It was deliberately small, fewer than thirty people, because we wanted to spend a whole weekend with our closest friends and family rather than trying to fit hundreds of people into a single afternoon.

It was wonderful, best weekend of my life, Richard danced in a dressing gown, my eyes are misting thinking of fun and meaning in all of it.

But, when we arrived, the wedding planner greeted us kindly, and immediately started asking a bunch of questions I hadn’t thought of.

Who might be difficult?… Me surely?

Who needs looking after?… Urm, me?

Who is likely to get lost? Who needs reminding where they’re supposed to be?… Oh goodness, it’s me okay?!?!

Within ten minutes I realised she had already identified me as the primary operational risk to this event, and I knew strait away this wasn’t her first rodeo. However, the thing that really struck me as the weekend pressed on was how invisible she became, until the moment I needed her.

Then at some point, I realised I trusted her completely, she was steering the most elegant ship silently from behind, true leadership in action.

I was so in her hands, and she made what was our special day so incredibly special because it had dawned on me that I would almost certainly drop the ball and risk ruining this wonderful experience for my wife and all involved.

That day, nobody applauded her, we got all the cheers.

Does technology erode value?

We stayed at a really lovely place for a night away recently and there was, propped up in the corner bathroom, an old metal box with a handle. On closer inspection it was a beautiofully ornate (and I mimagine a hundred or two years old) washing machine.

It brought me immediately to the present as a great metaphor for technological change.

We don’t look at the washing machine and crave a washing dolly. We won’t even give it a second glance nowadays unless it weighs our load and uses the correct amount of resources for the wash.

It has evolved with technology over hundreds of years, and we expect an electric one in every home. What will AI bring to your industry that will “be in every home?”

Over the last few months, regular readers will have noticed we’ve been experimenting heavily with AI.

Like most digital agencies, we’ve always struggled with the same challenge. Clients often know they need a brand, website, a marketing strategy, content, SEO or a digital transformation project, but turning that need into something tangible can take time, a dance back and forth and a beautiful iteration of something unique.

Without experience of this digital world, we understand for our clients that creating stuff (ideas or content) is notoriously difficult. Trying to imagine a finished website from a planning document is difficult. What AI has allowed us to do is dramatically accelerate that process.

AI will produce a quick bit of nothing until you build a process for it to follow. We’ve been building these into our workflows for a year or so, and now we are in the is lovely position where we can begin assembling these little nuggets together into one unified system. A system as far as the robots are concerned: of context.

And the outcome is not a rushed response, but process driven quality, with us as your guide.

We can now create draft sitemaps, wireframes, draft content, visual concepts and working ideas that clients can react to in hours rather than days, weeks or months.

And our clients can suddenly not only see what they’re buying, but how it all fits together and talks to each other. 

Instead of staring at an empty page, wondering where to begin, they’re looking at something real and making it better, unique to them.

We’ve also been building a new dashboard for our retainer clients that pulls together reporting, search data, SEO insights and planning tools into one place. 

Brand building → Analysis & Structure → Design system → Marketing Managed

Existing retainer clients will getting onboarded into all this shortly, assuming I can shake off this ridiculous lurgy and stop delaying everyone.

The technology itself is exciting. But what fascinates me more is what it means for value.

For years, agencies have charged largely for outputs because outputs took time.

Now many of those things can be produced significantly faster. If something that once took weeks can suddenly be achieved in hours, where does the value go?

The more I think about it, the more I suspect it moves closer to the things that have always mattered.

Judgement.

Experience.

Perspective.

Trust.

And in my examples above…

The ability to ask the right question.

The ability to guide someone through uncertainty.

Picasso said: “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”

Technology changes the tools, the speed, the process. What it doesn’t seem to change is our need for genuinely capable people. In fact, it may serve to put them in their rightful place, doing the work they should be doing.

Perhaps that’s why I find the current moment so exciting rather than frightening.

The tools are becoming available to everyone. The question is no longer who has access to them. The question is what you do with them.

Adopt and build the washing machine, or stand there with a wooden dolly, its up to you.

And maybe, in a world increasingly obsessed with visibility, the people who continue to create the most money will still unfortunately be the same people they’ve always been.

And perhaps the ones who create the most value will continue to blend in and become indispensable when it matters most.

But I suspect competence is about to become very important again.