There’s an old story about how the Soviet Union used to set production quotas to stimulate and manage their economy. In lieu of a free market system based on actual supply and demand, the central government often issued arbitrary tonnage or quantity quotas to keep factories going.
In a desperate need to fulfill these quotas, factories started to produce 1000kg screws (or tiny, tiny nails — depending on which version of story you’ve heard) of no practical use or value, but were excellent at meeting said quotas.
And simulating productive output.
If you work in the marketing-industry complex, you’ll know the main thing we produce are Powerpoint decks. It’s the currency of our business.
It’s also our modern day Soviet screw.
Outputs of questionable value, born of perverse incentives and processes, no one seems to be able to escape yet spend hours of sweat producing and perfecting regardless.
Like the Soviet screw, the deck creates an illusion of getting something done, without actually getting something done. At least, anything real people out there see in the real world.
Like the Soviet screw, the deck gives everyone something to point at (“We did it — here’s the deck!”) even if it leads to nothing.
Like the Soviet screw, the effort it takes to craft great decks has no correlation to their practical value. In fact, how beautiful a deck is often directly representative to how useless it is.
I’ve seen decks with slides so dense, fonts so small, graphs so complex — they’re unfit for human eyesight.
As if they were designed not to be read or actually convey information, but to prove just how hard the team worked to cram so much info on each slide.
Like the Soviet screw, the deck creates it’s own self-feeding process apparatus.
One of arbitrary deadlines, status meetings, intricate client feedback and strange conversations about whether the chart is the right color.
The deck is not the work.
The deck captures the work.
It makes the work more convenient to email around.
It allows people to understand the recommendation should they not be able to be in the meeting that day.
But the deck is not the work.
It’s the media for the work at best.
And at worst, an obsession with deck-making is a symptom of something more insidious: Mistrust.
Because what the deck really is is proof of labor for someone who doesn’t believe you.
And would rather have manufacture a deck than spend more time thinking, analyzing, experimenting to get to a better recommendation.
As a rule of thumb, the more decks there are at any given time, the less the client trusts the agency, the less your manager trusts you and the less trusting the agency culture is of itself.
If I trust you, I give you the problem, give you time to do the work and ask you to give me your recommendation as concisely and quickly as possible.
I do not ask you to unnecessarily extend the time I get said recommendation because I need it in 100-page deck format.
But if I don’t trust you, where’s my 1000kg screw?
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