You Probably Already Know What Your Business Is

There’s a particular kind of meeting I’ve never quite understood. An organisation comes in because its identity has stopped fitting, and before long someone has handed them a stack of Post-its and asked them to explain why they exist.

Most of the time, they already know.

They know what they do, who they do it for and where they want to go next. They know which parts of the organisation are working, which bits are held together with tape, and which PowerPoint template should have been taken outside and quietly dealt with years ago.

What they often don’t know is what all of that should look like.

That’s a different problem, and it’s the one I’m interested in.

I’ve never been comfortable with the idea that the designer has to arrive and uncover some hidden business truth before anything useful can happen. Sometimes there genuinely is confusion and it needs sorting first. But sometimes a swimming organisation really does just want to help people swim better, and we don’t need to lock twelve people in a hotel conference room until somebody discovers the word empowerment.

The client knows the business from the inside. They know the history, the politics, the ambition and the awkward bits nobody puts in the annual report. My job is to listen closely enough to turn that knowledge into identity decisions: what stays, what goes, what needs to be clearer and what people should recognise when they see it again.

That division of labour feels healthier to me.

You know your business.

I know identity.

We’ll probably get further if neither of us pretends otherwise.