Does having an account person or project manager make for better information to the team? Or a better relationship?
Software Agile’s Manifesto famously dismissed the need for intermediaries, espousing “Individuals and Interactions” and “Client Communication.” over the use of managers, contracts and tools. So I’ve always been a bit suspicious…wondering whether having account services people (and project managers) solves some problems, but causes others. Direct, person-to-person communication is so incredibly effective, I wonder what is the cost is of having an intermediary? Could it be that there are more negatives than positives, and especially in the chaotic world of agencies and other Naturally-Occurring Chaotic Organizations — where these intermediaries abound — could these negatives start adding up and cause some big problems?
That’s why I was excited to read an article named, Lying Through Others: Does Delegation Promote Deception? in the current issue of Journal of Economic Psychology. The researchers found that the existence of an intermediary increases the probability that one party (the principal) will lie to the other (the agent.) In a nutshell, that means that isolating the people doing the work from the client will be more likely to reduce the quality of information that is provided by the client. It is called, as the authors note, deception.
So if the mere existence of an intermediary can increase the probability of deception, then what we’re probably seeing in that research is actually innate human behavior. That means it is not about having a bad client, but really just the way we operate…we humans are more prone to be deceptive in that situation. We can’t help it; we’re not bad, we’re just bad at it.
Stepping back and looking at the agency biz, this actually makes things a bit more clear — many of the industry’s challenges may be from structure-driven behaviors like this, and its side-effects. For example, the presence of deceptive behavior (or actually just the perception of it) has been shown to effectively lower trust levels in a relationship. And this year’s Agency Productivity Survey showed that poor communications in various forms (including mistrust) was the greatest source of delivery problems.
What is also interesting, if you read many of the other surveys out there (or just the rags,) is that mistrust runs both directions — a “toxic spiral” of sorts, where both parties, client and agency have a declining trust level in the partnership; agencies feel like they are constantly victimized, and clients feel like they are not valued.
But this research oversimplifies; the real world is much more complex and challenging than just a simple trust transaction through an intermediary. According to Michael Farmer in Madison Avenue Manslaughter the number of “suits” versus “makers” approaches a ratio of 1:1 in the larger holding company agencies. Think of how much deception potential there is in a model where we don’t just have one intermediary, but five or ten for each account.
So maybe there is little mystery why the network agencies are struggling so with trust and feeling valued compared to the omnipresent management consultancies, and anecdotally, the independents less so.
The tragedy is that many of the industry’s woes might have come from the mistaken idea that a single point of contact is more effective; that someone telling someone else, and on and on, is somehow better than a direct conversation.
The takeaway: it is not. We’ve seen it with our clients, the research shows it. Go get everyone involved.
Jack is a former RAND senior analyst, recovering client services executive, and the founder of a productivity training and coaching firm that helps agencies, marketers, and other complex service organizations, AgencyAgile.
