You may have been wondering "what's next?" for Jack, in this post-Agile world. This is the core of what's coming, a North-star concept that I have dubbed the Y-Shaped Organization, a fusion of what I've seen work in the 200-plus agencies I've had the pleasure of knowing, combined with what I can see coming after a year of re-immersion in a strategic industry analysis and of course the dynamics of our new friend, AI.
The agency-style organizational model is widely recognized to be one of the most adaptive, first being called an adhocracy in the 1970's (Mintzberg), and more recently (by me) a Naturally-Occurring Chaotic Organization (NOCO). I believe the industry will survive the rise and adoption of AI capabilities, but that doesn't mean that agencies can survive without changing. The shift in raw economics and disruption to the traditional value chain model will require a new style of agency model, one that I have already seen (and help bring into) action, a client-forward, value-driven model that changes the underlying engagement dynamics so as to amplify what agencies always have done best, and get paid for it.
It's always been about judgment
Let's start with the uncomfortable accounting behind the agency business: judgment was always the value, and it was almost never the thing on the invoice. Agencies gave their judgment away — in the pitch, in the strategy deck, in the senior conversation that reframed the client's problem — and charged for the production that followed. AI is rewriting that arithmetic.
Assembly work isn't disappearing but the margin is draining out of it, and the judgment that was always given away is becoming the thing worth paying for. Disruption, yes, but also opportunity. And an invitation to think about what a better model looks like.
But before your agency can get paid for judgment, you have to stop misunderstanding what judgment is, and see why your clients have never been able to pay for it.
We talk about judgment as if it were a substance some firms have, a senior quality, a talent. Maybe it was all of the creatives involved, but somehow that ends up being way too ephemeral.
If you treat it instead as a process, with inputs and outputs, then its value comes into view. Superficial inputs produce superficial outputs, no matter how brilliant the people. When a client calls an agency's thinking shallow, they're rarely diagnosing the agency's intelligence. They're diagnosing what the agency was given to think about, and (this is the agency's failure) what it never went and asked for.
The Ask has always been a fail
Historically, agency judgment has been starved, underfed — yours included. Your input is a brief: the client's pre-digested version of The Ask, stripped of everything they assumed was irrelevant or preferred not to say. What's behind The Ask (why this, why now, what's actually broken, what failed before, whose career is attached, etc., which include about 50+ more questions) rarely gets surfaced much less creeps into the document.
So the judgment you end up rendering is more a judgment based on a hazy cartoon, not the realities of the client's business. Everybody's to blame, but your clients feel the gap and price it accordingly.
Maybe that last point needs another round: if the client didn't really have to dig deep and identify what the real valuable problems are, and why this really needs to be and how it needs to be done, then they have no expectation that you were doing truly valuable work. You were only doing work that was easily described. By the way, easily described work has another name: commodity.
Starved inputs are half the problem. The other half: clients don't pay for what they can't see and can't measure. Agency judgment has been invisible by default; the agency "how" made it so. Every transaction in the traditional relationship (the pitch, the brief handed across, the creative brief approved, the SOW negotiated, the project plan signed off) showed the client an artifact and a price. "Thanks for the info, we'll get back to you once we are done doing all of the stuff would be most valuable for you to see." As I remember hundreds of these moments, both in agencies I worked in, but also agencies I worked with, it strikes me that agencies have been afraid to have the client see them thinking.
Why so shy, agency-guy?
I get it on one level. I like to have time to ponder, and form my thoughts. But it seems that the cost for this has grown, now that the cost for assembly has shrunk. I can also tell you that when I was coaching our context briefing and roadmapping techniques with agencies and clients in the room, I never saw a client think less of an agency from watching them think and work through problems. In fact, the only halfway negative thing I ever saw that way was a client at a guitar company, I think it was Taylor, who was only mildly annoyed at the fact that he had basically been repeating the brief multiple times to multiple account people, and the questions that the team was asking, although they were very good questions, just felt like one time too many. For him that is. Obviously, the agency hadn't had enough times.
And the real loop usually looks like we talk a bit to the client, go away and do the thing that is really valuable, and then produce some artifacts and bring those back. Judgment is not only a black box, but it is a black box in a different building that their key card does not open the doors to.
Why artifacts, timecards, and pricing tiers all fail
It doesn't matter what's inside the artifact… if you can't see it, then its price tag is zero. Worse, the transactional form itself sends a signal: commodity sales imply commodity contents. When everything about the exchange says commodity vendor, the client reasonably concludes that what's for sale is assembly, and that whatever judgment came along with it is insignificant. You weren't hiding your judgment. The model you sold through was deprecating it for you.
Discovery is the perfect example. For a while, agencies got paid for it — paid, that is, for judgment. Then they squandered it: fiddling rather than conversing, interviewing rather than building consensus, specifying rather than asking the why behind the why. The problem was the delivery: transactional to its bones, and driven by agency needs (what production required to start) rather than client needs and mutuality. A waste on both sides, because nearly every client could use fresh eyes on its assumptions, its unsurfaced risks, its working model. That examination is worth paying for. Delivered as a transaction, it never was.
So getting paid for judgment means making judgment visible — tangible, even visceral — and the way to do that is co-creation. Open the client's situation up jointly, client in the room, both sides exploring the ask, then behind the ask, then behind that — an unboxing. The client doesn't read about your thinking in a deliverable; they watch it work on their problem, live, on things they care about. And the exploration feeds itself: the situated understanding judgment needs (the real situation, the politics, the history, the unnamed need) can't be handed over in a document. It can only be built together. This is where the name pays off: the Y-shaped organization is shaped like its own question. The open arms exist to hold the sustained, structured asking of why.
Why ask Why
The single, most important part of the Y-shaped organization is its relentless use of the word why. For years I taught agencies co-creative techniques: context briefings that put the team and the client's reality in one room, road mapping and scoping run as conversations rather than specifications. They worked dramatically (faster delivery, less rework, teams that understood what they were making and why). But except in special situations, they didn't climb high enough.
What I didn't see at the time: the questions we were asking were the tip of the iceberg. The real conversation needed to be driven farther upstream, above the project, above the brief, into the client's situation itself. The Y is that realization made structural. The unboxing is part of sales, yes, and the asking runs through every stage of the engagement, because the asking never stops being the work.
Making judgment visible gets paid twice, and the second payment is the one nobody prices. When judgment is co-created, the client is inside it. They watched the understanding get built; the conclusions are partly theirs. You don't audit a conclusion you helped reach — you act on it.
More important, you don't withhold your real problems from people you're genuinely thinking with. The unspeakable problems surface naturally, because the boundary between "what we told the vendor" and "what we're actually facing" dissolves when the vendor is helping you face it. Access grows; more senior people join the exploration; bigger questions enter it.
You can't bill co-created judgment by the hour; the hour is a transaction unit, and this isn't a transaction. Price it as what it is: the exploration, the understanding it builds, the decisions it carries, the access it sustains.
The meaning of Y
I asked myself, if the pyramid is dead, then what is the shape? I'm not sure if it will stick, but I like the letter Y. Its open arms are the co-creative reception, the institutional habit of asking why behind the ask. The junction turns situated understanding into configuration: team, cadence, plan. The stem is the depth that makes exploration productive (you need to know which why to ask next), and the stem has to be grown: if you're going to charge for judgment, you have to produce judgers, deliberately, through real exposure to real stakes, or you're selling down an inventory you no longer restock.
The pyramid sold transactions, and transactions can only price assembly. The Y makes judgment visible — fed jointly, exercised in the room, valued because it can finally be seen.
If this one hit close to home, let me know. Or share it with another agency leader who is trying to sort out "What's next and what now?"
The NOCO and other strange aspects of how agencies really work get the full treatment in my book, UNMANAGED, if you want to go deeper.
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