Culture Eats Process for Breakfast
We’ve all come across the famous quote: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” attributed to Peter Drucker. It captures a fundamental truth — that deeply ingrained behaviors and beliefs in an organization's culture shape outcomes more powerfully than any strategic plan.
The same can be said for process in creative agencies.
New “proprietary methodologies” and “proven processes” are constantly rolled out — often as attempts to create the illusion of control. Agencies feel safer with templates and flowcharts. Clients feel reassured by replicability. It’s understandable. But in the business of creativity, replicability is a myth.
Great advertising doesn’t come from process. If anything, it comes from chaos — the unpredictability of culture, the messiness of human behavior, the collisions of ideas that defy structure. Exactly the sort of thing that gives order-loving management consultants hives.
Let’s be clear: process has its place. As a planner, I know this firsthand. Strategic scaffolding is necessary, critical even. Good questions guide the work. But too often, process becomes a cage. Agencies try to eliminate uncertainty, instead of cultivating a culture that can navigate it. And in doing so, they risk squeezing out the very chaos that fuels breakthrough creativity.
The better pursuit? Build cultures comfortable with chaos. Cultures that thrive on it — turning noise into signal, unpredictability into opportunity.
Breakthrough ideas rarely emerge from rigid processes (though they’re often retrofitted into them after the fact — and that’s fine by me). They come from creative collisions, intuitive leaps, and lateral thinking. Chaos — whether in a brainstorm, a cultural current, or a pundit’s surprising opinion — is the raw material of originality.
And yet, many agencies seem reluctant to accept it. Why? Often, the obsession with process masks a deeper insecurity. A lack of conviction in the creative itself. A fear of appearing unserious or undisciplined. So they reach for the comfort of structure. Process becomes a crutch, a prosthesis for rigor.
The best agencies strike a cultural balance: Enough structure to channel creativity — but not so much that it stifles it.
If I could offer one suggestion for agencies looking to build a strong, unifying culture capable of harnessing chaos it would be this:
Have a point of view. An ethos. A philosophy. A belief about what great work is, what it does, or what's being asked of it — and build a culture around it. Find that North Star.
BBH, where I spent several years, realized this. The agency’s ethos — “When the world zigs, zag.” — wasn’t just a line from one of the agency’s very first Levi’s ads. It was a cultural compass. The symbolism of the black sheep going against the grain encapsulated everything the agency stood for: difference, irreverence, and the belief that creativity thrives in the unexpected.
I honestly can’t recall a single standardized process document from that time — though I’m sure they existed (and I was probably complicit in building a few on the fly). But that’s the point: they were scaffolding, never cages. They were never allowed to dilute the unpredictability and the creativity. Now, was every campaign that we did a winner at Cannes or the Effies? No. But because the agency's culture rooted all of us in a shared belief of what makes great work, it damn well felt like every brief had that potential.
My two cents: Build a creative culture that's comfortable with chaos, and you’ll never need to push process again.