Our Strategic Mission Patches
Almost a year ago at Major Tom, we realized that in order to continue being competitive and delivering great work for our clients we would need to improve the way we think about projects.
From that, we launched the Strategy Propulsion Lab. This agency-wide initiative included regular in-house training sessions, encouraged more conversation around what made for great work, and encouraged (and paid for!) staff to take courses with Sweathead, Account Planning Group of Canada - APG Canada, and the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising).
The name was inspired by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division responsible for creating robotic spacecraft to explore the solar system and beyond. Those little rovers on Mars? That’s JPL. Missions to study Jupiter and Saturn? Also JPL. Their unofficial motto is Dare Mighty Things (which comes from a Teddy Roosevelt speech), and is inspiration for them to aim for great results and not be held back by the fear of failure.
Further inspired by NASA and their work, we also created a series of "Mission Patches" to celebrate some of the great thinking that we were seeing from the team, and also to remind ourselves to think a bit differently. We’ve built these mission patches and their language into our own internal feedback tools, and regularly celebrate them at company meetings and our work.
The "Always Ask Why" patch features a cut-away of a planet, revealing the molten core within, and reminding us of the importance of getting to the centre of the problem.
The "Always Ask How" patch is a space-age Swiss Army Knife to remind us that there are a lot of different tools we can use to approach projects and problems. And that some of those tools might not even exist until we create them.
The "Always Ask What If" patch is my favourite: an image of an astronaut's hand flipping a coin (the animated version has a helmet on one side of the coin and an alien head on the other). It's both a tribute to Ursula K Le Guin who said that Science-Fiction is about asking "What if..?" about the present, and a reminder to our team that there are an infinite number of paths we can take.
The internal training sessions have been really fun to organize, and I’ve loved seeing some of my team get involved in running them. Some of the topics we’ve covered include:
Reverse-engineering Cannes-winning media and creative campaigns to understand what made them work
Marketing effectiveness, where the team has shared what they’ve learned from their own work and APG/IPA coursework
Sessions to make our writing and communication more precise and concise
It's been amazing seeing the way this has started to change the way we think, to see some of the work it's helped us win, and to see some of the results we're seeing for our clients.
Big thanks to Jay Chaney for printing out a piece of paper that said "ALWAYS ASK WHY?" to the desks of the planning team at DDB over 10 years ago, and to Mitchell Fawcett for coming up with the idea for the Strategy Propulsion Lab in the first place.