The most valuable editorial thinking falls between the agency and the in-house team

I’ve worked on both sides of this, four agencies and then in-house, and the same gap appears from either direction.

Agencies can make brilliant work. But they’re usually one step removed from the organisation itself. They get the brief. They get the research pack. They interview the stakeholders. Then they turn all of that into strategy, creative or content.

Internal teams have the opposite problem. They’re surrounded by evidence — customer conversations, sales insight, research, product knowledge, performance data, internal expertise — and also surrounded by meetings, approvals, deadlines, channels and delivery.

So the interesting question gets lost somewhere in the middle.

What does all of this actually mean?

The work before the work

That gap is increasingly the space I’m interested in. Not client management. Not project management. Not writing whatever arrives in the brief. The thinking that happens before any of that starts.

What evidence matters? What are we learning? What has changed? What argument does this organisation actually have? Where is the contradiction? What should we stop saying? What could become a narrative, a product, a campaign, a video, or something else entirely?

That’s a large part of what I mean by Editorial Intelligence, and it has a shape:

evidence → interpretation → argument → narrative → execution → learning

The full cycle is more detailed than that, but the compressed version is the useful one, because it makes the missing step obvious. Most organisations are well equipped at both ends and thin in the middle.

Why it was hard to stay close to the whole loop

For most of my career it was surprisingly difficult for one person to stay near all of it.

Even when you could see the idea, you needed other teams to turn it into anything. Design. Video. Web. Research. Analysis. Production. And the more senior you became, the more likely you were to move away from making and towards coordinating the people who made.

That last part usually gets called progression. You get better, so you stop doing the thing and start running the people who do it. I’m not sure that’s always what it is.

AI changes that equation, and I’ve written elsewhere about how far one person can now take an idea before needing somebody else. The short version: interrogate the evidence, develop the argument, write it, prototype something, try a page or a video concept, build a small tool — then bring in specialists where their expertise genuinely makes the work better, rather than because you couldn’t get past the first obstacle without them.

Leverage without managing more people

This matters to me for a reason that isn’t really about technology.

I’ve never particularly wanted my leverage to come from managing more people. I’m more interested in being close to the thinking and close to the thing being made, and for a long time those two preferences were in tension with getting anywhere.

Maybe that’s one of the genuine opportunities here for experienced individual contributors. Not replacing judgement. Not replacing specialists, who remain better than me at their disciplines by a distance. Giving people who have judgement considerably more ability to act on it — which is a different argument from the usual one about capability compounding inside an organisation, because it’s about what an individual career can look like rather than how a team should be designed.

And perhaps that moves editorial value as well.

Less at the end of the process, polishing the words. Much closer to the beginning, helping an organisation work out what its evidence means in the first place.