Why being a studio matters

Here at WF, we operate a studio model; something we’ve done since we first opened our doors. It’s a central part of what makes us what we…

Here at WF, we operate a studio model; something we’ve done since we first opened our doors. It’s a central part of what makes us what we are, and more importantly, it plays a critical role in how we work with our clients.

by Mark Wilson, Founder Partner, Wilson Fletcher

wrote recently about why the physical nature of in-house innovation labs is one of the reasons they’re failing with such consistent regularity. In that post, I touched on the nature of a real design studio from the perspective of its environment.

This time, I want to focus on the more human characteristics of being a studio, and why it’s such a critical component in both the work that we do here at WF and in great design work in general.

First, some clarification: when I say we operate a studio model, I mean that our team spends the vast majority of its time living under one roof, based in one of our studios in London or Sydney. We live and breathe our work in our studios, and we work together as a (almost exclusively permanent) team every day.

In recent years, it has become common for consultancies and agencies to do what some call ‘bodyshopping’: placing individual members of their team — often several of them — into client teams to work in-house as part of their own team. It’s not uncommon to walk into a large organisation’s digital team these days to find that a significant portion of the people there are employed via a third party consultancy of some form.

There are many perceived advantages to this approach. It allows client organisations to increase their capacity (paying more per day than they would for real staff, but without the recruitment hassle) and to import expertise that they can use to develop the capabilities of their own team, all within their own control. It’s good business for agencies too: long-term engagements are not infrequent, they get close to the problem, and the team members who are rented out to that client get to press the flesh and spot new opportunities.

A studio model is very different, and is much closer aligned to how most of the more established design sectors work, from architecture to branding.

There are no two ways about it; we get more done, to a higher standard, when we’re working together in our own studio.

We believe that a critical component of successful strategy, design or innovation work is bound up in team culture and dynamics. A team that knows each other really well, and trusts in both the skills and collective purpose of the company around them, is always likely to be more open, free-thinking and collaborative than one that is not. And that leads to better work.

It also, interestingly, allows us to work much faster: one of the most frequent pieces of feedback we get from clients is “how did you achieve so much so quickly?”.

As in so many other walks of life, better, faster results are the benefit of a tight-knit team where individuals inherently know how to get the best out of one another. Great sports teams with a common ethos beat collections of ‘star players’ week in week out — new Premier League Champions Leicester City are a glowing example of this. In our studio, it’s the same: our team is a genuine team, not a collection of people who don’t understand each other and have to expend energy figuring each other out at the same time as getting the work done.

There are no two ways about it; we get more done, to a higher standard, when we’re working together in our own studio.

Interestingly, so do our clients. While we’re passionately against the bodyshopping model, we have consistently found that reversing the co-location model works incredibly well. Bringing client teams into our studio for intensive periods of collaborative work often delivers incredible results.

That’s largely a product of reversing the scale of the engagement: instead of a couple of us playing a minority role in their team, there are a couple of them working as a small part of ours. As a result, they’re quickly drawn into the pattern and pace of the studio and absorb the approach and methods we use naturally. We don’t need to add any artificial processes into our working methods to make that happen. A studio model is, in my experience at least, the only way to achieve that type of organic knowledge transfer.

Above all, from a selfish perspective, we’ve built an incredible team of people with diverse skills and personalities. I want to work with them as much as possible, not on the odd occasions that everyone is in the studio. I’d like to think that they all feel exactly the same way.

Don’t get me wrong — we frequently spend time out of the studio with clients and their customers, but we rarely spend time there doing the type of work we do in the studio. Our studio is the heart of our design process, it’s where we do our best work, and we wouldn’t swap that for the world.