Field Notes
What Twenty One-to-One Conversations Inside an Agency Taught Us
Discovery Lab conversations follow a pattern. Leadership thinks AI use is near zero. It is not. Here is what people actually say when the boss is not in the room, and why that gap matters more than any survey.
What people say when the door is closed
A Discovery Lab is a set of structured 1:1 conversations with everyone on a team, followed by a leadership session and a written report. I have now sat through enough of these inside event agencies to notice the same handful of things coming up, almost word for word, whoever the client is.
What follows is a composite. No client names, no identifying detail, because the value of these conversations depends on people trusting that what they say stays anonymous. But the patterns are real, and they repeat.
"We don't really use AI yet"
This is what leadership tells me at the start of almost every engagement. It is usually said with a slight apology, as if the business is behind and needs to catch up.
Then I talk to the team, one at a time, and the picture changes completely. People are using AI daily. Drafting supplier emails. Summarising long client threads before a call. Getting a first pass at a run sheet done in ten minutes instead of an hour. They are just doing it on personal accounts, on their own phones, quietly, because nobody told them they could not, and nobody told them they could either.
The gap is not adoption. The gap is visibility. Leadership is often the last to know what is actually happening on the ground, which is exactly why a survey sent from the top rarely captures it.
The person who "just knows"
Almost every agency has one. Usually not the most senior person in the room. The one who understands why the quoting spreadsheet has that odd column in it, why a particular supplier always gets a manual price adjustment, why a certain client's briefs need translating before anyone else can work from them.
Nobody wrote this down. It lives in one person's head, and everyone else has quietly learned to route around it rather than ask, because asking feels like admitting the process is broken. It is a serious risk hiding behind a running joke: "oh, just ask Sarah."
The forty-minute Tuesday
This is the line that comes up more than any other, in one form or another. Someone describes a task, dismissively, as just something they do. Not a problem. Just Tuesday.
Except when you sit with it, it turns out to be forty minutes of manually cross-checking a spreadsheet against an inbox, every single week, because two systems do not talk to each other and nobody has ever been given the time to fix that. The person doing it has stopped seeing it as a problem, because they invented the workaround themselves, years ago, and a workaround you invented yourself does not feel like a broken process. It feels like competence.
Nobody agrees what "confirmed" means
Ask five people in the same agency what stage an event needs to reach before it counts as confirmed in the CRM, and you will often get five different answers. Sales counts it as confirmed once a verbal yes has been given. Finance counts it once a deposit has landed. Delivery counts it once a signed contract exists.
None of them are wrong. But a shared system built on an unshared definition produces reports that everyone privately distrusts and nobody wants to be the one to say so out loud.
The best ideas come from the person nobody asked
Leadership sessions tend to generate leadership ideas: strategic, structural, sensible. The best practical fix I have heard in a Discovery Lab so far came from a junior account exec, about twenty minutes into an unremarkable 1:1, offered almost as an aside. It solved a handover problem that had been quietly costing the delivery team hours every month, and it had never once come up in a management meeting, because nobody had ever asked that person directly.
Why a conversation beats a form
A survey gets you what people are willing to write down, with their name attached, knowing their manager might read it. A structured, anonymous 1:1 gets you what is actually happening.
That difference is the entire point. You cannot fix a workaround you do not know exists, and people will not tell you it exists in a form with a submit button on it.
When I started running these, I expected the interesting findings to be about software: which CRM people hated, which spreadsheet was one bad update away from collapse. Some of that is real, and it matters. But it is not what stays with me afterwards. What stays with me is how often someone says a version of "nobody's ever asked me that before" about a job they have done for years. Not asked in an appraisal, where the question is really about them. Asked about the work itself: what actually happens, in order, when this lands on your desk. That tends to open people up in a way that catches them a little off guard.
It also explains why the write-up at the end of a Discovery Lab rarely feels like a surprise to the team once they read it. They already knew most of it. What they did not have was a reason to say it out loud in one place, gathered together, where leadership could finally see the whole shape at once.
If you want to know what your team would say in a room where the boss genuinely is not listening, that is what a Discovery Lab is built to find out.