A lot of very capable people have become very good at agreeing. It’s labelled as partnership, but often it’s really just the art of making sure nobody in the room has to sit with something uncomfortable for too long.
So here is the sentence at the centre of this: the client isn’t always right. Neither is the agency. That shouldn’t be provocative. It should be the premise of the job.
Everywhere else in life, we already understand this. We don’t admire the couple who never argue; we wonder what they’ve stopped telling each other. Conflict, handled well, isn’t a sign of a weak relationship; it’s proof that both parties care enough to have the difficult conversation. Somewhere on the way into a client meeting, we forget everything we already know about human relationships and start rewarding the opposite.
A client should understand their business better than anyone else at the table, and an agency should understand its craft. Put those two kinds of expertise in the same room and some tension should be expected. It isn’t a malfunction; it’s part of the point.
A client might know that a brave idea will never survive their organisation. An agency might know that the safer version won’t survive the audience. Both can be right. Both can also be wrong. That’s exactly why the conversation needs to happen, and why avoiding it isn’t efficiency. It’s cowardice with better manners.
And yet, we’ve made a virtue out of ease. We reward “alignment” and praise people for being “easy to work with”, as though the ambition is for everyone to think the same rather than for everyone to think clearly.
Disagreement has started to sound like a problem, while consensus sounds like maturity. But the strongest relationships aren’t the ones where people agree most often; they’re the ones where neither side has to agree just to keep the relationship strong.
I’ve watched good ideas die this way more times than I can count. Not because anyone strongly objected to them, but because nobody was willing to say what they really thought as the work was slowly pulled apart.
The room chose harmony over honesty. And that instinct, to protect the room rather than the work, might be one of the most expensive habits in our industry. It doesn’t look like fear. It looks like being collaborative, being pragmatic, knowing how to read a room. But reading a room and surrendering to it are not the same skill.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” There’s something in that which feels particularly relevant to our industry, because good disagreement requires exactly that: the ability to hold “I could be wrong” and “I still believe this” at the same time. It means not rushing to resolve one in favour of the other simply because disagreement is uncomfortable, but staying with both long enough to understand which deserves to survive.
That, to me, is what a good “I disagree” really means. Said at the right moment, those two words can save weeks of going in the wrong direction, uncover the real problem behind a brief, or stop a good idea from being slowly rewritten into something nobody hates, but nobody remembers either.
Having conviction doesn’t mean defending your opinion until everyone else gives up. It means believing in something enough to challenge, while being open enough to be challenged back. Sometimes the client changes the agency…