In Accord

A manifesto for agency work in the LLM era

The operating system has six parts.

  • Ladder — where the agency stands on its AI adoption journey, honestly named.
  • Layers — where in the client's business the problem actually lives.
  • Trail — a source you can point to for every claim.
  • Rhythms — loops around projects, reviews, retros.
  • Memory — what the system remembers so people don't have to.
  • Accord — humans and AI sharpening each other on real work.

What we rejected:

  • The billable hour as a unit of value
  • Tools without protocols
  • Delivery without loops
  • Frameworks without memory
  • Cleverness without evidence
  • "AI transformation" as a line item on a proposal

The seven habits.

The operating system has six parts. The practitioner who runs it has seven habits. These are the seven.

  1. 01

    Diagnose before you deliver

    See the constraint above your work before you propose the work. Every brief starts with a diagnosis, not a deck. Present the finding clearly. Show the evidence. Ask the client where it doesn't match what they see on the ground. Inquiry is how professionals work together. Apologetic tentativeness is weakness wearing humility as a costume.

  2. 02

    Show the trail

    Every claim has a source you can point to. When you don't have one, you say "I don't know yet, but I'll find out." AI hands you precise-looking numbers — percentages, benchmarks, charts with trend lines — that turn out to be invented. Confident wrong is its default output. The trail is the only defense.

  3. 03

    Close every loop

    Projects are real — start dates, end dates, invoices. What cannot end with the project is the learning. Close with a post-mortem: what worked, what broke, what the next project starts from. A project that ends with an invoice extracted value. A project that ends with a loop built it — for both sides.

  4. 04

    Work in accord with the machine

    Use AI as a teammate whose output you can inspect. Keep your thinking legible to it. Keep its output legible to you. Neither replaces the other. Automation replaces the human. Accord assumes the human is irreplaceable and makes the machine useful to them — and to the next human who walks into the room cold.

  5. 05

    Carry lessons through people

    Agencies do not learn. People do. Patterns travel in conversation, in review, in a practitioner who sees the same shape a year later in a different business. And they travel through each practitioner differently — a pattern named by one lens is provisional until a second lens confirms it. Know whose lens you are reading. Systems help, but they serve the connection between people — they do not replace it.

  6. 06

    Count on the people in the room

    Strategy that counts on people holds. Strategy that counts around them collapses. The client, their partners, their franchisees, the ops manager who will live with what you recommend — they sit in the room, not across the table. They carry context you will never have. Ask their questions. Write their names into the plan. And know who they are — cognitive shape is as real as a role title, and a seat that fits the person holds while one that does not drifts. Együtt — together — is a working relationship, not a slogan.

  7. 07

    Sharpen the instrument

    The agency is the product. Invest in what compounds — craft, brand, memory, accord. Retire what does not — the billable hour, the tool-of-the-month, the deck nobody remembers. The renewal is the work.

— The first practitioners