Oh my word… you’ve put words to a tension I’ve been feeling and tapping into doing with the work (albeit) on a much smaller scale (and with a lot less lock-in). I genuinely thought I was going insane as I started to realise what getting into the reeds actually enabled, but maybe not…
The biggest barrier for this model is trust. Leadership has to actually trust the people embedded to be 'in charge' of their specialty. Without that, regardless of how much they know the business, nothing will change. The lack of trust in specialists is a massive issue, and will roadblock this too. (Love the write up, though.)
but the whole point of embedding ppl into these orgs for long periods of time is to build that trust no? it’s literally rule one in their playbook. rule 2 actually trusting their ppl enough to give them autonomy is how knowledge currency works bc they need to know their people well enough to predict their plays and know that those plays will ultimately benefit the master strategy.
Good analysis, Zoe. One note: the embedded model predates Palantir's branding of it. We ran essentially this playbook at Salesforce starting in 2012 with Ignite...embedded teams, months-long engagements at no charge to clients, learnings fed directly to product. Scaled it from 6 to 250+ people across 14 countries. Palantir executes well, but the playbook isn't new. There's a deeper argument about what comes after the FDE model...who gets embedded and why...that I think the current conversation is missing. More to come on that.
Exactly, this is why micro agencies are booming right now. Small, founder-led outfits that can act like an in-house team, build trusting direct relationships as you would a colleague, but have the creative perspective and distance of an external agency. They scale up and down with freelance talent brought in on a project basis because of their suitability to a specific need, making each project team ultra-tailored.
These teams are being utilised by some of the biggest companies in the world, handed projects and budgets they never would have touched previously, and executing work faster than a network could dream of. I've written about this a few times and whenever I've shared the posts on LinkedIn, I've had pushback from people in denial of this shift.
What I'm interested in is whether these teams can stay small, agile and savvy or will suffer an inevitable bloat as their workload grows?
This is spot on and a territory that outsourcers of all shades have operated in for some time. I think its where 'business analysis' meets 'service design' meets 'UX' meets 'lean six sigma' meets 'CX' etc etc - but nobody owns a view of all of those analyses... And its the diagnosis that typical agency strategists would struggle to make only mainly because they would have been restricted to 'the brief' and at best the chance to challenge the brief. The real problem to solve so often sits behind the brief, deep in the business and usually in a blind-spot that as you say, the client itself will have struggled to identify.
One thing the commenters below are dead right on though is that the client has to either be in serious, serious pain to work in this way, or led by an absolute prescient genius who is prepared to put their career on the line to make a change...
Fantastic piece & thank you for calling out the scale questions for creative agencies trying to do something differently. The solution is not hard - & AI is def making it easier - but it is hard to find anyone in the industry interested in it. I think an entire career’s worth of being brainwashed into believing people can ONLY do one thing (i.e. accounts/ strategy/ creative) has created vicious cycle for so many people in the industry 😣
Great article. One of the challenges is finding an agency willing to change how they do things, or even to countenance a more rigorous process. Anyone with an ounce of exposure to a business can see the benefits of the diagnosis, and not accepting the brief on sight, but most agencies are running scared, and revenue is revenue - even if it's for entirely the wrong thing. Accept the brief, deliver some nonsense, move on.
Also - as a side note - an improv course has been one of the top two experiences that have made me a better facilitator (the other was my yoga teacher training). I’d highly recommend every consultant does one
This is excellent (as always), thank you. My hope is that the indie practitioners, of which there are a growing number of brilliant ones, can and will play a similar role.
What’s missing at the moment, although there are green shoots, is the mechanism for them to meaningfully partner with each other, share insights and build joint points of views that span industries and clients. That’s why I think we’ll see a growing number of independents form formal and semi-formal collectives, displacing companies and agencies. They’ll be a group with shared values and purpose (and, to an extent, ways of working) but diverse skills and experience - combining freedom and autonomy with connection and industry influence.
That is superb. Thank you. Not entirely convinced by ‘They’re selling time inside the mess. Diagnosis as the product. Residency as the model.’ I need more than diagnosis as a product because diagnosis alone won’t be seen as value at board level. IMO. Such a brilliant articulation of the potential solution for agency strategy though!
But isn't it funny that 'diagnosis alone won’t be seen as value at board level', when it absolutely should be? So maybe the issue is less that diagnosis can't be a product and more that we need to make it one.
Really great thoughts here Zoe. Yeah a lot of agencies don’t work this way but a bunch of consultancies do. My six years at agency.com, an ancient digital shop was this. I was embedded at Grainger for years and we helped them build out and evolve their e-commerce product which is now likely half their entire revenue in terms of orders. The company I work for now, (NTT Data) also works this way.
It’s a great observation and no doubt Palintir is bringing some serious smarts to their embedded engagements. Thanks for the brain food.
This resonates deeply because it articulates something many practitioners feel but rarely say out loud: much of what passes for “strategy” in agencies has become performance, not practice.
What’s striking is not the critique of creativity or intelligence—those are abundant—but the absence of consequence. When insight is reverse-engineered to justify decisions already made, strategy becomes theatre. Elegant, expensive, and ultimately disposable.
This is precisely where consultancies have gained ground. Not because they are more creative, but because they are structurally forced to engage with real stakes: capital allocation, operating models, organisational trade-offs, and long-term outcomes. Their work is judged less by how compelling it sounds in a room and more by what changes six, twelve, or twenty-four months later.
Agencies excel at articulation. Consultancies are increasingly trusted with direction.
The discomfort described here—the shame—is not personal failure. It’s a signal of misalignment between intellectual capacity and the problems being assigned to it. Strategy, at its core, is meant to reduce existential risk, not decorate predetermined answers.
Until agencies re-anchor strategy to decisions that carry consequence—P&L impact, structural change, real trade-offs—they will continue to lose ground to advisory models that are willing to sit longer in uncertainty and be accountable for outcomes, not just narratives.
The most important line in this piece may be implicit rather than stated:
real strategy begins when you are willing to be wrong, not when you are paid to sound right.
And while mainstream media debates quarterly earnings and culture-war trivia, the enslaving Palantir infrastructure of the future is being quietly normalized in plain sight.
Great post Zoe. I wonder how agengic will change all this. Maybe the lock-in is just a different type, but as workforces get reimaged with agentic and humans in the loop, the embedding and why will change.
As an ad creative, I’ve sat through too many meetings where “creative work” is treated like a piñata, beaten senseless to avoid confronting the client’s real problems. Problems rooted in exactly the unspoken internal issues you describe. I salute you. I feel seen. 🙂
Oh my word… you’ve put words to a tension I’ve been feeling and tapping into doing with the work (albeit) on a much smaller scale (and with a lot less lock-in). I genuinely thought I was going insane as I started to realise what getting into the reeds actually enabled, but maybe not…
The biggest barrier for this model is trust. Leadership has to actually trust the people embedded to be 'in charge' of their specialty. Without that, regardless of how much they know the business, nothing will change. The lack of trust in specialists is a massive issue, and will roadblock this too. (Love the write up, though.)
The book we gave employees was The Trusted Advisor for this exact reason… nothing happens without it!!
but the whole point of embedding ppl into these orgs for long periods of time is to build that trust no? it’s literally rule one in their playbook. rule 2 actually trusting their ppl enough to give them autonomy is how knowledge currency works bc they need to know their people well enough to predict their plays and know that those plays will ultimately benefit the master strategy.
Good analysis, Zoe. One note: the embedded model predates Palantir's branding of it. We ran essentially this playbook at Salesforce starting in 2012 with Ignite...embedded teams, months-long engagements at no charge to clients, learnings fed directly to product. Scaled it from 6 to 250+ people across 14 countries. Palantir executes well, but the playbook isn't new. There's a deeper argument about what comes after the FDE model...who gets embedded and why...that I think the current conversation is missing. More to come on that.
Exactly, this is why micro agencies are booming right now. Small, founder-led outfits that can act like an in-house team, build trusting direct relationships as you would a colleague, but have the creative perspective and distance of an external agency. They scale up and down with freelance talent brought in on a project basis because of their suitability to a specific need, making each project team ultra-tailored.
These teams are being utilised by some of the biggest companies in the world, handed projects and budgets they never would have touched previously, and executing work faster than a network could dream of. I've written about this a few times and whenever I've shared the posts on LinkedIn, I've had pushback from people in denial of this shift.
What I'm interested in is whether these teams can stay small, agile and savvy or will suffer an inevitable bloat as their workload grows?
This is spot on and a territory that outsourcers of all shades have operated in for some time. I think its where 'business analysis' meets 'service design' meets 'UX' meets 'lean six sigma' meets 'CX' etc etc - but nobody owns a view of all of those analyses... And its the diagnosis that typical agency strategists would struggle to make only mainly because they would have been restricted to 'the brief' and at best the chance to challenge the brief. The real problem to solve so often sits behind the brief, deep in the business and usually in a blind-spot that as you say, the client itself will have struggled to identify.
One thing the commenters below are dead right on though is that the client has to either be in serious, serious pain to work in this way, or led by an absolute prescient genius who is prepared to put their career on the line to make a change...
Fantastic piece & thank you for calling out the scale questions for creative agencies trying to do something differently. The solution is not hard - & AI is def making it easier - but it is hard to find anyone in the industry interested in it. I think an entire career’s worth of being brainwashed into believing people can ONLY do one thing (i.e. accounts/ strategy/ creative) has created vicious cycle for so many people in the industry 😣
Great article. One of the challenges is finding an agency willing to change how they do things, or even to countenance a more rigorous process. Anyone with an ounce of exposure to a business can see the benefits of the diagnosis, and not accepting the brief on sight, but most agencies are running scared, and revenue is revenue - even if it's for entirely the wrong thing. Accept the brief, deliver some nonsense, move on.
I’ve heard Peter Thiel described as simply amoral.
Also - as a side note - an improv course has been one of the top two experiences that have made me a better facilitator (the other was my yoga teacher training). I’d highly recommend every consultant does one
This is excellent (as always), thank you. My hope is that the indie practitioners, of which there are a growing number of brilliant ones, can and will play a similar role.
What’s missing at the moment, although there are green shoots, is the mechanism for them to meaningfully partner with each other, share insights and build joint points of views that span industries and clients. That’s why I think we’ll see a growing number of independents form formal and semi-formal collectives, displacing companies and agencies. They’ll be a group with shared values and purpose (and, to an extent, ways of working) but diverse skills and experience - combining freedom and autonomy with connection and industry influence.
That is superb. Thank you. Not entirely convinced by ‘They’re selling time inside the mess. Diagnosis as the product. Residency as the model.’ I need more than diagnosis as a product because diagnosis alone won’t be seen as value at board level. IMO. Such a brilliant articulation of the potential solution for agency strategy though!
But isn't it funny that 'diagnosis alone won’t be seen as value at board level', when it absolutely should be? So maybe the issue is less that diagnosis can't be a product and more that we need to make it one.
My experience is that diagnosis - unless it is confirming and comforting at board level is entirely unwelcome.
100%. Most people are ultimately paying for feelings, even if it's somebody else's money.
Really great thoughts here Zoe. Yeah a lot of agencies don’t work this way but a bunch of consultancies do. My six years at agency.com, an ancient digital shop was this. I was embedded at Grainger for years and we helped them build out and evolve their e-commerce product which is now likely half their entire revenue in terms of orders. The company I work for now, (NTT Data) also works this way.
It’s a great observation and no doubt Palintir is bringing some serious smarts to their embedded engagements. Thanks for the brain food.
This resonates deeply because it articulates something many practitioners feel but rarely say out loud: much of what passes for “strategy” in agencies has become performance, not practice.
What’s striking is not the critique of creativity or intelligence—those are abundant—but the absence of consequence. When insight is reverse-engineered to justify decisions already made, strategy becomes theatre. Elegant, expensive, and ultimately disposable.
This is precisely where consultancies have gained ground. Not because they are more creative, but because they are structurally forced to engage with real stakes: capital allocation, operating models, organisational trade-offs, and long-term outcomes. Their work is judged less by how compelling it sounds in a room and more by what changes six, twelve, or twenty-four months later.
Agencies excel at articulation. Consultancies are increasingly trusted with direction.
The discomfort described here—the shame—is not personal failure. It’s a signal of misalignment between intellectual capacity and the problems being assigned to it. Strategy, at its core, is meant to reduce existential risk, not decorate predetermined answers.
Until agencies re-anchor strategy to decisions that carry consequence—P&L impact, structural change, real trade-offs—they will continue to lose ground to advisory models that are willing to sit longer in uncertainty and be accountable for outcomes, not just narratives.
The most important line in this piece may be implicit rather than stated:
real strategy begins when you are willing to be wrong, not when you are paid to sound right.
That’s the difference.
And while mainstream media debates quarterly earnings and culture-war trivia, the enslaving Palantir infrastructure of the future is being quietly normalized in plain sight.
Great post Zoe. I wonder how agengic will change all this. Maybe the lock-in is just a different type, but as workforces get reimaged with agentic and humans in the loop, the embedding and why will change.
As an ad creative, I’ve sat through too many meetings where “creative work” is treated like a piñata, beaten senseless to avoid confronting the client’s real problems. Problems rooted in exactly the unspoken internal issues you describe. I salute you. I feel seen. 🙂