Shhh. Sometimes it’s best
just to shut up and listen.

This goes without saying, but it’s been a hard six months.

We’ve struggled to take care of our families and communities. We’ve lost people we love. And then, it all just kept getting more and more awful with the murders of Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, George Floyd...and the list goes on and on. It just doesn’t seem to stop.

We were and are outraged. Beyond our outrage, we didn’t feel like we had much to say that was additive, as a brand or a business. And we were scared. There was the fear of not doing enough, doing the wrong thing, and being complicit in injustice. We asked ourselves hard questions: how we may have added to a climate that enables this behavior, how can we do better with the power we have, and what our responsibility as a creative agency even entails. There aren’t obvious answers. So while we struggled, we stuck to what we knew: our work, our families. And we listened.*

For many of us, work has been a source of normalcy and camaraderie. We’ve been very fortunate to have clients who trust us to work together to navigate these hard moments. Our team has grown, and we’ve hired many new faces in the last several months. We’re still trying to figure out how to orient them to an organization where they still haven’t met any of their colleagues face to face.

It’s been painful but useful to focus on what’s important to us. Coincidentally or not, over the last six months, we’ve done some of the most interesting and challenging work of our careers. We’ve helped relaunch the tools and software that are getting remote workforces up and running. We’ve helped the world’s largest brands bring their events online with a new approach to strategy, design and production. And we’re continuing to work with human rights and democracy advocates so that future generations won’t suffer the same injustices.

The last time we sent this newsletter was on Sunday, March 8, 2020. Since then, we haven’t published anything. Or tweeted. Or self-promoted. These are all pretty important activities for a services business that relies on customers to ask us to do work. But it just didn’t feel right.

So why are you getting this email now? Because publishing is how we talk about the work we’re doing — guts, glory, and all. So, we’re continuing to make tools and work in hopes of inspiring people to get better at solving problems. Starting in October, we’ll be sharing our work thematically, twice a month. Early in the month, we’ll do a deep dive into a topic — how to reposition your business; what makes a great client; why embracing the future is a bad idea. Mid-month, we’ll share a related tool — Essential Guide to Frameworks; KPI Alignment Wheel; Tech Enterprise D&D (not a joke) — and invite you into our feedback process. We’ll also continue to report on our progress (and setbacks) as an agency working toward a more just society. That’s one of the major changes we’ve wanted to make since pressing pause back in March: incorporating opportunities for improvement, making Article Group a better resource for the long term. As always, all of our resources will eventually live here, for future reference.

We’re optimistic for the next phase of this newsletter, and hope you are, too. And if there’s something you’d like to see here, just drop us a line at hello@articlegroup.com. We’re listening.
 

  Article Group
Article Group // Our essays and such
 

* We are lucky to be able to listen. And part of our reflection over the past several months has been thinking about where we’ve come from, and where we’re headed. Historically, many of us came from workplaces that were focused purely on producing work, regardless of personal values or beliefs. That’s just the way things were: an unspoken separation between client work and individual values. As an independent agency, we aren’t accountable to shareholders. But we are accountable for ourselves. We recognize that to solve increasingly complex issues, we need an increasingly diverse group of talent. And while diversity has always been top of mind, we’ve never actually put it in writing before, or audited our own practice, or had an outside DEI consultant tell us what we could be doing better. These are small first steps.