The Real Work Framework
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Why meaningful growth starts with understanding the problem worth solving.
Over the course of my career working across marketing, media, advertising, consulting and agency leadership, I have become increasingly convinced that one of the most valuable contributions we can make as strategists and business leaders is also one of the most frequently overlooked: the ability to understand a problem before attempting to solve it. It sounds deceptively simple, perhaps even obvious, but in an industry defined by creativity, innovation, speed and an almost instinctive desire to produce solutions, the discipline of understanding can be surprisingly difficult to practice. We are trained to respond, to develop strategies, create campaigns, build brands, identify opportunities, deliver compelling ideas and demonstrate the value of our expertise. These are important capabilities, and much of our industry's success has been built upon them, but I have come to believe that the quality of our work cannot be separated from the quality of the problem we have chosen to solve.
A sophisticated strategy can be developed around the wrong diagnosis. An exceptional creative idea can address a challenge that was never particularly consequential to the business. A technically brilliant media plan can deliver against objectives that have little relationship to an organization's underlying commercial needs. And an agency can successfully deliver everything it was hired to produce without meaningfully changing the conditions that prompted the engagement in the first place. None of this necessarily reflects a failure of talent, commitment or execution. More often, it reflects how quickly organizations and their partners can move from identifying a perceived need to developing a solution, without creating sufficient space to understand whether the original problem was properly defined.
This conviction has increasingly shaped how I approach growth, strategy, client relationships and agency leadership. It has also led me to develop what I call The Real Work Framework, a strategic decision-making methodology designed to move from a stated business challenge to a defensible diagnosis, a deliberate strategic choice and, ultimately, meaningful change. The framework is not intended to make strategy more complicated or introduce unnecessary process into already demanding environments. Its purpose is to make our thinking more precise, our recommendations more consequential and our work more accountable to the outcomes that matter. At its foundation is a belief that has become central to my professional philosophy: before we decide what to make, we must understand what needs to change.
How my understanding of growth has evolved
My perspective has been shaped by working on different sides of the same commercial equation. Throughout my career, I have had the opportunity to work within global agency networks, including IPG Mediabrands, GroupM/WPP and dentsu, where the demands of strategic planning, media investment, client leadership, business development and commercial performance regularly intersect. I have worked alongside talented strategists, creatives, analysts, marketers and business leaders, each bringing a different perspective to the challenges organizations face. Those experiences gave me a deep appreciation for the capabilities of our industry, but they also exposed me to the complexities of translating specialized expertise into meaningful business outcomes. I began to recognize that the strongest recommendations were not necessarily those that demonstrated the greatest sophistication within a particular discipline, but those that reflected the clearest understanding of the organization, its circumstances and the problem it was ultimately trying to resolve.
My experience working closer to the operational realities of businesses further influenced that perspective. Leading marketing and operations within the hospitality sector gave me a different appreciation for the decisions that sit behind a marketing brief, because the relationship between strategy and business performance becomes especially tangible when you are accountable for both attracting customers and delivering the experience they have been promised. Revenue, margins, customer satisfaction, employee performance, operational capacity and competitive positioning are not abstract considerations. They are interconnected conditions that influence whether a business can succeed. A compelling campaign may generate demand, but it cannot independently resolve an inconsistent customer experience, an uncompetitive proposition or an operating model that is struggling to deliver value. That experience reinforced the importance of understanding the broader commercial system surrounding a marketing challenge, rather than assuming that the solution necessarily sits within marketing itself.
Today, in my leadership role at ChangeMakers, where reputation management, strategic communications, brand marketing, creative strategy and social impact consulting intersect, I find this perspective increasingly relevant. The challenges organizations bring to us rarely fit neatly within a single discipline. They may involve declining market relevance, competitive pressure, reputational vulnerability, stakeholder mistrust, organizational transformation, market expansion or the need to influence complex human behaviour. Often, several of these conditions exist simultaneously, making it difficult to distinguish the immediate challenge from the underlying factors contributing to it. This has strengthened my belief that our responsibility as strategic partners extends beyond the services we provide. We need to understand the commercial, organizational, human and societal dimensions of the challenges we are being asked to address, because the most appropriate intervention can only emerge from a credible understanding of what is actually preventing progress.
The brief is not the diagnosis
Organizations rarely approach an agency or consultancy with a perfectly articulated business problem. They arrive with ambitions, pressures, assumptions and requests, often shaped by internal conversations, performance expectations, stakeholder priorities and the immediate demands of running a business. They may need a new campaign because growth has slowed, a refreshed brand because the organization has evolved, a new website because digital performance is underwhelming, or a communications partner because their reputation needs strengthening. Sometimes these requests are entirely appropriate, and the solution the organization has identified is precisely what is required. But sometimes the request is simply the most visible expression of a deeper issue, and responding to it without further investigation risks addressing the symptom rather than the condition responsible for it.
A business experiencing declining sales, for example, may assume that it has an awareness problem when the more consequential challenge is weakening differentiation, poor product availability, pricing pressure or an inability to convert existing demand. An organization seeking to rebuild public trust may believe it needs a more compelling communications strategy when the underlying problem is a disconnect between its commitments and its actions. A company investing heavily in lead generation may discover that demand is not its primary constraint, but rather its ability to convert interest into customers or retain the customers it has already acquired. Each of these situations points toward a different intervention, and the distinction matters because the solution we recommend should be determined by the problem, rather than by the capabilities we are most comfortable delivering.
I have spent much of my professional life in pitch rooms, boardrooms, client workshops and strategy sessions where talented people are asked to solve complex problems under considerable pressure. In these environments, I have seen how quickly a team can move from receiving a brief to developing an answer. Research begins, strategies take shape, creative ideas emerge, media recommendations are assembled and presentations become increasingly polished. That momentum can feel productive, and often it is, but I have also learned that activity and progress are not necessarily the same thing. There is an important distinction between being responsive and being strategically useful. A responsive partner answers the question they have been asked, while a strategically useful partner first considers whether it is the right question. That requires the confidence to challenge assumptions respectfully, the humility to acknowledge uncertainty and the judgment to recognize when the most responsible recommendation may differ from what the client initially requested.
This is why I have come to regard the brief as the beginning of the diagnosis rather than the diagnosis itself. It provides an important perspective on what the organization believes it needs, but it does not necessarily explain why the challenge exists, how consequential it is, which conditions are contributing to it or whether the proposed intervention represents the most effective use of available resources. Those questions require a deeper understanding of the business and the environment in which it operates, and they are often where the most valuable strategic conversations begin.
Growth as a discipline of understanding
In agency environments, growth is often described through the language of commercial activity. We discuss pipelines, prospects, conversion rates, pitches, proposals, revenue forecasts, client acquisition and account expansion, and these measures are essential to managing a healthy business. They create accountability, discipline and visibility into performance, but over time I have come to see them as measures of the mechanics of growth rather than its underlying source. They tell us how much activity is taking place and how effectively opportunities are moving through a commercial process, but they do not necessarily tell us whether we are creating meaningful value for the organizations we hope to serve.
For me, sustainable growth begins with a deeper understanding of those organizations, their ambitions and the conditions influencing their ability to succeed. What are they trying to achieve? What is preventing progress? What has changed in their market? What pressures are shaping their decisions? What are the consequences of leaving the challenge unresolved, and where might our expertise create the greatest difference? These questions fundamentally change how we approach business development because they shift our attention from identifying opportunities for our services to identifying opportunities to contribute to outcomes that matter. Prospecting becomes less about finding a reason to contact an organization and more about developing a sufficiently informed perspective to recognize whether there is a meaningful reason to begin a conversation. A new business pitch becomes more than an exercise in demonstrating credentials and capabilities, and account growth becomes less about identifying additional services to sell and more about understanding how a client's business is evolving and what new challenges may require attention.
I believe growth is fundamentally a credibility discipline, because credibility is not established simply by communicating what we are capable of doing. It is earned by demonstrating that we understand something consequential about an organization, its circumstances and its ambitions. Some of the most meaningful moments in my career have occurred when a client recognizes their own challenge more clearly because of a question we asked, a connection we made or an assumption we challenged. There is something particularly valuable about those moments, because the conversation begins to move beyond the exchange of services and toward the exchange of strategic understanding. The client has not necessarily been persuaded to purchase anything, but they have gained greater clarity about a problem they are trying to solve, and that clarity creates the foundation for a more meaningful relationship.
This perspective also changes how I think about the responsibility of growth leadership. Our role is not simply to create more commercial opportunities for the organization, although that remains an important measure of performance. It is to help establish the conditions through which the organization can consistently identify, understand and respond to consequential business challenges. That requires commercial curiosity, market intelligence, cross-disciplinary collaboration and the ability to connect the organization's expertise to the needs of the clients it serves. In this sense, growth becomes less of a function operating at the edge of the business and more of a discipline that connects market understanding, strategic judgment, organizational capability and commercial value.
The Real Work Framework: From understanding to strategic judgment
The Real Work Framework emerged from these experiences and from a growing conviction that understanding a business challenge, while necessary, is not sufficient to produce a good strategy. A strategist must also determine which problem matters most, what must change, where the organization should concentrate its efforts and which choices are most likely to create meaningful progress. Most complex business challenges have multiple contributing factors, some highly visible but relatively inconsequential, others less obvious but exerting disproportionate influence over performance. Not every problem deserves equal attention, not every constraint can be influenced, and not every intervention is worth the investment required to pursue it. The objective is therefore not to uncover every possible problem facing an organization, but to identify the most consequential problem we can meaningfully influence and establish a defensible basis for deciding what should happen next.
At the foundation of the framework are three disciplines that I believe should govern strategic thinking throughout an engagement: curiosity, context and critical thinking. Curiosity encourages us to investigate beyond the information initially presented, explore perspectives that may be missing and remain open to explanations that challenge our assumptions. Context requires us to understand the commercial, competitive, cultural, organizational and stakeholder conditions shaping the situation, recognizing that a problem cannot be properly understood in isolation from the environment in which it exists. Critical thinking allows us to distinguish evidence from interpretation, evaluate competing explanations, recognize the limits of our knowledge and avoid confusing confidence with certainty. These are not preliminary steps that we complete before strategy begins, but habits of judgment that should influence every stage of the work.
The framework itself is organized around six connected strategic decisions, which I describe as Frame, Find, Focus, Define, Decide and Prove. Together, they form three broader responsibilities: to diagnose the problem, decide how to address it and demonstrate whether the resulting intervention is creating meaningful change. The structure is intentionally straightforward, but its application requires the discipline to move progressively from what an organization believes is happening toward an evidence-informed understanding of what is preventing progress, what deserves priority and what needs to become true for the organization to achieve its ambitions.
The diagnostic process begins by framing the organization's underlying business objective and distinguishing it from the deliverable or intervention being requested. We then investigate the current reality, examining available evidence, customer and stakeholder experiences, competitive conditions, organizational capabilities and plausible explanations for the gap between current performance and the desired outcome. This investigation should not be designed simply to validate an initial hypothesis, but to challenge it, because the strength of a diagnosis depends as much on the explanations we have considered and rejected as on the conclusion we ultimately reach. From there, we focus on identifying the problem that matters most, evaluating its business consequences, urgency, potential leverage and the organization's ability to influence the conditions contributing to it. The result should be a clear and defensible understanding of the problem worth solving, rather than an increasingly complicated inventory of everything that may be wrong.
Once the diagnosis is established, the work shifts toward defining the change required and making deliberate strategic choices. This is an important distinction because understanding why a problem exists does not automatically tell us how best to address it. We must first determine what needs to become true for meaningful progress to occur, whether that involves a change in customer behaviour, market perception, organizational capability, stakeholder trust, customer experience or some other condition affecting performance. Only then should we begin determining where to focus, which audiences or constraints deserve priority, what guiding approach is most likely to create the desired change and which capabilities are required to deliver it. Strategy, in this sense, is not simply a collection of recommended activities. It is a coherent set of choices supported by an understanding of why one direction is preferable to credible alternatives, including a willingness to identify what should not be pursued.
The final responsibility is to establish how progress will be demonstrated. Too often, success is defined through the completion of activities, whether that means launching a campaign, securing media coverage, delivering a strategy, producing content or implementing a new platform. These outputs matter, but they are not sufficient evidence that the underlying business problem is being resolved. We need to understand whether our intervention is producing the intended change in what people understand, believe, experience or do, and whether that change is contributing to the organization's broader commercial, reputational, operational or social objectives. This requires a clear relationship between the work we deliver, the change we seek to influence and the outcomes we hope to improve, while recognizing that business performance is shaped by multiple factors, many of which sit beyond the direct control of an agency or consultancy. The objective is not to claim certainty where none exists, but to establish credible measures, make assumptions visible and remain willing to reconsider our approach when the evidence challenges our original understanding.
One business problem, multiple disciplines
One of the reasons I believe this framework has particular value is that it creates a common strategic language across disciplines that often approach the same challenge from different perspectives. Throughout my career, I have had the opportunity to work with specialists in brand strategy, creative development, media, analytics, digital experience, communications and business consulting, and I have seen how each discipline contributes a different form of expertise. A brand strategist may recognize a problem of relevance or differentiation, while a media strategist may identify a challenge involving reach, attention or the moments in which decisions are influenced. A communications strategist may recognize an issue of trust, credibility or stakeholder understanding, while a creative strategist may uncover a human tension that has not yet been meaningfully addressed. A digital specialist may identify friction preventing people from taking action, and a business consultant may recognize that the primary constraint is structural or operational rather than communicative.
These perspectives are not inherently in competition, but without a shared understanding of the underlying problem, they can become disconnected recommendations competing for resources and attention. A common diagnosis creates a common purpose, allowing specialists to contribute their expertise in service of the same intended outcome rather than beginning with the assumption that their particular discipline must be the answer. This is especially important as agencies and consultancies continue to expand their capabilities and position themselves as integrated strategic partners. Integration should not be defined simply by the number of services an organization can provide or the extent to which those services can be packaged together. Its value should be determined by whether bringing those capabilities together produces a more coherent and effective response to the client's challenge.
This has important implications for agency leadership because the responsibility of leadership extends beyond ensuring that individual teams produce strong work. We must also create the conditions for different forms of expertise to inform one another, challenge assumptions constructively and align around a common understanding of what the organization is trying to achieve. The objective is not to eliminate disciplinary specialization, which remains essential to the quality of our work, but to ensure that specialization serves a shared strategic purpose. I have come to believe that this is one of the most important distinctions between an organization that offers integrated services and one that consistently delivers integrated thinking. The former describes a business model, while the latter reflects a discipline of collaboration and judgment.
Leadership, accountability and the responsibility to create clarity
My understanding of leadership has evolved alongside my understanding of strategy. Earlier in my career, I often associated leadership with the ability to establish direction, make decisions and move people toward a shared objective, and I continue to believe those responsibilities are important. But experience has taught me that leadership also requires the discipline to create the conditions for better thinking, particularly in environments where complexity, competing priorities and commercial pressure can encourage organizations to move toward conclusions before the underlying issues have been adequately examined. It requires us to invite perspectives that challenge our own, distinguish urgency from importance, recognize when confidence is outrunning evidence and create enough space for thoughtful judgment without allowing the pursuit of certainty to become an excuse for inaction.
My involvement in industry governance, mentorship and professional recognition has reinforced this perspective. Serving in leadership roles with organizations such as NABS Canada, the AdClub of Toronto and the Broadcast Research Council of Canada, alongside opportunities to participate in the evaluation of work through the Effie and D&AD Awards, has given me different vantage points from which to consider creativity, effectiveness, professional responsibility and the evolution of our industry. These experiences have strengthened my belief that we should be as rigorous in how we define problems and evaluate impact as we are ambitious in the ideas we create. They have also reminded me that leadership is fundamentally an act of stewardship, carrying responsibility for the people we lead, the resources entrusted to us, the organizations we advise and the consequences of the recommendations we make.
I believe this responsibility is particularly important in consulting and agency environments, where our expertise gives us influence over decisions that may have significant commercial, organizational or societal implications. Clients place trust in our ability to understand their circumstances and provide recommendations that serve their interests, and that trust should not be taken lightly. We have an obligation to distinguish what we know from what we believe, to acknowledge when important information is missing and to recognize when the most appropriate recommendation may sit outside our immediate capabilities. That does not diminish the value of our expertise. I would argue that it strengthens it, because the credibility of a strategic partner depends not only on the quality of the solutions they can deliver, but also on the integrity of the judgment that leads them to recommend those solutions in the first place.
The real work begins before the pitch
For those of us responsible for growth, one of the most consequential implications of this philosophy is that our most important work often begins before a formal opportunity exists. Before the pitch, before the proposal, before the creative brief and before the strategy presentation, there is an opportunity to understand the organization, its ambitions, the environment in which it operates and the conditions shaping its ability to succeed. There is an opportunity to develop an informed perspective rather than relying exclusively on credentials and capabilities, and to recognize that the value of a client relationship should not be measured solely by the services we are able to provide, but by the progress we are able to help create. This changes the nature of business development from a primarily transactional pursuit into a more substantive exercise in understanding, interpretation and strategic relevance.
The same principle applies to existing client relationships, where the most productive question we can ask is not necessarily what additional services we might sell, but what else is happening in the client's business that we do not yet understand. Markets evolve, organizations change, leadership priorities shift and new constraints emerge, often creating challenges that were not present when the relationship first began. A partner who remains curious about those changes is better positioned to identify where new forms of value may be created, while a partner who focuses primarily on expanding the scope of existing services risks overlooking the more consequential needs developing within the organization. I believe the strongest client relationships are built through this continued commitment to understanding, because they create the conditions for relevance, trust and meaningful collaboration over time.
I do not believe every engagement requires an elaborate diagnostic exercise, nor do I believe that good strategic thinking should be measured by the complexity of the process used to produce it. The depth of investigation should be proportionate to the significance, complexity and uncertainty of the decision being made. Some situations require a few thoughtful questions and a clear understanding of the business objective, while others demand extensive research, stakeholder engagement, hypothesis testing and multidisciplinary analysis. What matters is not the volume of information gathered or the number of stages completed, but whether the process produces a sufficiently credible understanding to support responsible decisions. The framework is therefore intended to provide a consistent standard of judgment rather than a rigid sequence of activities, recognizing that new evidence may require us to revisit an earlier conclusion or reconsider the direction we have chosen.
The work before the work
The Real Work Framework reflects lessons accumulated across different industries, organizations, leadership responsibilities and client relationships, but it also represents a philosophy that I expect to continue refining through practice, dialogue and the perspectives of others. I do not regard strategic thinking as the possession of definitive answers, nor do I believe that the strongest strategists are necessarily those who arrive at conclusions most quickly. In my experience, the greater contribution often comes from the ability to make sense of complexity, recognize what matters, challenge assumptions constructively and help organizations see their circumstances with greater clarity. That requires both intellectual confidence and intellectual humility, because the responsibility to make decisions does not eliminate the possibility that our understanding may be incomplete.
I have come to believe that the strongest strategists do not necessarily make organizations feel that they have discovered more problems. They help organizations understand, with greater clarity, the problem that matters most, why it matters and what must change for meaningful progress to become possible. Similarly, the strongest partnerships are not defined simply by the sophistication of the services exchanged or the scale of the work delivered, but by the quality of the understanding, judgment and progress they make possible. This is the standard I continue to aspire to in my own work and the standard I believe we should encourage across our industry, particularly as the challenges facing organizations become more interconnected and the expectations placed upon strategic partners continue to evolve.
Ultimately, the purpose of The Real Work Framework is not to make our recommendations more elaborate or our processes more sophisticated. It is to encourage a more deliberate relationship between understanding, decision-making and value creation, ensuring that we do not confuse a request with a diagnosis, a symptom with a cause, an activity with an outcome or an opportunity to sell with an opportunity to create meaningful change. It is a reminder that our expertise is most valuable when it is directed toward the problems that genuinely matter, and that the responsibility of strategy is not simply to determine what we should do, but to establish why doing it is likely to make a difference.
Before we decide what to make, we must understand what needs to change. Before we solve the problem, we have to earn the right to define it. And before we can credibly claim to be creating value, we must understand the outcome that value is intended to serve. These are the principles that have increasingly shaped how I think about growth, leadership and the responsibility of being a strategic partner, and they are the foundation upon which I have developed The Real Work Framework.
That, to me, is the real work, and it begins long before the work itself.
— Sincerely, Boris
