A Mandate Is Not Adoption

The night it stopped being a preference

Inconsistent brand material is normally a taste argument. Someone thinks the deck looks messy, someone else thinks it looks fine, and the argument is unresolvable because neither position has a cost attached to it.

Late 2024 attached a cost. I had five days of slack to build the annual company presentation. Every department sent their material in, and none of it agreed with any of the rest — not the styling, not the copy, not the narrative structure. There was no version of that week where I did the design work, because the week was consumed by reconciliation. Sixty hours of overtime across those five days, three to four hours of sleep a night, and the deck was finished four hours before it was delivered.

I want to be precise about what the cost actually was, because it changes what the fix has to be. The expensive part was never the design. It was aggregation: taking material authored in four countries, under four sets of local assumptions, and making it read as one organisation. That is not creative work and it does not get faster with practice. It scales with the number of sources and the distance between their conventions.

Nobody filed it as a brief

This is the part I would want a hiring manager to notice, because it is the shape of most senior design work and it is almost never what a portfolio shows.

No one wrote a ticket that said our material is inconsistent and it is costing us. No one could have, because the cost was not visible from anywhere except the desk it landed on. To the regional teams, each one was shipping perfectly reasonable work on time. The inconsistency only becomes a number at the point of assembly, and only one person stands at that point.

The problem arrived as a date in the calendar. That is what constraints usually look like at this level: not a specification, not a review comment, but a deadline with an organisational shape behind it that nobody has named yet. Naming it is the design work. Everything after that is execution.

I went up, not sideways

The obvious move is to talk to peers — go to each regional marketing lead, make the case, ask nicely, build consensus. I did not do that, and I think the reasoning matters more than the outcome.

I went to the CEO and the COO. The ask was not headcount and it was not more runway. It was narrower than that: the authority to set one rule — a single logic and a single template set that all regional material is produced to, so that finishing on time stops depending on individual heroics.

I got the mandate. I want to be careful not to make that sound harder than it was: I work closely with the operating executives, so the request had a short path. That proximity is real and it is the reason this was a two-week conversation rather than a two-quarter one. It is also, as it turns out, not sufficient.

The fight nobody warns you about

I expected resistance to the idea of standardising. That is not what happened. Almost everyone agreed that the material should cohere.

The fight was about whose work becomes the template.

I do not author the regional material — I integrate it. So I was arbitrating between designers whose work I was not doing, each of whom had a case rooted in a market I do not sell into. The Vietnamese material was built for a different acquisition funnel than the Australian material. The material produced for the Middle East was not a translation of anything; it was composed for a different reading direction and a different set of formal expectations. Every one of those positions was defensible, and there was substantial opposition to every candidate template including the one I picked.

What I did was pick a base, then build the shared frame outward from it: corporate architecture, sub-brand lockups, voice, and explicit regional flexibility rules — the parts a local team is allowed to change, and the parts they are not. Right-to-left support was designed in from the beginning rather than retrofitted, because a system that treats RTL as a mirroring pass has already decided which market is the default.

What it produced

Since the 2023 Melbourne gala I have owned the design of the annual company presentation end to end: three consecutive galas in three countries, plus nine investor, board and audit-facing decks across 2024–2025, along with the demos that run inside them. One of those evenings is on the public record in someone else's words — the Managing Director who delivered the keynote at the 15th Anniversary gala in Jordan, in front of politicians and dignitaries, wrote afterwards: “I would not have been able to send the msg to the distinguished audience before me on the evening if it weren’t for Ed and his team.”

That quote is a signed, public recommendation, which is the closest thing to an audit trail this kind of work ever gets. It is also the reason I can write the next section without it reading as false modesty.

What it did not produce

Here is the mechanism, as plainly as I can put it. A mandate from the CEO produced permission, not adoption. The people who did not adopt do not report to me and are not measured on whether they adopt. The authority arrived; the consequence did not arrive attached to it. I was given the right to set a rule and no mechanism by which the rule matters to the person choosing whether to follow it.

That is not a complaint about those teams. They are doing what any rational team does with an unenforced standard from a function that does not sign their review: they weigh it against the thing that is actually urgent, and the actually-urgent thing wins. I would do the same.

What I would do differently

Three things, in order of how much I think they would have mattered.

Ask for the consequence, not just the authority. The request I made was “can I set a rule”. The request I should have made was “can this be something regional leads are asked about”. One of those is a permission; the other is a mechanism. I asked for the wrong one and did not notice for a year, because the mandate felt like a win.

Make the compliant path faster than the non-compliant one. Adoption that depends on goodwill decays; adoption that saves the adopter time on their own deadline does not. Where the spec ships ready-made artefacts that a regional team would otherwise have to build, it gets used. Where it mostly constrains, it gets ignored. I built more constraint than I built leverage.

Involve the dissenters in choosing the base, publicly. I arbitrated and then announced. Arbitration is the right call — consensus on a template is not reachable — but the announcement made it my template rather than the group's, and that is a durable disadvantage for something people have to choose to use every week.

The question I have not answered

I do not know whether the remaining holdout is about authority or about composition, and the difference determines what to do next.

If it is authority, the fix is organisational: get adoption into the conversation that regional leads actually have with their own management, and the spec follows. If it is composition — if the base template carries assumptions that genuinely do not survive being moved into a different formal tradition — then the fix is not enforcement, it is a second base built natively rather than derived, and pushing harder would be pushing the wrong thing.

I have been assuming the first. I have not tested it, and writing this note is the first time I have stated the alternative clearly enough to see that it is testable. The test is a single conversation with the right person, and the fact that I have not had it after more than a year is its own finding.