At Elemental Concept, we spend a lot of time talking to each other about the work we do (as well as our weekend hobbies, our favourite pizza topping, you know what we’re like…)
Sometimes that means early mornings and strong coffee, and sometimes it means difficult conversations and admitting that an approach we were excited about isn’t quite right anymore. None of this is accidental. These conversations are part of how we make sure experience, knowledge and ideas don’t stay locked in one place, and how we stay honest with ourselves and our clients as work evolves.
Complex work doesn’t reward certainty.
Here’s something we’ve learned over time: the best work rarely ever follows a straight line.
Most of the challenges we’re asked to help with aren’t neatly defined. Clients don’t arrive with a clear answer or a single “right” solution, and we often find that what a business thinks it needs at the start of a conversation isn’t quite what will deliver the best outcome in the end. In fact, we’re usually brought on board first to dig deep into the business problem, before we even start thinking about technology and outcomes.
This is the reality of working on complex problems, with real constraints, changing priorities, and imperfect information. It’s like a jigsaw, where we don’t know if we have the pieces or even what the end picture is going to look like. And to be honest? We wouldn’t have it any other way.
We’ve realised that clients come to us because they trust us to do the right thing. Trust, in this context, isn’t about sounding certain from day one: Rather, it’s about being able to think clearly as things change and pivot accordingly. It’s about spotting when assumptions no longer hold, and adjusting course without drama or defensiveness. We’re open and honest with our clients about all of this because we’re confident the decisions we’re making are the right ones.
That kind of confidence doesn’t come from personal brilliance alone – as much as we’re the first to admit that we do have many brilliant people at Elemental Concept and Purple Shirt. It comes from shared experiences.
Sharing is caring – making experience visible.
As we’ve grown, we’ve become more deliberate about how knowledge moves around the company.
Recently, that’s meant running internal demos across teams and geographies, sharing the projects and services we’re delivering, and creating space to talk openly about how the work actually went. And unlike a shiny case study (we have plenty of those on our website already!), this isn’t just the polished outcomes, but the decisions, trade-offs, and moments that shaped them.
We’ve also spent time looking back over years of work together. Talking honestly about what’s gone well, what hasn’t, and why people choose to work with us in the first place. Some of those conversations were affirming, some were pretty fun, some were uncomfortable. One thing is for sure: all of them were useful.
Because experience only becomes valuable when it’s shared.
When people have access to context beyond their own project or discipline, decisions improve, and patterns start to emerge. A developer in one team recognises a challenge another team has already worked through, and new colleagues bring in perspectives from outside and ask questions we’ve stopped thinking to ask.
None of this happens by accident. We’ve had to make time for it – for our demos, it’s been at 7 am UK time to accommodate our teams in Australia and New Zealand (yes, we’ve needed a lot of coffee!), and in real time, we encourage this continually amongst our team. We’ve had to be willing to listen, and to get comfortable hearing things that don’t always confirm what we already believe. That’s meant asking hard questions – what could we have done better? Where are we going wrong? Why did we lose that pitch? And being open about the answers and lessons learned along the way.
Transparency makes better decisions.
There’s a common misconception that being open about uncertainty or change, or let’s be frank, when things have gone a little awry, will undermine confidence. In our experience, the opposite is true.
Being upfront about what’s working and what isn’t leads to better decisions, because it reduces the chance of small issues quietly becoming big ones. And it builds trust, both internally and with clients, because everyone is operating with the same information.
This doesn’t mean oversharing or narrating every wobble. But it does mean being honest at the moments that matter, and flagging when an approach needs rethinking. Saying early when something doesn’t feel right, and creating space to change lanes.
It also means being comfortable sitting with a bit of discomfort. If something feels awkward to talk about, it’s often a sign that it’s worth talking about.
An internal POC and a moment of honesty.
A recent internal proof of concept is a good example of how this plays out in practice.
We’d been working on an idea we were excited about, but because it was internal work, competing priorities crept in. This isn’t anybody’s fault – we’ll always prioritise client work over internal projects – but it means that we weren’t able to apply the same rigour or processes we’d apply to client delivery.
Progress was pretty slow, and when we eventually took a proper step back and looked at where things had landed, we had to be honest with ourselves. The product we’d started to build wasn’t right. The tech had moved on, and hand on heart, we knew we could do better.
At that point, there were a few options:
- Push on regardless.
- Try to retrofit something workable.
- Pause, reflect, and accept that the right thing now was different from the right thing at the start.
Dramatic pause…. We chose the latter.
This wasn’t a dramatic decision, and it certainly wasn’t a failure. We didn’t point fingers at each other. It was simply the result of shared reflection and a willingness to question our own assumptions – or put simply, the same behaviour we expect in our client work. And it reinforced something we already knew: that knowing when to change the plan is just as valuable as the plan itself.
How this shows up for clients.
This way of working shapes what it feels like to work with Elemental Concept.
Clients don’t come to us for cookie-cutter answers or unquestioned execution; they come to work things through together. They know we love to explore the underlying problem, not just the brief in front of us, and they’re expecting to be challenged thoughtfully and collaboratively.
Sometimes that means the solution we land on isn’t the one anyone expected at the outset, and that’s okay. Our focus is on doing the right thing, not just delivering the outcomes at all costs. Being open about uncertainty doesn’t weaken the work; it makes it stronger. It creates space for better judgment, better decisions, and better results.
Behaving differently – not just a strap line on a pitch deck.
We do this work – the demos, the conversations, the reflection – because it helps us learn better.
It also makes the work more enjoyable. When teams trust each other, share context, and aren’t performing certainty for the sake of it, collaboration gets easier. Shared experience helps us spot risks earlier and adapt with confidence as work evolves, challenging assumptions along the way. It helps us behave differently, not as a strap line on a website or a pitch deck, but as a practice.
If you work with Elemental Concept, our aim is that you feel calm confidence in our ability to deliver the right thing, even when that thing changes along the way. If that sounds like the kind of partnership you’re looking for, we’d love for you to experience it yourself.
