The Missing Rung

A creative director at one of the agencies I advise told me something a few weeks ago that I haven't stopped thinking about. She said she couldn't figure out what to do with the juniors.

The senior team was thriving with AI. They were using it to move faster through the parts of the job they'd long since mastered. But the people hired in the last twelve months were struggling. The research tasks that used to teach them how to think about clients had been automated. The first-draft work that used to teach them how to write had been automated. The competitive reviews that used to teach them about markets had been automated.

They were doing quality checks on AI outputs instead of doing the thinking that the AI was now doing for them. And they were learning almost nothing.

She called it the missing rung. The bottom of the ladder was still there, and the top was still there, but the middle rungs where people actually developed judgment had been removed.

She ended up restructuring the junior roles quite significantly. Paired each one with a senior who used them as a thinking partner rather than a production resource. Gave them ownership of small client relationships rather than pieces of larger ones. Rebuilt the learning path around decision-making rather than output.

It took about three months to settle in. She lost one of the four juniors who wanted to do the old job, not the new one. The remaining three were developing faster than any cohort she'd had before.

I think this is going to be one of the defining questions for agencies over the next two years.