ABOUT | BIOS

Lance Ness

We curmudgeons are often misunderstood. People tend to confuse our cynicism with pessimism. But acknowledging issues isn’t an admission of defeat. We simply don’t like pretending something is working, if it isn’t. And having the temerity to believe that things should work better is infinitely optimistic.

I appreciate a good challenge. The opportunity to figure things out is why I gravitated to Account Planning in the first place and eventually became a brand consultant. In my 30+ years in this business, it has always surprised me how easy challenges are to find. On the surface, some categories can seem uninteresting and some challenges insignificant, but they rarely are.

Solving problems suits my way of thinking. It’s like fixing an old tractor, a hobby of mine. When I started, I knew virtually nothing about tractors (and my marketing degree lacked practical relevance), but I understood how a tractor derives its utility. So, I was able to comprehend the interconnectivity and relative importance of its many complex parts. Context and relationship are critical to problem solving, because the symptom is rarely the cause of the problem, and a solution is only valuable if [the machine] works the way it should. Or, the way you need it to.

Jerrold Freitag

My thinking draws on a broad range of disciplines and sources. Certainly, my agency experience (Fallon) is invaluable to me, and so is my graduate work (University of Massachusetts) in philosophy, literature and languages. But I’ve also benefited from driving trucks, hitch-hiking through Europe and guiding wilderness canoe trips. This range of experience helps me recognize the connection between seemingly disparate situations and events.

Problem-solving is less linear than many people think. And the source of the problem is rarely a lack of information. Managers are buried in a paralyzing amount of unprioritized and unconnected data. And the last thing they need is more data.

The ability to see threads in information and combine data in a constructive manner is critical to problem-solving. The few, right pieces of information, aligned in a useful way, is more valuable than a bookshelf full of data tables. Helping clients solve problems is more than an analytical challenge, it’s an opportunity to be creative. Making something better—or making sense out of confusion—is the same as creating something out of nothing. It’s artistic.