AFRICAN SPEAKER BUREAU - CURATED FOR WPP
The Strategy Becomes Real When People Can Say It.
A two-part proposal for the teams turning Elevate28 from a structure on paper into a way of working.
Everything that follows is observation, offered in the spirit of an open conversation: original thinking, analytic reading, and respect for the difference between what can be known from the inside and what can only be inferred from the outside. Elevate28 has been announced. Decks built, town halls held, the new structure named, and the incentives have already started to shift too, with bonuses now split between unit and company performance. What hasn't happened yet, for almost anyone below the people who wrote it, is the moment where someone has to translate it into their own words and find out whether it holds up when they do. That translation doesn't come from hearing the strategy explained more clearly. It comes from being given the structure to work it through for yourself: the voice to say it with conviction instead of reading it off a slide; and a room of people from other parts of the business doing the same thing, so what comes out isn't one person's guess at what leadership wants to hear. We're proposing two movements: The first runs cross-functional cohorts through Speak So You Are Heard, with Elevate28 itself as the live project: each cohort works out what the strategy actually means for their part of the business, and builds toward a decision talk, their own case for it. The second carries that work, and the people who did it, into a leadership forum, where Eric Edmeades and Veli Ndaba address why this is how a strategy becomes something 94,000 people believe, not just something they've been told.
About this collection
Elevate28 is, on its own terms, a good strategy; and not only on paper. One company, four operating units, four regions, one platform; a clear case for why the old model stopped working. The incentives have already started to move too: bonuses are now split between how a unit performs and how WPP as a whole performs, which is a real signal, not just a slogan. None of that is in question. What any strategy document can't do is make someone believe it. Not because people are cynical, though after two strategy reviews and three chief executives a little caution is reasonable; but because belief isn't something you receive. It's something you arrive at, usually by being asked to explain a thing to someone else, in your own words, and discovering whether it holds up when you do. That's the gap Speak So You Are Heard is built for, not as a side benefit, but as the actual mechanism. Cross-functional cohorts, people from across Media, Creative, Production and Enterprise Solutions, and from different regions, spend ten days building the communication skills the programme is known for: presence, voice, one clear message with proof behind it, the ability to say less and mean more. The live project for each cohort is Elevate28 itself. What does "lead with media" mean for someone in production. What does "one company" mean for someone whose career has been built inside one agency brand. Each cohort works toward a decision talk, three to four minutes, their own articulation of what the strategy means and what they're going to do differently. What comes out of that isn't a communication skills certificate. It's a set of people across the business who can talk about Elevate28 the way you'd want your best client-facing teams to talk about it, because they've worked out what it means, in language that's theirs. That's the proof point for the second movement: a leadership forum where Eric Edmeades and Veli Ndaba address the deeper question underneath all of it; why telling an organisation what to believe doesn't work; and what would need to be true for this kind of translation to happen everywhere, not just in a pilot cohort. This is why we're proposing two movements rather than one programme: Movement One is where Elevate28 moves out of the heads of the people who wrote it and into the hearts and voices of a cross-functional group who work through what it means, find their own conviction in it, and learn to say it with authority. Movement Two is where that work goes back to leadership, live, in the room. Veli Ndaba and Eric Edmeades take what the cohort discovered about turning strategy into belief and voice, and use it to make the case for what would need to be designed, deliberately, so that same shift can happen for everyone who wasn't in the cohort. Movement One proves it's possible. Movement Two is where leadership decides what it would take to make it the default.
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