Friday marked the final school day spent working on portfolio brief one. With that came talk of partnerships and how – if we so wished – we could move on to work with someone new.

Given the timing, I felt it a nice opportunity to reflect on what I found to be a key learning.

Earlier in the week began a series of masterclasses on tone of voice, conveniently timed as we approached the point in this particular process where we would have ideally started executing our ideas.

The session highlighted a personal hope to see the craft of tone, and copy in general, nudged up the industry agenda. But a broader learning was that, no matter how busy we are at various points of a creative process, it helps to ensure we do all we can to manage the tone we deliver and exchange in conversation or debate with our creative partners.

Within our team I think we managed this pretty well. When the heat was on, or when we’d hit a wall, the tone – when packed full of generosity and curiosity – set a much more cohesive agenda and helped us navigate some tricky challenges.

Admittedly, it’s not easy to maintain, but you definitely notice the rewards if you keep an eye on it. In parallel, if we’re ever a bit sloppy with regards to the state of the studio, Marc is, quite rightly, quick to remind us that our environment affects the work we produce. I’d therefore suggest that this ideology extends to the emotional environment created between two people that could, in some cases, spend more time with each other than they do their own families over the course of their careers.

The definition of partnership, interestingly, covers both the ‘state’ and an ‘association’. The latter feels a lot colder to me. I’m therefore a big believer in striving for the former, but it needs feeding, and if fed mindfully, the relationship and the work will hopefully begin to flourish.