Six Things Six Years of Working With Complex Organizations Taught Me

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There's a version of this article where I tell you I have all the answers. That version would be a lie. What I do have is six years of building Brett Snowball Design from the ground up — working alongside communications teams at government agencies, maritime industry organizations, heavy equipment companies, and the kinds of organizations where getting it wrong isn't just embarrassing. It has consequences. These are the lessons that actually stuck.

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Your job is to solve problems within constraints, not despite them.

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Every client comes with guardrails. Federal brand regulations. Accessibility requirements. A board that needs to approve the colour palette. An executive with strong opinions about fonts. Early on, constraints feel like the enemy of good work. Eventually you realize they're the whole game. Constraints aren't the enemy of good work — they are the brief. When PacifiCan needed a visual identity that couldn't technically include a traditional logo due to federal regulations, that constraint forced a solution more distinctive than a logo would have been. The guardrails became the creative direction. Your client's job is to protect their brand and their organization. Your job is to play within those constraints and find the unconventional angle nobody else saw.

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Scope creep is predictable. Treat it that way.

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Large organizations are complicated. Your main contact is aligned. Their director has a different priority. The C-Suite weighs in two weeks before launch with feedback that reframes the entire project. None of this is malicious — it's just how institutions work.
In large organizations, scope creep is a law of physics — it's entropy. Your job isn't to prevent it. It's to navigate it. The communications manager you're working with often doesn't have the full picture of what's happening three levels above them. Part of your job is helping them see around that corner — flagging early when a new request will affect the timeline, giving them the language to manage upward, and making sure the people signing off understand what's actually involved. Be the person who sees the corner before they turn it.

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Step away from the problem.

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There's a particular kind of stuck that happens when you've been staring at the same design iteration for too long. It starts feeling like an impossible Rubik's cube — every move creates a new problem somewhere else, and the solution feels further away the harder you push. Go for a run. Take a walk. Do something that puts your hands somewhere else and lets your mind go passive. The solution you couldn't find at your desk has a way of appearing on the pavement. Not because the problem got easier — because you stopped forcing it. Some of the best creative decisions I've made for clients came from a completely different direction than the one I was grinding against. The answer was simple. I just needed to stop staring at the complexity long enough to see it.

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Only take advice from people you'd trade places with.

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Everyone has an opinion. Not all opinions are useful. In fact, some will actively send you in the wrong direction if you let them. The rule that's served me best: if I wouldn't trade places with the person giving the advice, I don't need their advice. This isn't arrogance — it's discernment. Entrepreneurship is slow in the wrong moments and brutally fast in the others. You don't have the bandwidth to process every opinion from every person who means well but hasn't been where you're trying to go. Choose your advisors the way you'd choose your clients. Deliberately, and with high standards.

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Speak for the emotion. Never from it.

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You will get frustrated. A project will go sideways. A stakeholder will move the goalposts. Someone will ignore a boundary you set clearly and in writing. This is not a question of if — it's when. Taking twenty minutes before hitting reply is a professional superpower. Speak for the emotion, never from it. It's the difference between solving a problem and becoming one. The clients and partners worth keeping will respect you more for it. The ones who don't weren't worth keeping.

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Understand what your client actually needs to win.

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This one took the longest to learn and matters the most. Every client has a stated objective — the rebrand, the campaign, the annual report. But underneath that is a human being with a real motivation that has nothing to do with deliverables. Sometimes they're trying to earn a promotion. Sometimes they're trying to justify a budget to a skeptical executive. Sometimes they've had three agencies fail them and they just need someone who answers emails, hits deadlines, and doesn't make their life harder than it already is. When you understand what winning actually looks like for the person across from you — not just the organization, but the person — everything changes. The feedback makes more sense. The approvals move faster. The relationship becomes a genuine partnership instead of a transaction. The communications managers I've worked with at organizations like BCMEA and PacifiCan aren't just managing projects. They're managing up, managing sideways, and trying to demonstrate value to people who don't always understand what they do. When you make that easier — when you're the person they can point to and say "we've got this handled" — that's when good work becomes great work.

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I'm still learning.

I celebrated six years of BSD last month. I still don't have all the answers. But I'm significantly better equipped than I was — and the learning isn't close to finished.
Brett Snowball is a Strategic Brand Development Consultant based in Vancouver, BC. BSD works with communications teams at industrial, government, and regulated sector organizations across Western Canada who've outgrown their internal creative capacity but aren't a fit for a traditional agency. If that sounds like your organization, let's talk.