In today’s agency boardrooms, the most dangerous “C-word” isn’t “Creativity” or “Clients.”

It’s Comfort. Closely followed by its lazy-arse twin, Complacency.

Agencies have learned to live with shrinking scopes, eroded margins, and burned-out staff as if this were the natural order of things. Leaders spin narratives about resilience, culture, and “purpose,” but underneath, they’re running the same tired operating system that failed them a decade ago.

Complacency tells the C-suite: don’t rock the boat, we’ve survived this long. Comfort whispers: our legacy systems may be creaking, but at least they’re familiar. Together, they sedate leadership into inaction.

The irony? This industry was built on disruption. Ogilvy, Bernbach, Abbott, they thrived on discomfort. They tore up the rulebook, reinvented the agency model, and forced clients to think differently. Today’s leaders do the opposite. They cling to the rulebook, endlessly repackaging “integration” decks while their workflows rot from within.

Meanwhile, the world outside has moved on. Technology has rewritten how work gets done, how fast it gets done, and how much it should cost. Agencies know this, but too many choose to squeeze another year out of systems designed in the fax era.

When self-preservation trumps agency growth

This is not harmless caution. It is actively dangerous. If your internal decision makers are more invested in comfort than impact, you will get:

• Fear-driven decisions warped by personal biases

• Half-baked “solutions” that maintain the illusion of progress

• An agency that is losing the race while patting itself on the back

As the saying goes,

“Turkeys seldom vote for an early Christmas”.

If you rely on comfort-driven advice, your team won’t push for bold change, and your agency won’t take the risks it needs to survive.

But here’s the rub: embracing these tools requires a degree of discomfort. It forces agencies to acknowledge that legacy systems and bloated workflows are millstones. It forces leaders to admit that their talent is not just leaving for money — they’re leaving because they’re tired of doing dumb work on dumb systems.

Take platforms like Blutui. They exist to slash build times, automate routine drudgery, and free up scarce talent for actual creative problem-solving. Agencies using it are delivering projects in a fraction of the time, with fewer people, and with more creative freedom. That’s productivity, not PowerPoint rhetoric. That’s what modern reinvention looks like.

Agencies are not dying because of clients, consultancies, or AI. They’re dying because their C-suites are addicted to comfort and incapable of administering hard medicine.

The cure is simple, if unpalatable: rip out complacency. Stop treating productivity as a dirty word. Equip your teams with the right tools. Benchmark your scopes. Price your work properly. And for once, lead instead of preserve.

Because the “C word” that’s killing agencies isn’t creativity, or clients, or even cost. It’s complacency. And until it’s banished from the C-suites vernacular, the future of this industry is written in shrinking scopes, collapsing margins, and empty offices.

The key takeout

Comfort and complacency is lethal in an agency and should be drummed out at all cost. Relying on advice designed only to preserve is how even the mightiest agencies fade into irrelevance. Leaders who confront this head-on, shake up assumptions, and embrace risk are the ones who survive and thrive.

Author’s Note:
If week after week is going by without you or your senior leadership team addressing the need for change head-on, then you are the problem. Stop waiting for the mythical “right moment” to act, it’s not coming. Borrow a page from Mel Robbins’ 5 Second Rule.Count down 5,4,3,2,1 . . . and move. Call the meeting. Rip up the process. Trial the tool. Replace comfort with action. Your agency’s future depends on it.