I was brought in by a training business to partner with a director on the client side: someone genuinely good at her job, well respected, and hands-on enough that she was designing eLearning content herself rather than just signing it off. What she didn't have was much experience with dynamic content, video in particular, which is where I came in.

The business was a UK facilities management company: 70,000 staff, 4,500 managers, the kind of scale where "leadership programme" usually means something built once and rolled out identically to everyone, whether it fits or not.

We opened with something like "What makes a great leader here...", a decent, sensible start. And then, over the following weeks, the content drifted. Not badly. It became more theoretical, more hypothesised: the kind of leadership content that sounds correct because it's built from principles rather than from anyone's actual Tuesday afternoon.

I was working as a video consultant for a leading global advertising agency: freelance, one-man-band, brought in whenever a project needed dynamic content nobody in-house had time or kit for. This one came through the account management team, sounding slightly nervous on the phone.

The client was a global telecomms infrastructure corporation. Their business development lead for automotive, across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, wanted a centrepiece video for a large interactive display unit, a showpiece for an automotive event in Salzburg. The agency had produced a creative brief. He hated it. Not politely unhappy, either: unhappy enough that he'd asked, by name, to see "this chap", meaning me, and cut out everyone standing between him and the person who'd actually be making the thing.