Why Agencies Become Crazy Places to Work — And Why AI Makes It Worse

Most agencies explain their internal chaos the same way: we’re growing fast, clients are demanding, the work is complex. All of that is true. But none of it explains why a fifty-person agency loses 30–50% of its productive capacity to coordination overhead, rework, and managerial friction — while a twelve-person version of the same agency ran beautifully.

The problem is structural. Agencies are what we call Naturally-Occurring Chaotic Organizations — NOCOs. Multiple managers pulling on shared resources, competing priorities across clients and projects, fractured understanding, and an empowerment model that erodes as headcount grows. Nobody designed it this way. Nobody designed it at all. That’s the point.

AI is now entering this picture. It accelerates production — but production was never the bottleneck. Coordination, understanding, and judgment were. More output through a chaotic structure means more review cycles, more competing priorities, and more contagion from failing projects. AI makes your agency faster. It doesn’t make your agency less chaotic.

This session examines the structural anatomy of agency chaos — where it comes from, why it scales superlinearly with headcount, and why the instinct to manage more makes it worse. We’ll explore:

•      The three types of NOCO chaos — understanding, coordination, and empowerment — and how they compound

•      Why a single team member in a fifty-person agency can be interrupted by ten or more managers in a day

•      How multi-allocation and multi-client structures create an over-managing situation that nobody intended

•      What happens when AI enters a NOCO — and why the structural problem becomes the bottleneck AI can’t fix

•      The pod model and what deliberate structure looks like for project-driven firms

Presented by Jack Skeels, CEO of Better Company. Over fifteen years and more than two hundred agency engagements, Jack has helped leadership teams crack the structural problems they’d stopped believing were fixable — the chronic rework, the coordination drag, the culture issues that survive every initiative. The results are consistent: 20–50% faster delivery, 40% less rework, dramatically happier teams and clients, and a 94+ Net Promoter Score from the leaders he’s worked with. His approach is conversational, not prescriptive — he works alongside agency principals to make the structural changes that produce those numbers, drawing on a body of applied research that includes the award-winning book Unmanaged and ongoing work on how AI is reshaping knowledge-work organizations. This is a 45-minute session with Q&A afterwards.