Giving Back (and Getting More Than You Expect)

I went back to the School of Communication Arts this week to spend time with the latest intake, and was reminded, quite quickly, that this wasn’t going to be a passive session.

Under questioning from Mark Lewis, it turned into a proper conversation. Not a polite talk, but a Q&A that pushed into the realities of working in this industry, the parts that don’t make it into portfolios or polished case studies.

My relationship with the School of Communication Arts goes back some way, and it’s evolved. What’s stayed consistent is the intent: to create a space for people who might not follow a traditional path into the industry, but who have the raw instinct and perspective to shape it. Or as I refer to them as The Rough Diamonds, from the successful programme we ran at Ogilvy Labs 20 years ago.

That’s what makes the Rough Diamond programme so important. It’s not about smoothing people out or making them fit a mould. Quite the opposite. It’s about recognising potential early, often before it looks like anything conventional, and giving it the support, confidence, and challenge it needs to develop.

Spending time with this new 2025/2026 cohort, what stood out was the quality of their questions. They weren’t looking for neat answers. They were probing, practical, and sometimes uncomfortable in the right way. The kind of questions that suggest they’re already thinking beyond the obvious.

Mentoring in that environment is a useful reset. It forces you to articulate things you normally do on instinct. It also exposes the gaps, the things you’ve stopped questioning because you’ve been doing them too long.

There’s a tendency to frame this kind of work as “giving back.” And it is, in part. But that’s only half the story.

You also take something away.

You’re reminded what it’s like to be at the beginning, to question everything, to not yet have settled into patterns, to still be actively working things out. That perspective is easy to lose.

If anything, the exchange feels more balanced than it sounds. Less about passing knowledge down, more about keeping it moving.

And that’s probably the point.