Discipline 02 · Bearings
Find true heading before you draft
A bearings session names where your message must arrive. We work outward from the reader's expectation, not inward from your product folder.
Three passes on the wall
- Pass one — audience fix
- Who reads this line first? We write their name on the board and refuse to proceed until everyone agrees.
- Pass two — channel fit
- Email, landing strip, or spoken deck — each channel bends syntax. We choose one and defer the rest.
- Pass three — surviving sentence
- One sentence that must remain intact through every revision. Everything else is negotiable ballast.
- Handover
- A photographed rail with five square marks and a single typed paragraph you can paste into any brief.
Bearings tide marks
| Hr | Mark | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| 09 | Slack | Arrival, tea, silent reading of intake notes |
| 10 | Flood | Audience and channel debate on the planning wall |
| 12 | High | Surviving sentence drafted and read aloud twice |
| 14 | Ebb | Photograph rail, email handover paragraph |
Capability detail
Positioning headings require stakeholder interviews, competitive language review, and a locked paragraph before channel work. Message architecture expands the heading into a hierarchy: primary claim, supporting proofs, audience-specific emphasis, words to avoid. Channel calendars assign dates and owners; they are living documents updated at soundings. Asset systems include template rules, naming, and approval paths. Launch sequencing aligns internal enablement with public moments. Communications governance names escalation when unpublished language appears in market.
Each capability can be engaged alone or in combination. A team may need only a heading sprint. Another may need a quarter of channel work plus monthly soundings. Scoping happens in conversation and is fixed in the mooring agreement before work begins. Deliverables are always written — documents you can hand to agencies, internal studios, or regional offices without oral translation.
We do not perform media buying, SEO rank programmes, or lead-generation campaigns. We prepare the language those functions must carry. When media teams ask for "more hooks," we return to the heading and ask which hook the document already authorises.
When two capabilities run together — for example positioning headings followed by channel calendars — we sequence so the heading locks before dates are assigned. Reversing that order produces calendars full of tentative language that must be rewritten. When asset systems run alongside launch sequencing, we name file freeze dates that match the launch window mooring. Communications governance is often added after a drift incident; we prefer to install it early, but we can moor it alone for teams that already have a heading and need enforcement language only.
Regional APAC work adds translation review to soundings: not literal translation alone, but whether the heading survives in Mandarin, Malay, or Tamil summaries clients use internally. We document authorised renderings beside the English heading so regional offices do not improvise.
Capability rows are intentionally plain. We avoid branding jargon in column heads so your procurement team can read the table without a decoder. Cadence column values are typical ranges; your mooring letter specifies exact dates.
Preparing for your bearings session
Arrive with three items only: a one-page list of channels you actually publish to (not aspirational ones), the last piece of copy each channel shipped, and the name of one person who can say no without deferring to a committee. We read your intake notes in silence for the first twenty minutes — no small talk required, though tea is available. Do not bring slide decks; we will ask you to close the laptop if it opens.
Pass one is an argument, not a brainstorm. We write the primary reader's job title on the wall and test every proposed sentence against whether that person would finish reading it. Disagreement is expected; we pause until the room agrees on a single name. Pass two narrows syntax to one channel. We read aloud how the surviving idea sounds in email subject lines versus landing-page headers versus spoken introduction — then strike two channels from the day's work. Pass three produces the sentence that must survive every future edit. We read it twice, once at normal volume and once while someone reads competing copy from your archive aloud beside it. If the sentence still holds, we photograph the rail and type the handover paragraph before you leave. Allow ninety minutes after the session ends for the mail to arrive — we do not hand over verbally.