Twenty Rounds of Revisions, and the First Draft Won

I once did twenty rounds of revisions on a set of pull up banners. Twenty. An equine company, big product launch, and everyone had a seat at the table. Move the logo. Move it back. Make it bigger. Too big now. Try it in another orange. We went through weeks of this.

When the final version was signed off, I overlaid it on my first draft, just to see. It was identical, pixel for pixel. Twenty rounds to land exactly where we started.

For years I told that story as a joke about committees. Lately I think it is about something else. The banner was never the problem. The first version was perfectly fine, and I reckon everyone half knew it. Those twenty rounds were not for the design. They were for the voices in the room. Nobody wanted to be the one who said yes and got it wrong, so everyone kept touching it, because touching it feels safer than deciding.

I see the same thing in businesses of one. No committee in sight, just you, circling your own brand decisions for weeks because saying yes feels riskier than fiddling.

You change the colour. You change it back. You ask three friends and get four opinions. You sit on the logo for a month because something about it is not quite right, and you cannot say what.

Usually nothing is wrong with it. What is happening is that choosing means being accountable for the choice, and fiddling lets you stay in the part where nothing is your fault yet.

But deciding is the whole job. The brands that look confident are not the ones that got it perfect. They are the ones that picked, committed, and put their energy into everything that comes after the yes.