I ordered a bacon breakfast sandwich last week. The menu listed bread. It listed bacon. It listed cheese. No egg. So I asked: "Does this come with egg?" The person behind the counter looked at me with the patience of someone who has answered this question four hundred times and said, completely deadpan: "Yes. It's implied."
The egg is implied.
I laughed. I paid. I ate my sandwich (it had egg, obviously). And then I spent the entire walk back to the office thinking about how many implied eggs exist in our industry.
In advertising, we swim in them. The creative brief that "clearly" explained the brand voice (it didn't). The rounds of revisions that were "obviously" included in scope (they weren't). The strategic rationale behind a campaign that the client never actually heard, because we presented the work and assumed they'd feel what we felt.
We craft messaging for a living. We obsess over word choice. We know that the right word in the right place changes everything. And then we send a scope of work that assumes the client knows what "concepting" means. How many things do we assume clients, colleagues, or new hires just know, because to us it's obvious?
The process that lives entirely in one person's head because they've been here for years, and it never occurred to anyone to write it down. The acronym everyone uses in every meeting that nobody has defined since the Obama administration. The "next step" in the client journey that your team knows by heart, and your client has absolutely no idea about. Psychologists call it the curse of knowledge. The more you know, the less you remember what it felt like not to know it. I call it the implied egg. Same thing, worse branding.
The fix is not complicated. It is just humbling.
Read your proposals like someone who has never heard of your company. Walk your onboarding like it is your first day. Send the SOW to the person on your team who asks the "obvious" questions, because they are catching your implied eggs before a client does.
Clarity is not condescending. Clarity is the strategy. And more often than not, it is the difference between a smooth project and a very uncomfortable conversation in month three.
So here is my ask this week: find one implied egg in your business. One thing you have never written down, never explained, never put on the menu because obviously everyone knows. Write it down. Say it out loud. Put it on the menu. Your clients will thank you. Your team will thank you. And your onboarding process will finally make sense to someone other than the four people who built it.
What is your implied egg?
