Every good piece of work needs a capable translator

A report or a program is worked on for months. Eventually it is finished, put on the table, and someone in the room says it. Usually that someone is me: “This will win an award.”

I am glad to say I have always been right about that. And it is usually the easiest part of the job 😊

The jury was not in that room

Plenty of institutions do good work anyway. The jury, though, does not read the work; it reads the file. It does not know — cannot know, and is not interested in — how many times you met, which clause you gave up, how many departments you went to for one piece of data. So it does not ask. It scores only what is written on the page in front of it.

In award processes the real question is how the work will read to someone who was never in the room.

What the institution is proudest of can be its weakest link

To my mind, one of the most frequent moments in preparing a submission is this: the institution values one part of the work above the rest. There is a part it has fallen in love with, and the effort that went into it really was enormous. Yet in the file, the place where the evidence stands weakest is very often exactly there. Saying so, and finding the right words for it, is not easy. But if I do not say it before the submission, the jury will — and the jury says it in points. The size of the effort and the strength of the narrative do not always sit in the same place.

The right category requires looking at the work strategically

The same piece of work can look ordinary in one category and legendary in another. Choosing the category correctly means stepping out of the eyes of the person who did the work and into the jury's criteria — an eye shift. That shift is harder than it sounds, because the institution has been describing its own work in its own words for years, and believes those are the right ones ☹

This way of looking brought first place in all six categories we entered with the Darüşşafaka Society's 2023 Integrated Report. With Zorlu Enerji's 2023 Integrated Report it brought first place for Design. The same method, in two different institutions, took us to an award from two different directions.

Knowing a piece of work is one thing; knowing what it looks like under a particular set of criteria is quite another.

The secret of a good narrative is telling the work without inflating it and without shrinking it

In my experience, two mistakes compete with each other in submission texts. The first is exaggeration; the jury spots it in the opening paragraph. The second moves more quietly and costs more: the institution making its own work smaller. I have heard the sentence “all we really did was update the report” from institutions that were in fact describing a governance transformation. Modesty is valuable. But a submission text is not the place for it. A true narrative does not make the work look bigger than it is. It simply makes the parts that are compelling, in the eyes of that award system, visible.

What the process gives back to the institution

Preparing for an award is the most honest mirror we hold up to an institution. The moment the file is opened, the data nobody kept, the processes nobody wrote down and the sections left without evidence all surface on their own. And the surprising thing is that nobody becomes defensive. Because now there is a target, and the target pulls everyone to the same side. Gaps are filled, records are gathered, a stir begins in the team. You feel that stir the moment you walk into the room. And all of it happens while there is still no award anywhere in sight.

So what else is an award good for?

An award is visible evidence that lets an institution say “we are on the right road”. It makes people's effort visible and renews trust in the eyes of stakeholders. The most valuable part is this: an award is not an ending. It is a new bar set for the year to come.

A last word

An institution that does good work deserves an award. But there is a distance between deserving one and receiving one, and that distance is closed by a striking narrative.

If you have work worth an award, the answer lies in which criteria you describe it by, and in whom you take alongside you while you build that description.

And then there is the evening the award arrives. People who worked for months at separate desks and separate hours stand side by side in the same hall with the same delight. Perhaps one person walks onto the stage, but everyone carries that award in their heart together. The team spirit is renewed and the institution's confidence goes through the roof. Years later nobody remembers what was written in which clause of the file. But everyone remembers the feeling of that evening: so it really was possible.

Putting that feeling into words, I realized something. People do not want an award because it is an object for a shelf. They want it so that they can look at their own work once from the outside and say: so we could do it after all.

And I sit down at this table to hear that sentence 😊