The Curious Incident of the Impertinent Billboard

Part I: In Search of a Sign

It was an ordinary November week. A mist of emails. A haze of screen time. A drift toward Thursday. Except for one thing… 

Thursday held a gleam of promise: a real-life workshop with ten creative entrepreneurs from across the West Midlands - comfy chairs, shared biscuits, actual eye contact. I had a skip in my step. Too much of my working life lives online: pixelated faces, transactional nods, that micro-delay that kills connection. But this - this felt different.

I had a plan. A Holmesian structure. Comfortable seating. Crisp facilitation. And beneath it, a quiet ambition: to foster something real. Trust... maybe even collaboration. This was the first in a four-part series, and I wanted to set the tone. Not just in tasks, but in energy. The right energy changes everything. It makes a room buzz. Shapes connection. Opens social and neural pathways.

But as with all curious cases, something was missing.

In my early calls with the group, I’d already spotted a pattern: despite their experience, many weren’t confident pitching themselves or their ideas. Curious, but not uncommon. So, I designed a session around a simple prompt: your Three Uniques - those qualities that make your venture distinctive, customer-focused, and defensible. It would build self-awareness and lead naturally to session two: confident pitching. From self-knowledge to self-expression. A gentle arc.

And the structure felt solid, except for one absence: 

A case study.

Something real. A vivid example of a business that had nailed their Three Uniques. Despite searching notes, folders, and past projects, nothing quite fitted. Too vague. Too generic. Not quite right.

I rooted around in my brain attic… behind the red marble clock, beneath the Moorcroft lamp, beside the Indian elephant on the coffee table. Nothing. I rummaged through folders, skimmed old client decks, bookmarked half-promising links. Still nothing that clicked. The usual suspects were all silent.

Wednesday passed. Still nothing.

Thursday morning arrived, bright and cold. The kind of morning that stings your cheeks and sharpens your senses. I opened the curtains and conceded defeat. No perfect case study was coming. So I crystalised the backup plan: choose a live example from the group. Not ideal, but adaptable. I packed my materials, checked the route, and – crucially - stopped for luxury biscuits. (Never underestimate the power of a luxury biscuit to fuel a superior workshop.)

The drive was smooth. Radio low. Mind humming. I let ideas drift. Watched the streets slide by like a moving diorama. Somewhere between the industrial estate and the last roundabout on the approach to Wolverhampton…

It happened.

A billboard. Across the road, on the gable end of a white building: deep blue background. Bold white letters. No image. No slogan. Just a short provocation.

It dismounted from the wall, floated across four lanes of traffic, passed effortlessly through the grille of my car and slapped me - full-force - across the face.

I gasped. 

Not metaphorically - an audible intake. It had found me…

The clue I was waiting for.

The story pauses here. But your investigation doesn’t have to…

When have you been searching so hard for an answer that you almost missed the clue in plain sight?

Part II of II: The Insight in Plain Sight

I blinked. Shook my head. Let out a short, involuntary breath, somewhere between a scoff and a gasp.

The billboard stood tall and unapologetic, as if it hadn’t just committed a full-frontal assault on my subconscious. A crisp blue rectangle. White text. No image, no punctuation, no pitch.

That was it… and it was perfect.

Because - of course - what could be more distinctive, more customer-aware, more unapologetically clear than a media company committed to publishing only good news?

In a landscape obsessed with outrage, noise, and algorithmic doom, they’d chosen the opposite. They’d inverted the model. Subverted the rules. And they hadn’t just said it - they’d shown it. Not with a press release. Not with a positioning slide. With one sentence on a wall. One moment of frictionless, unapologetic clarity.

I laughed. Out loud. In the car. A strange, solitary laugh like a cork releasing from a shaken bottle. It startled the driver in the next lane. And honestly, it startled me.

You see, I’d spent the week deep in the hunt. Trawling old decks, half-built case studies, abandoned workshop slides. I’d interrogated the mind palace. Ransacked memory like a consulting detective with too many lamps and not enough clues. But that very morning I’d stopped. I’d run out of leads. Consciously, I’d let go of the search.

But my brain hadn’t.

It had quietly continued, like a background process still scanning for a match. And that, of course, is what we do. We obsess. Then release. And that’s when the answer arrives. Not through logic, but through pattern. Not by force, but by attunement.

The great insight here - the thing that caught me off-guard - wasn’t just the brilliance of the billboard. It was the way my subconscious delivered it. Casually. Precisely. Right on time.

There’s a name for this kind of moment. Vishen Lakhiani calls it “the lens” - the way your inner world shapes what you notice in the outer one. It echoes a line from The Alchemist:

“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

But the trick isn’t force: it’s alignment; attunement.

And there it was. On the gable end of a building on a Thursday morning in November. The very insight I’d been hunting for. Not because I chased it harder, but because I’d made space for it to find me.

I used the case study in the workshop. Told the story exactly as it happened. The room loved it. Not just because it was clever, but because it was real. It carried the electricity of something found, not manufactured. And in so doing, it reminded the group - and me - what distinctiveness really looks like: not louder, not shinier, just truer.

The story rests here. But the investigation continues…

One question to sit with

When has an answer appeared only after you stopped trying to force it?