By Michael Richard Storey, Senior Vice-President, Global Advisory, InnerGroup
Internal teams are built for speed. For control. For creative precision at scale.
But let’s be honest—half the time, it feels like you’re stuck in a multi-directional tug-of-war.
Marketing wants storytelling. Finance wants you to manage your payroll. The creatives want freedom. IT wants compliance. Everyone wants impact—but no one agrees on the route.
That push-pull isn’t dysfunction. That’s the internal marketing and creative reality. And it’s exactly what our Inner8™ framework is designed to decode.
The operational diagnostic your team is silently crying out for
The InnerAssessment is our proprietary diagnostic tool. It’s a fast, focused way to map your marketing and creative operation across eight essential areas—our ‘Inner8™’ framework.
It shows you where you’re strong, where you’re stretched, and where competing forces are grinding against each other.
Most teams are too close to the work to see the patterns holding them back. Inner8™ surfaces them—bringing clarity to challenges that may have been hiding in plain sight.
Each report is compiled by highly-experienced advisors who know internal agencies (IHAs) inside out—and how they truly operate.
We’ve designed the report to be genuinely useful, even on its own.
And if it raises questions you’d like to explore, we’re here for that too.
We share well over a century of collective experience in building, leading and enhancing internal marketing and creative ecosystems. We partner with you in a way that is adaptive, collaborative, supportive—and laser-focused on your needs.
Tension is a constant—but it rarely has a name
Most internal marketing and creative teams aren’t short on challenges.
What they’re missing is a way to make sense of them.
That’s what InnerAssessment is for. It helps teams understand the dynamics they’ve been feeling for months (or years)—but couldn’t quite explain.
It’s not about eliminating tension—it’s about learning where the tensions are, and how to balance them: how to make smart trade-offs—on purpose.
That moment of recognition came through clearly when we walked one respondent through their report:
“The questions put a name to the challenges. People knew something wasn’t quite right—but didn’t know how to describe it. InnerAssessment helped us get to the root. And once you can name the problem, it suddenly feels like you can solve it.”
Take the assessment. Find your friction.
This isn’t a personality quiz. It won’t tell you which house you should be in at Hogwarts.
It’s a practical tool for operational leaders who want to move faster, lead smarter, and build teams that don’t just survive the tension—but thrive because of it.
The assessment is free to complete. The report you’ll receive is comprehensive, data-informed, and illuminating—a 360° snapshot of your creative operation, delivered in plain English.
Take the InnerAssessment and see where your team stands.
