The Kill List / Cannes Lions 2026
Good ideas rarely die of bad luck. Assassins kill them with good intentions.
Brave creative work seldom loses to a better idea.
It loses to a roomful of reasonable people protecting reasonable things — note by careful note, until it's safe.
The patterns are remarkably consistent. Which means you can learn to see them coming.
Born from the LIONS Creative MBA, tested at Cannes Lions 2026, and sharpened by the uncomfortable truth that even Cannes-winning work can be killed five times before it lives.
324
workshop notes counted
123
lines filed against assassins
108
prevention moves captured
The rule
Assassins are not villains. They kill as a protective reflex. And they are fascinating.
Spend enough time watching good work die and you stop seeing villains and start seeing a system. The same forces, the same sentences, the same quiet moment of collapse, in agency after agency, market after market.
That is not us. It is a bit risky. Can't we just AI it? Love it, not right now.
You have heard these lines. You may have said one. Under enough pressure, you may even have been one.
The person who kills the idea is usually protecting something real: the brand, the budget, the audience, the timeline, their own neck. They are often not even wrong. Which is precisely why arguing with them fails, and understanding them works.
So there is one move underneath this whole field guide: concede the fair point, then counter. Name what the reflex is protecting. Agree, out loud and early, that they are right about it. Then find the one sentence that lets the brave version live too.
You are not trying to win the argument. You are trying to improve the room.
The cast
Meet the Assassins.
Assassin files
Why it matters
The reasonable version of creative work is the expensive one. Here's why.
When making more of everything becomes effectively free, good enough stops being worth much. There is now an infinite supply of it. The only work with any leverage left is the work distinctive enough to be noticed and remembered.
And distinctiveness, by definition, is the unfamiliar, the slightly risky, the not-yet-proven. Exactly the qualities every reflex in this Index is tuned to sand away.
Put bluntly: safe is the most expensive thing you will ever make. Cannes celebrates the work that survived. This is for the work that did not, and for the embarrassing amount of it that was talked out of the room for no good reason at all.
Learning to keep the distinctive thing alive through the rounds of reasonable feedback is not a soft skill now. It is the craft.
File an antidote
Add one observation that worked.
No names. No clients. No revenge stories. Those help no one. Just the useful finding: what the assassin was protecting, the line that actually moved them, and the move that might have prevented the strike upstream.
Everything is reviewed before it is published. File it now; your future self is walking into a meeting on Tuesday, and might need a better sentence.
The three of us
We met in a room built for exactly this.
The Kill List was made by Adam Horne, Liza Kazyuk and Loren Cook, who found each other through the LIONS Creative MBA: Adam helping shape the curriculum and lead Cohort 4, Liza and Loren returning to facilitate it after graduating Cohort 3.
It was one of those rare, easy collisions: three different brains, all quietly obsessed with the same thing. A year in rooms full of brilliant, exhausted creative leaders, and the same heartbreak kept surfacing under all of it: I had something good once, and I let it go.
We are not strangers to the feeling. Loren's Cannes-winning Persil work, the one about period shame, was killed five times before it lived; she is now Executive Creative Director at Publicis London. Adam has spent twenty years watching ideas get talked out of rooms across twenty-five markets, ran Europe's top creative school, and now runs Aizle, a company built to make itself unnecessary. Liza is a UX architect and creative strategist who has spent a decade learning why systems fail and designing the way through the friction. A creative meeting, it turns out, is just another system that breaks under pressure.
None of this is theory. It is the thing we wish someone had handed us, years ago, on a hard day. We agree on this: the point is not to win the argument. It is to improve the quality of creative work that goes into the world to make a positive difference. And we need more smart, brave and interesting creative work in the world, not less.
Follow the Index, submit a line, or come back before your next dangerous meeting. Your future self may need a better sentence.
Beyond Cannes
Bring The Kill List into your organisation.
We can start with a blank page, or we can bring the existing Kill List into your world and find the assassins that live in your culture. Same core method, your rooms, your language, your antidotes.
The session helps a team spot the reflexes that make work smaller, understand what those reflexes are protecting, and build the better sentences for the meetings where creative work is most exposed. It is not a creativity pep talk. It is a practical diagnostic for better creative decisions.
Found a line that works? File it in the Index.
Meet an assassin in the wild, spot the phrase, concede the fair point, and send us the better line. The Instagram feed is the public edge of the case file: a place for the polite, reasonable, completely lethal ways good creative work gets made smaller, and the lines people use to keep it alive.
Useful beats spicy. Patterns beat revenge. The best submissions help someone walk into a difficult meeting with a better sentence already in their pocket.