Hi friend – Rob here.

Today in Salmon Theory+: a summary of 'The Body Keeps The Score', by Bessel van der Kolk.

One of the first books my therapist recommended to me, years ago.

And reader, i have to say it fundamentally helped rewire my brain around the topic of chronic stress.

Which is good news, because that might be one way of defining strategy.

The "rewire brains" part, not the "chronic str"... actually, never mind.

Let's get into it.

📝 TL;DR:

1. Your business is probably underreporting its trauma
2. Study the business of creativity, not just creative business
3. Create conditions for shared doubt and shared responsibility
4. The paradox of giving something, or someone, 110%
5. Let your imagination produce skin in the game, not just slides

1. Your business is probably underreporting its trauma

There are two key moments that define whether therapy can be successful:

1. You show up to the appointment (hey, without it nothing happens)
2. You feel comfortable crying in front of your therapist (it's a primal game not a psychological game)

Until that second point happens, at least from my experience, you're not really "doing therapy".

You're performing a role in front of the therapist, and in my case trying to impress them with how smart i was (great use of 60 quid per session).

It's only when we're able to be fully vulnerable, which is another word for communicating more fully, that we can begin to heal.

Now, this doesn't mean the parallel is that we need to get our actual clients to cry in front of us before we can solve a brief.

However, it does mean that trauma can get in the way of full communication, which gets in the way of good work.

So i wonder to what extent we can talk about some businesses being traumatised based on how little they communicate.

It makes the problem of silos suddenly feel like more than a nuisance, it's a fundamental systems disconnect.

And much like in therapy, so to in business, you want to get the mind to speak to the body more often.

Maybe it's that the leadership's philosophy don't always add up to the frontline practices (extremely common).

Or that one department's priorities directly contradict some other department's, which creates the corporate version of an auto-immune disease.

One thing feels true though: a business which cannot communicate fully within itself, like a person, is probably repressing deep things it should not.

If you can get some parts of a business to communicate in a way that otherwise they wouldn't, that already counts as a successful first type of output.

2. Study the business of creativity, not just creative business

The more i speak to people who are senior enough at agencies, or ex-agency, or never been in agencies at all, the more i see issues in agency models.

Specifically when you consider brutally honest points of view like this one around how the time-based business model is fundamentally unscalable.

The great irony is that, in the current system, agency people end up having an increasingly lower sense of, er, agency over what they can do for a client.

In therapeutic terms, if you're starting a project knowing:

1. There's a slight chance that what you do may yield something later on (e.g. discount today, future brief tomorrow)
2. But historically speaking you've been around the block enough to know this is extremely rare (and therefore why bother)

Then your resilience around actually making it work goes down, because passion drops and nihilism kicks in.

If this sounds dramatic, it is, but that doesn't mean it's not true.

Instead, what you want is to create the conditions for knowing that work put in today will have a reasonable chance of yielding tomorrow.

If not creatively, then financially, which means deep down we need to have a harder look at how we price the value of the services we offer.

"Money talk" is not the strategists' job until you realise that, actually, strategists who can't "talk money" have fewer career options in the long run.

So study the fundamentals of the business of creativity, not just the creativity that's possible within a business.

3. Create conditions for shared doubt and shared responsibility

The extreme arrogance with which we sometimes may assume we've cracked a client's brief is funny at best, emotionally damaging at worst.

Look, some folks might thrive on this, and more power to them, but i am not convinced that showing up with a "my way or the high way" vibe works.

Or it can work, but it also creates strange emotional deterrents for someone to feel they can have a honest conversation with you, no agenda-wearing.

Instead, i believe smart clients are not afraid to show doubt in front of someone who is equally not afraid of showing doubt back.

And with great doubt, comes great responsibility, although by doubting (and trying to solve) together that responsibility gets shared more evenly.

Of course, ultimately, the greater responsibility comes from the client's side, but doubt also encourages us to stop asking them to "be brave".

Because saying "be brave", for someone with doubt, simply denies their reality, while recognising their doubt is real validates their experience.

And validating a client's experience, seems to me, is an extremely underrated way to lead a conversation into powerful spaces.

Because you're starting from a position of shared doubt, it stops being about the consultant standing against the client.

It becomes a situation where they're both side by side, standing against a problem.

4. The paradox of giving something, or someone, 110%

Picture two scenarios and imagine to whom you'd see yourself giving more of your time on a consistent basis:

1. The 'leader' who insists you need to work late because everyone else is, lest you're not "a team player" (not explicitly said, but often meant)
2. The leader who insists on protecting your boundaries, even if at their expense, because they know that's how they get the best of you

The great irony, perhaps paradox, is that for me situation #2 makes me far more likely to then go and proactively dedicate more time to that person.

Might be a simple attitudes vs behaviour equation, where breaking boundaries can provoke short-term behaviour but undermine long-term attitudes.

And protecting boundaries may affect short-term behaviour (i don't work tonight) while reinforcing long-term attitude (you got my back so i got yours).

In short, believing in the "pay it forward" dynamic of relationships may yet produce more interesting results in the long run than simply barking orders.

It's not too dissimilar to how great communications work, anyway: offer value upfront (entertain), before asking for value back (commercial gain).

Except it's less about impact/communication/persuasion in an ad, and it's more about planting healthy seeds which later grow something back.

The harder you work for your people, the more likely they are to work hard for you.

5. Let your imagination produce skin in the game, not just slides

Imagination is a fundamental aspect of being able to re-articulate our current predicament into something richer, more positive and more sustainable.

From a therapeutic standpoint, it takes a dose of humility and imagination to challenge our life's story to that point, and entertain something new.

From a business standpoint, this is the source of something you gain, as well as something you avoid:

1. You gain what we might call 'brand pleasure', which is getting to do interesting and memorable things that customers and stakeholders enjoy
2. While alleviating 'business pain', because you have greater odds of this resulting in better performance of your people as well as your marketing

When agencies talk about things like brand fame and creativity, it's easy to get infatuated by how romantic it all feels – modern day artisans, yeah?

But if brand fame is about better coverage at lower working media costs, and creativity is another word for potential of pricing power... shit gets real.

Lessons like this become extremely apparent when you're in charge of running your own business and consider what builds future vs present cash flow.

Perhaps yet another reason why imaginative people should run, at least once, something of their own before telling clients how to run their thing too.

It doesn't have to be successful, it just needs to be something where your imagination produced skin in the game, instead of just more pretty slides.

📝 TL;DR:

1. Your business is probably underreporting its trauma
2. Study the business of creativity, not just creative business
3. Create conditions for shared doubt and shared responsibility
4. The paradox of giving something, or someone, 110%
5. Let your imagination produce skin in the game, not just slides