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Salmon Theory

🍣 10 ways to win your strategist's heart

Published 10 months ago • 1 min read

Hi friend – Rob here.

Yesterday we looked at what composer Tina Davidson said:

"Let your heart be broken. Allow, expect, look forward to. The life that you have so carefully protected and cared for. Broken, cracked, rent in two. Heartbreakingly, your heart breaks, and in the two halves, rocking on the table, is revealed rich earth. Moist, dark soil, ready for new life to begin."

And we covered how to break your strategist's heart.

Today, let's talk about how to win their heart instead.

It ain't rocket science.

Here are 10 ways to get started:

  1. Don’t worry about insight semantics. Worry about implications for the work.
  2. Respect flights of fancy. We're sorting out our own minds in public.
  3. Protect us by demanding clear guidance from the people in charge.
  4. Don’t ask for more slides, ask for a clearer story.
  5. Focus on whether the strategy is clear, not whether it sounds cool.
  6. Don’t belittle ‘negative’ language. All great work is born out of tension.
  7. Remember objectives (“we want to X”) are not strategy (“by doing Y”).
  8. Keep an open mind about what the underlying problem might be.
  9. Recognise that we know too little about audiences, so yes we need research.
  10. Don’t treat strategy as the warm up act, treat it like a MC at a boat day rave.

Do some or all the above, and you're guaranteed to have a fantastic love triangle.

Between you, your strategist and, er, the problem you're both trying to solve.

Not weird at all.

Salmon Theory

By Rob Estreitinho

Helping savvy strategists swim upstream.

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