Meaning and momentum as an operating system

Originally posted on the Beneath Agency blog. Thanks Adam!

Meaning and momentum

Adam Ketterer: Salmon Labs [Rob’s company and newsletter] is all about “meaning and momentum” – as your line goes – and that made sense, having read some of your stuff about how strategy is what you do, not say, and so on. But I wanted to ask what those two words mean to you and why you chose them. Are they at the heart of everything you’re doing with Salmon Labs?

Rob Estreitinho: Yes they are. It’s a very deliberate choice of words. I’m not going to bore you with the origin story of why it’s called Salmon Labs. But what I can tell you is that I absolutely love that salmon swim against the current. And that’s what a lot of our role is. 

We’re fighting inertia. We’re fighting gravity. We’re fighting business-as-usual, because most companies are probably going to be okay, at least in the short term, if they don’t change things. So that’s where the “meaning and momentum” thing came from. As a result of this inertia, sometimes you do things because that’s how you’ve always done them. And that isn’t even a dig on how organisations work. I would say it’s a dig on how strategists work. 

For some reason, we’ve accepted over time that strategy is a very rigid thing when, in fact, there’s endless ways of doing it. I’ve known people who do strategy by drawing from comedy. I know people who do strategy by drawing from writing. I know people who do strategy by doing workshops. I know people who do strategy by locking themselves away for two days and coming up with the answer. And it seems to me like it’s arrogant to say this one’s better than that one, just because it’s my way. 

My way, for example, is very collaborative. And I’m not afraid to say this, but I just don’t like the pressure of it all being on me. But I’m a very good channeller of where our energy is collectively. I’ll set the scene. I’ll get a sense of where different people’s heads are at, and I’ll go, “Okay now let’s try and channel all this energy into a shared bit of language. Into a shared trajectory.” And that’s what meaning and momentum is. It’s unifying how we’re thinking about this. But in such a way you can actually do stuff with it and act. What pisses me off is when we discuss the semantics so much that you go in and say, “It’s been 12 months. What have we done? We’ve done a hell of a lot of workshops.”  

That sounds like a terrible waste of money. And it’s not even my money, but it angers me. “Meaning and momentum” draws from the idea that inertia and chaos are what exists. That’s the default. Order is not the default. Chaos is the default. So when we show up, and we learn from the great wise salmon (that most glorious of animals), swimming against the current is what we do. And the way you do it is by basically learning how to create meaning on the fly and learning to keep that momentum going. 

Plus it’s an alliteration, which always does well.

Value-based vs time-based pricing

AK: I’ve seen you talk about value-based pricing and time-based pricing. And I think it’s one of those things where the positioning and the model are kind of the same thing. Let’s figure it out by doing it, you know? 

RE: And that’s the other thing as well. Meaning is born out of doing stuff. I think sometimes we stop ourselves from doing things because we think we need to get into the mindset of doing them. What I would argue is that very few people wake up and go, “Oh, man, I really feel like a run.” But try starting running and then you start to feel like that’s what you want to do. It’s like, the meaning for the activity happens after the activity has begun, right? And it’s true across so many things. If you want to write, if you want to be better at writing, you start writing, and then you see what works for you. You don’t try and work out the meaning of writing, and then go and do it. I always think action precedes the meaning you attach to that action. 

And so, in a way, that’s how I like to work with clients. The quicker we can get to what action might look like, we can then reverse-engineer what that means for the meaning behind that action. Now, I’m not saying just start doing stuff with no thought. What I am saying is, when you think about how to approach a project, it’s always good to almost start at the end result and then work backwards to the actions you need. Sometimes what happens is you just get so hung up on all this theory about strategy that you have this brilliantly compelling case and go, “Okay, so what do we do first?” And the answer is “Oh, we haven’t thought about it yet.” Like, fuck’s sake, really? Surely that’s the answer that you need to provide.

Strategists who write

AK: I want to talk about being a strategist who writes, and vice versa. You do both, and writing is integral to your work. I was lucky to work as a writer in B2B agencies where I think it’s maybe easier to jump over the wall and pretend you’re a strategist, and then just learn by doing. Getting to do positioning work and content strategy and stuff. And so many strategists are very good writers – it’s nice to see a strategist exploring that side of themselves more. There’s that event series – Life Sentences – where strategists share their personal writing or something—

RE: It’s great. I love it. 

AK: Oh, have you been?

RE: Oh, yeah. I joined the second one, I think. It was a lovely experience. And you get to meet such clever people as well. 

AK: How do you approach that strategist-writer divide in your work?

RE: I wouldn’t sell myself as a writer, because it’s not really like the source of my business. I’m not a copywriter, that’s for sure. But I would say I’m a writer just because I write. I write daily – and not just emails and presentations. But I put into practice the ability to string ideas together in a way that people understand them, and try and maybe be as unconventional as I can here, there, and everywhere. 

But most importantly, I try to be memorable. That’s why I’m so obsessed with one-liners and alliteration and just stuff that I – with my shitty elder-millennial memory – can remember. Because that’s the first audience: can you remember your own idea? That’s my first test, with my fragmented attention span: can I remember the stuff I said maybe a year ago? If I can, there’s probably some validity to it.

So in that sense, I would say, yes, I am a writer, but maybe not in the traditional sense.

Building Rob in public

AK: Well I enjoy consuming your writing through the Salmon Labs newsletter and what you might call the media arm of your business. And I know you’re doing a bit of community-building with your Salmon Crew for strategists. I enjoy the build-in-public vibe and how you’re quite open about the process of building, testing, iterating your ideas and your business. But what’s really nice is that you’re also building Rob in public, in a way. You’re thinking about your life. You’re sharing quite candidly your life and your experiences as a father, and as a son. How does that feel? Does it feel natural?

RE: Yeah, it does feel natural, in a way, because I was always encouraged to do it. A former boss of mine way back in like 2010, he kind of advocated for me to start a blog and, to his credit, I became addicted to writing. It’s just such a nice release. And it’s how I learned. So in a sense, yes, it’s building the company, but it’s also building me as the face of the company. Whether that changes in future, we shall see. 

But yeah, I’m trying to diversify what Salmon Labs is about by basically having, like you say, the media arm, which is part business development, part learning in public – which in itself acts as a form of business development – and then part revenue-making. So that’s where Salmon Crew comes in. When I started this journey as a business owner, I thought, rather than the exam question being, “How do I solve myself as a consultant?” my exam question was always, “How do I monetize my expertise?” – of which consultant is one answer. 

The other answer is doing stuff that people will pay for. That’s more separated from the time you dedicate to it, right? I don’t need to write 10 times more articles to get 10 times more people joining the community. So it feels like, in the long term, the economics might be good on that, but I won’t lie, it takes time and effort and a lot of mistakes.

But yeah, in a sense, it’s building my name – in order for the company to be more in people’s minds, let’s put it that way. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to have a company rather than just say “I’m now a freelance strategist” because that felt like it was going to put me in a box that I wasn’t ready to be put in, and that then creates a series of complications, right? Because as soon as you say you’re a freelancer, it immediately attracts the types of projects where all you can really discuss is your day rate and how long do you want to charge that day rate for? Whereas if you’re a business owner, yes, freelance work comes into play, but so does running your own projects and subcontracting your own teams. So does running a little media company on the side. 

So it just made more sense to me from the beginning to not just go, “Rob’s now a freelancer, and Rob is the thing to remember.” Rather I go, “I’ve started a company and Salmon Labs is the thing to remember.”

Strategy, philosophy, psychotherapy

AK: One of the fun things about this B2B POV series is talking about how the people behind the brands position themselves as practitioners. I remember reading something in your newsletter about the kind of defining features of your work or your thinking, that give you your edge. Yours are strategy, philosophy and psychotherapy. I wanted to dig into how you got into those interests and specialisms, and how they inform your niche. 

RE: I would say they’ve always been with me, but I’ve never really formalized them in my head until later in life. I was always a very inquisitive kid. I got exposed to philosophy in 11th grade and I absolutely loved it. My philosophy teacher basically goes, “I don’t care if your answer is wrong as long as your reasoning is right.” And so I’m like, “Oh, cool! I can work with that.” And so I enjoyed philosophy at the beginning for the wrong reasons. But then, over time, I started seeing a much richer side to it.

Now, I should say that I like philosophy, I don’t like a lot of philosophers. This is where I started drawing the connection with strategy because I like strategy but I don’t like a lot of the way that the practice is done. Similar to philosophy, strategy often feels elitist, overcomplicating things to make simple points, sometimes with language that’s not designed to be understood by people.

I think the reason the newsletter feels so personal is because it started as a personal project where I was trying to reconcile a lot of the questions I had about this industry. But I wasn’t satisfied with the resources I had at the time, and I just started realising that a lot of my ways of learning about stuff is by comparing it with things that in principle have nothing to do with them.

Lessons from the Stoics and the Existentialists

I’ll give you an example. I started making sense of strategy more when I started reading about how the Stoics and the Existentialists defined the nature of reality. With the Stoics, it’s always important to know what you can control and separate it from what you can’t. That, for me, is extremely useful advice when approaching a brief. Because when you’re a strategist, you try to solve for the whole thing. The reality is a lot of it is just not in your control, so just give yourself some peace of mind, for once, by knowing what you can control first. And then sure, having a point of view on what you can’t – but don’t worry too much.

Similarly, the existentialists had this great mantra about how freedom is what you do with what is given to you. Which, again, is kind of the same point – just, you know, different country and century, I suppose.  But stuff like that gave me more clarity around the job than reading all the books I had been reading until that point. And so I just started hanging on to the newsletter as a tool to make sense and find meaning around what strategy meant for me and how I would approach it.

“We don’t fucking know what we’re doing.”

And then, later on, the psychotherapy point came into play as well, because I just started realizing that there’s a lot in this job that is deeply emotional, if nothing else, because a lot of us half the time feel like we don’t fucking know what we’re doing. And so we freak out about it. And so we’re always anxious about it, we’re always double guessing ourselves, and I have those feelings as well all the time. But things like psychotherapy – and specifically having gone through therapy for a number of years – have given me tools that allowed me to be more conscious about when I’m entering those thought patterns so I can relate to myself in a bit more of a friendly way. Because we’re not very good friends to ourselves when we’re in those moments, right? We just think, “Oh, my God, I’m really shitty at this, aren’t I?” Or, “Oh, you know this person much better than me. That’s because I’m not classically trained.”

All that inner chatter exists, and it’s not about getting rid of it. It’s just about knowing how to manage it and how to spot it faster, and when you spot it, you go, “Oh, hang on. I’m doing a bit of that crappy self-talk. I’m not being a good friend to myself.”

“Being clear is the job.”

And I know that sounds a bit woo, but I do believe that if you’re operating out of fear of not being good enough then your primary reasoning for entering a meeting or writing a deck is going to be to impress someone. But every time I’ve tried to impress someone, I’ve overcomplicated the answer. And so impressing is not the job. Being clear is the job. You can’t be clear if you’re worried about all the things that others may or may not be thinking about you, and how inadequate you are. 

But I never got to any of these conclusions without going through therapy. And so now I’m like, okay, things I’ve experienced through therapy have also made me a more productive and sane strategy practitioner. And so that’s where a lot of those things then come together – and now Salmon Labs is the play space for all those ideas to come and hang out in my brain. And we see what comes out of them!

AK: That’s great. It’s a very merciful kind of outlook. You know, take it easy on your own brain. 

RE: I think merciful is a very good word for it. It’s like, give yourself a break, man. And learn to be friends with those ugly signs of yourself, because if you try and fight them, you’re always going to be in inner conflict, right? By the way, this is what depression is. It’s inner conflict. It’s rage turned within.

And so if you do that long enough you will end up depressed, and if you do it aggressively enough, you’ll end up clinically depressed, which, by the way, I have in the past. It’s just not fun. It’s just not. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It’s just a terrible, terrible place to be in, because you just don’t relate well to yourself. And so it’s very, very hard, if not impossible, to relate well to others. Because it makes you defensive, it means that you’re not fully paying attention to what the other person is saying. 

For me it’s about being a good friend to yourself, being merciful to yourself, treating yourself as you would treat a friend. If someone in my team told me they made a mistake, would the best way to encourage them be to shout at them? I don’t think so. I’m trying to basically be the team manager that I wish I had.

AK: Yeah, you’re the team, you’re the manager, you’re the mascot.

RE: I mean realistically, I am all of those things myself.

Therapy as strategy. Strategy as therapy.

AK: And therapy still seems to be a very American thing – therapy almost as a proactive thing. We don’t really do that in the UK. Therapy culture in America, maybe in certain groups, has almost become a leisure activity. But a positive one, right? 

And often you find that people who have what you might call examined lives, who take care and are thoughtful about themselves, tend to be thoughtful, interesting people in whatever work they’re doing. And that’s just more culturally encouraged in America, whereas in the UK it’s like, “Oh, you’re in therapy? Oh…” 

RE: I agree with that. And by the way, in Portugal it’s opened up a bit, but it definitely still gets an “Oh!” and a worried look, especially if you’re a man in therapy. Every time you say I’m going to therapy, people almost never ask, but what they’re thinking is, “Why, what’s wrong with you?” But that’s like saying you’re going to the gym and someone asking, “Why, are you injured?” And you go, “No, because I want to stay healthy.”

AK: Incidentally, the person who came to mind about living an examined life and doing interesting work is George Tannenbaum, if you know him?

RE: Yes. 

AK: Copywriting hero who mentions his own therapy occasionally in his blog [Ad Aged] that he’s published basically every day for like 20 years. And you get a sense from his blog, which is an immense body of work in itself – so rich and funny – that he’s therapeutising himself in it every day. And I think we need more of that. 

RE: I’ve not done therapy for a number of months now, but I think it’s something that definitely should be encouraged as an always-on thing. I’ve been feeling like I have enough tools now to kind of work with it, but it is something that in time I think I would do again like once a month. But what I would say is that I think therapy gives you the courage to admit that it’s okay to feel these things. It teaches you that there are no bad feelings. There’s just more or less intense feelings, but everything is a message. When your throat gets lumpy because you can’t breathe, or you’re having a panic attack because someone said something about you – your body’s trying to tell you something. It’s not a bad feeling. It’s information. So that’s what therapy teaches you: to be less judgmental about your feelings because they’re just information. There are things you need that your body is bringing to your attention, because it doesn’t know how else to do it.

AK: Yeah it’s just differently coded. And that stigma divide between mental and physical health is so true – going to therapy versus going to the gym. I found myself in a similar position when I got testicular cancer (I’m fine now, by the way) and for a while when I spoke to male friends, and guys I didn’t know that well to be honest, I would tell them to check their balls. Like a mini public service announcement. Which is funny because I’d never have felt comfortable doing that with mental health, but here I am, with guys that I’m on varying levels of intimacy with, and I’m talking to them about their balls like some kind of testicle evangelist. I think the stigma imbalance is improving slowly.

RE: Yeah, I think that’s the right way of looking at it. Things are improving. They could just go a bit faster.

B2B vs B2C (and B2B vs B2B)

AK: So, you work with B2C and B2B clients, and I wondered if and how you approach them differently. 

RE: It’s a bit like how you might think about, for argument’s sake, global and local communications. Any good campaign or piece of marketing activity needs to be born out of a customer understanding of some kind. And so in that sense, you start getting into the evidence and you go, “Well, you know, most people don’t really pay attention.” So you’ve got to lodge yourself in their memory, because that’s how you win. It’s to be remembered. You know, “First to mind, first to find.” You need to make it easy to buy from you, both mentally and physically or digitally. 

All of those foundations are kind of the same, right? So one of my favourite bits of research is about the role of emotion in B2B. I don’t know if they said it exactly this way, but I’ve said it so many times that I now just assume they did. It says that B2B is also emotional – it’s just different types of emotions. So you may not be looking for family values, for example, or a sense of connection. But you might be looking for pride and legacy. It’s still emotional, right? It’s just not the same types of emotions. 

But that being said, there are differences in B2B. For example, I worked on B2B before starting out on my own, and my founding client was a fundamentally B2B client. And what you notice is that yes, a lot of these foundational principles apply. One of the things that we don’t think about enough in B2B is not only what does your prospect need to think, but also what do their stakeholders need to think about that person? So if I’m selling you a service – think about it from the world of agencies. The whole thing about “No one ever got fired for hiring IBM” – there’s a truth in it, right? A lot of the time, part of the reason why you’re hiring an external partner and they’re taken seriously is because others have heard of them and hold them in relatively high regard. 

It’s not always the case. And certainly, for example, in our case – we’re not famous like the big agencies or the big external advisors out there – but there is an element of, when someone decides to hire you, they’ll need to justify it in front of someone else, and they want to look good when they do it. So whether that’s “I’m hiring these folks because they are the best in their field” or “I’m hiring them because I’ve worked with them in the past and I had a really good experience”, you’ll need to justify your decision. And whenever you need to justify a decision, it’s your status on the line.

“It’s totally fear-driven.”

And so thinking in those terms takes the principle of B2B as emotional, too, but then makes it very specific to the types of emotions and types of relationships that happen in a business or an organisation. What will make some feel more proud or less proud of their decision? So, in a sense, I don’t see them as different at an initial stage. 

But then, when it comes to the rollout and the commercial side of it, then they are very different. B2B takes longer. B2C depends on what type of industry it is. But it’s very different to sell a pack of Cadbury Heroes than to sell enterprise software for the Fortune 100 – even though they are both, I would argue, very emotional choices. And even though everyone’s probably more scared to play with controversial emotions (like anything negative) in B2B, it is totally fear-driven. It’s “I’m going to lose” and “Don’t be left behind” but also the personal stuff like “I’ll get fired. I’ll lose my credibility. I’ll waste millions of pounds or dollars.” That’s interesting, right? Try and imagine yourself on the brink of getting fired for a bad decision, and then tell me business isn’t personal.

AK: It reminds me of what I think Rory Sutherland said about applying behavioural psychology in B2B, which is that you have to apply it to groups of people. It becomes about group dynamics rather than just the individual buyer. 

RE: And just to build on that, because you mentioned Rory Sutherland, I’m a big fan of believing that most things aren’t rational, but that doesn’t mean they’re not logical. So you might say that it’s not rational for someone to undermine a project in an organization because that budget was meant to go to their team instead of the team it went to. It’s not rational, but it’s logical, right? Because it’s that person’s way of protecting their own career prospects. Or, similarly, if someone has a preferred agency and someone else has a preferred agency – this isn’t rational, you shouldn’t just go with what you like, but it’s logical, because in a B2B environment sometimes you go with what you like because it’s what you trust.

I know for a lot of people this kind of thing is boring, but I find it extremely fascinating these days. 

AK: That thing of, “People buy on emotion, and then justify their decision with reason.” So you have to front-load with the emotion, but then provide the evidence for them to post-rationalise. You need both, but the order is maybe not the one you think it is. 

RE: That’s exactly right.

Strategists as parents. Parents as strategists.

AK: I also wanted to talk about fatherhood and how you write about the ways in which it’s changed you. In one post you had a diagram breaking down your personal sources of meaning, and how parenthood changed things – and it wasn’t a simple flip. I got the impression you’re processing life in fatherhood rather than as a father. That it’s like another aspect.

RE: That article was something about pie charts of meaning. I got a bit dorky about making pie charts about where my meaning in life comes from. So there’s, let’s call it, the market share of these things. And then there’s the specific words I use to describe these things. And if you look at it superficially you might see that my ‘work’ source of meaning went from like 70% to 50% and you might think, “Oh work’s still a big part of it, it didn’t go down to 10% or whatever.” But that’s because work took on a different meaning. Work is not my way to prove myself, it’s now my way to provide.

I’m always going to try to do the best possible job, of course. But I’m no longer approaching it thinking, “Please, god, tell me how good I am!” because I don’t believe it myself – although there’s always a little bit of that. I now approach it as my responsibility to make work work for me so that I can provide for my family and be emotionally and physically present for my daughter and my partner. I still have my insecurities and my need for validation. We all do. But I have more self-assurance about what I’m good at. So of course work’s gonna be 50%. It’s where I spend most of my time! But it means a different thing now. 

AK: Reconciling those two lives – work and kids – I recognise that challenge. 

RE: When people now say, “Oh, I’m so busy I don’t have time.” I’m like, “You know nothing about time, child.” I say it as a joke, but I kind of mean it. I have become probably three times better at managing my time since having a kid. Because we have to be more efficient. We need to be more assertive and we need to know how to protect our boundaries. Otherwise it’s not doable. And so it’s like, the necessity makes you good because you have to be good.

AK: A value-based approach to parenting. 

RE: Yeah, exactly.