Embodied practice
Hey – Rob here.
One of the frustrating things about the modern AI discourse is that it falls on the trap I’ve come to describe as the “if only they knew” bias. How it works is simple: we assume all people need is more information. And once they have more information, they do “the right things” (according to us).
You don’t need more than a couple of minutes in the real world to work out this isn’t quite how it works, is it? I mean, politics doesn’t work like this. Business doesn’t work like this. Education doesn’t work like this. Consumer decision making doesn’t work like this. And neither does this strange job we call “doing strategy for brands and comms”.
If the answer to marketing was simply to have more information, we’d have nothing else to do than simply look for all the information before deciding where we’re gonna get our morning latte. And you may argue AI makes this easier than ever before, but here there’s also a gap: you may have information, but do you trust the information you have?
All of this makes me think of theories of how we learn. It was the theme of my masters’ thesis, and in a strange twist of fate some of those lessons are now coming back as we make sense of all things AI. In theory, education and training are no longer necessary because surely you can simply ask Google Gemini to give you the best articles on how to write a brand strategy or what good comms looks like? Job done, right? ... Right?
Except of course, what you then have there isn’t access to the best information per se, but the most influentially disseminated information. We are, and always have been, in a global consciousness machine where whoever influences events most effectively has the greatest chance to win. Sorry, truth seekers. Almost everything’s spin and influence games.
Sure, many things are the right kind of spin and influence games. We need to keep fighting for the importance of good marketing fundamentals, how the climate crisis is definitely real, the importance of peer-reviewed science on all things planet, people and systems, and challenge falsehoods that may swing elections towards authoritarianism. The good things need reinforcing as much as the bad things need us to push back. Nothing's guaranteed, and the "end of history" has proven to be a naive theory.
Anyway. Point is, it’s useful to recognise that spin is indeed all around us, and like any tool you can use it for good or for evil. So what does all this have to do with education and strategy stuff? Well, if we’re not careful, our minds and progression are spun in strange ways that may make us feel reassured (the AI said so!) but in reality our impact becomes quite limited.
One under-discussed way in which we learn? Through practice. And practice, while depending on good quality information, goes much deeper than that. It’s not just a brain thing, it’s a body thing. By practising you’re not only assimilating knowledge in ways that pure theory cannot achieve, but you’re also building muscle memory about how to do certain things.
Practice is a full body act. You know your stuff, and you feel it enough in your body to argue for it, and feel good about how much you know and how much you can argue for it. It's intellectual, emotional and physical, because all our 'feel good' sensations are basically bodily sensations.
In fact, the broad realm of “knowledge work” (a term which needs to die cos knowledge alone is cheap) is a full body act too. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s not been doing this for a number of years, but something in your body and gut starts telling you when you’re onto something good.
A good strategy has a feel to it, it has its own rhythm, one might even argue its own sense of musicality. A real shape of a story. And once you see this, you can’t really un-see it. In most instances, all we’re really working with is a variation of the following general narrative flow:
The business needs to do this
But the audience thinks or does that
So what if instead we reframed it as this
Therefore this is a new way to look at it
And look it changed things this way
Sure, the details change, but the beats of most narratives are largely the same. And that leads me to something I’ve been toying with: why don’t we do more group practice sessions? Why don’t we make it ok to jam live about strategy, and see how others work through things? I remember the good feedback Piotr and I received when we did our experiment on live tackling strategy problems with AI. I want to do far more of this stuff.
Why? Because my theory is that this helps everyone out there feel less intellectually isolated when it comes to doing this strategy thing. Between people getting into freelancing, being strategy teams of one or working remotely (or, y’know, being part of the Omnicom bloodbath and not knowing where to go or what to do next), we need a better sense of how others work so we can continue learning with each other through osmosis.
This is the real value of in-office work, the feeling of how others work and trying those modes of work on for size, but the world’s changed and so how we learn and practice should change too. It’s something I want to crack soon, so that anyone who joins the Salmon Crew can not only have access to a community of mutual support, a swipe file with all the curated information they might need to get going, but also practice spaces to feel ok about where they’re going. Intellectual, emotional, physical practice.
It’s clear that any sense of relative stability ain’t getting any better soon, and in the absence of stable systems we need to fall back on each other. A small contribution I want to make is to hold that space in more interesting and nourishing ways from 2026 onwards. And all 200+ Salmon Crew members will be a core part of how I make that real. I hope you’ll consider joining us so you can co-create the spaces that you wished always existed.
Keep swimming,
Rob
