The Problem Is the Problem: Why solving symptoms won’t fix your marketing, with Nick Richtsmeier

Elliot: Hello, and welcome to the Bon Sauce podcast, where we chat about branding and marketing pain points with me, Elliot, founder of Marketing Consultancy Bon Creative. My co-host, Eliška founder of branding outfit, Light Sauce Studio is still on a well-deserved holiday, so we’ve got yet another special guest. Today I’m joined by Nick Richtsmeier. He’s the founder of Culture Craft and Trust Made Growth. And he’s also the author of The Damn Rules: How vulnerability, inefficiency, and love liberate leaders from the trust broken economy. Nick, thanks for joining me. So glad to be here. So every episode, Nick, we do a secret sauce. I think we’re gonna do things a bit differently than what we normally do. And we’re gonna get to the end and figure out what the secret sauce is. But to really tease it, it is how to actually find and solve the problems in your business.

Nick: Essentially because we got a lot of folks in branding and marketing on the call, is my understanding. People who are your listeners and audience. Anybody in branding and marketing know that you’re often invited to be the sin eater of fundamental problems, right? That instead of being a part of the solution, you’re like, “Hey, this thing’s a mess. “Can you make it look pretty?” Right? You’re brought in too late to the game. The decisions are already made, right? You’re downstream of problems. So really, Elliot, what you and I talked about, and I think what we’re gonna do today is we’re gonna bring that skillset way up to the front of the decision making. We’re gonna give you some ideas on

Nick: how to get into those conversations in the right way. Often branding and marketing leaders are like, “Hey, I’m not at the table.” And then we’ll have some very specific, more sort of secret sauce style tips at the end.

Elliot: Perfect. That’s what we need. So let’s dive into the book itself. Let’s take, I guess, a step back. It gives the context for the damn rules. Why now? What exactly is it?

Nick: Yeah, I originally wrote, when I was running a more sort of design slash strategy oriented studio, I originally wrote the seven rules in a much shorter format for the team because I was challenged to help them really give differentiated advice to our clients. And because I had not come out of the marketing ecosystem, I came out of the executive suite of a mid-sized financial firm, but I had marketing in my purview and I like to imagine myself a creative. I just saw the whole thing in a different way. So initially it was a way to help creative people think about business style strategic advice. And it sat that way for five or six years. And then everything that has happened since post COVID started to become real, right? And so the way that those of us who kind of research and look at these things, talk about it, is there’s sort of this like watermark around 2018, 2019, this sort of peak of the digital ecosystem. Ads still worked, funnels relatively made sense. There was still some attribution issues and people arguing about dark web and all this kind of, like there was a lot of that kind of stuff. But the fundamental guidance was, hey, go be online, figure out a customer journey for your people. And eventually, as long as you’re not an idiot, magic shit will happen. COVID was certainly disruptive of that. But what was going on beneath the surface is that the major platforms, Meta, Google, et cetera, were slowly coming away. Can we now know this from like literal congressional testimony and documents and other things were slowly coming away with the fact of like, hey, us being sort of the free portal to the internet was a fun time. What if we didn’t do that?

Nick: And what we saw kind of post COVID and particularly peaking in 22, 23 was what I refer to as the closing of the web.

Nick: And so the primary portals to the internet still exists, but they’re trying to keep you from moving traffic. And this was before the AI overlay. And then you add the AI overlay and it’s sort of only tanked from there. Now, I hope we don’t have millions of callers from the digital marketing space or people sending you emails being like, “Ah, that’s not true. Our stuff still work, right?” I get it, stuff still works at some basic level. But the overall mechanics of the internet are no longer, and the system is no longer designed to do what it was being used to do throughout the 2010s. And that’s a huge problem. Now that was the beginning of the problem, but that’s a huge problem.

Elliot: And do you think this book is a way to wake people up to that fact? Because it would be lovely if we had millions of listeners full stop. But reading through the book, it felt like a wake up call. It felt like a way for, one of the things I love most about the book is it’s a way for us to be able to describe what we have felt has been happening for a few years, right?

Nick: Yes. So it’s still the same rules as it was seven years before, but the book became a way to lodge those seven rules in what was happening and what has been happening and what’s gonna continue to be happening for the next five to 10 years in an understanding of real fundamental systems thinking that this isn’t about one platform or one player. It isn’t even really about marketing. This is about a fundamental shift in the way organizational power and organizational growth is allocated.

Nick: And what started to become really clear is that what I originally thought was a digital decay starting out in the 2010s goes all the way back to a trust decay going back into the 1980s. And so we’re really at a nadir of a 40 year trend and as I work with leaders and coach CEOs and help people try to find their footing in this economy, one of the things I’ve become clear to me is everybody knows how to talk about trust, but people really completely don’t understand how fundamentally broken it is. And I don’t want it to be like a fear mongering hand waiver, but we can’t address problems if we don’t understand the systems layer. So the book really tries to surface the systems layer of what’s going on and then get very practical, get very, very practical about what you go do.

Elliot: So give us a quick run through of the seven rules because today we’re gonna focus on one of those rules. Give listeners an overview of the seven.

Nick: Yeah, so the thing to understand is these aren’t like rules, like here’s what you go do for good behavior. This is like rules of a game because the book really invites you into a different kind of an economic game than the one that you’ve been enticed to play, the one that is much more like monopoly where you’re just gonna keep playing and keep getting poorer and poorer and poorer as you go. So we invite you to a different set of rules, the damn rules. The reason why they’re called the damn rules is because it’s like, well, gosh, damn, I wish this wasn’t true, but it is, right? And so each one of them has a little bit of that flare. The first one is no one’s paying attention. This is the hardest news for digital marketers, but no one’s paying attention. Number two is it was never about you.

Nick: Number three is the problem is the problem. Number four is the customer is wrong. Number five is the competition is your friend. Number six is the villains are in the building. And number seven is love is the strategy.

Elliot: So this is systems level thinking. I’ve heard you speak about, you put it in great terms, the extractive system and the expansive system and how, as soon as you explain that, as soon as you kind of put a name to it again, we go, oh, right, that’s what it is. And then the expansive side is where we need to move to any anyone, I think with any ounce of common sense recognizes that we need to move to the expansive side of things. But the whole point of these rules is to highlight that extractive system. Give us a summary of exactly where the world is currently suffering in the extractive system and where we want to take it to.

Nick: Yeah, so I’ll do this part briefly. It’s the first chapter of the book, but essentially extraction really becomes quite powerful.

Nick: In areas where there’s broad level change. And so the first chapter really explains and maps out the fact that we’re in system-wide change, not just the internet, not just marketing. We’re in global socioeconomic change, we’re in political change, like fundamental systems that says, okay, this is how the world works, just aren’t there in the way that they used to be, right? We’re talking across the pond, right? That system, the relationship, right? The

Nick: blessed relationship, or special relationship. Special relationship.

(Laughing)

Nick: Right, the special, I lost the word, I lost the word. The special relationship, right? That is not, and we could list those out in droves, right? And all of that creates deep insecurity. Well, Gramsee, who was a thinker in the sort of post-fascist Italy, talked about how these interregna, these spaces between ruling eras, was an opportunity for monsters.

Nick: And so the reason why we see this rise in extraction is because there aren’t fundamental systems to keep it from happening. And so extraction really is a very simple idea. It just, it sounds complicated. And the idea is the relationship between the three layers of a business, right? So the base layer in extraction is the production layer. And the production layer is all about finding something that you can’t own, and then controlling access to it and charging rent to it. So oil, data, people’s social media feeds, right? These sort of, the base layer of an extraction system is, we’re gonna take control of this, even though we can’t own it. We can’t own the oil underneath the ground, but we can control access to it, right? Then we’re gonna add an operating layer where everything other than the thing that we control access to stops working,

Nick: right? So if you think about the Rockefellers and Standard Oil, one of the biggest reasons why Standard Oil was so powerful in America at the turn of the century was because the Rockefellers controlled the trains, it controlled the pipe, it controlled everything. It started to control what got put in people’s houses and didn’t get, and all of a sudden houses always had to have lamplights, and now those lamplights were tied to Standard Oil, right? So you start to control the systems by which everything happens, right? So that’s the, and then everything becomes rent seeking. So the users of the system, the users of the extractive game, don’t ever actually own anything. And if you think about what it’s like to be on a business on the internet today, you’re always on rented land, right? You don’t own the data, you don’t own the contacts, you don’t own the network, you don’t, and you’re crossing your fingers at this thing that you’ve invested in, whether it’s Substack or LinkedIn or Ghost or whatever, is gonna be virtuous enough long enough for you to justify being a thief on rented land, right? And then eventually this becomes negative, right? Eventually culture catches on and people go, gosh, this is a real problem, we should do something about this. And then extractive systems are incredibly skilled at using PR and political leverage to maintain the narrative, right? And so you see that today with OpenAI and Anthropic and all of these systems, that their primary mechanism is not actual delivery of solutions, their primary mechanism is PR. When they

Nick: ship out the CEOs, is to craft the narrative. We’re gonna cure cancer. We have no evidence of curing cancer, but we’re gonna cure cancer, right? We craft the narrative and we have relationships with political power to make that happen. So that system is everywhere and we are all

Nick: to some degree participating in it. And there are small versions and big versions, I use the big versions in the book as a way of capturing this. And the point isn’t to demonize or virtue signal and go, look at me, I’m not an extractive system. The point is to understand the fundamentals of what’s happening so that you can see the enticements. Because one of the great things about extractive systems is they’re very good at enticing people to play. Usually by offering you the, there is no other option card. I talk to people about this all the time and they’re like, well, what else do you expect us to do? You expect us to wander the streets and put banners on polls and, you know, so there’s this inherent cynicism that riles up because of the belief that this is the only game in town. Well, it isn’t the only game in town. In fact, it’s actually the most failing game in town. It’s the most expensive, the most resistant to change, the most incapable of reacting to current needs, right? The most politically dependent, right? You look at what’s happening with the hyperscaler AI systems and how expensive they are, how capital intensive they are. You look at the cash flows of these major corporations, Facebook is cash flow negative for the first time in years. They burn through all their money, right? And they’re burning political capital as they go, right? So these systems are incredibly expensive. Now we can cross our fingers and go, well, maybe it’ll all work out and they will cure cancer. And someday they’ll all send us money in the mail and we won’t have to work anymore and magical things will happen, right? This is the fantastical promise of the extractive system that a thing that has fundamentally taken everything will someday wake up and have a moral awakening and give everything back. It’s never gonna happen. So an expansive system, just to finish the narrative works in the opposite direction. So quite simply an expansive system works with from relationships first, like, hey, here’s some people I know, here’s some people I care about, what could I do for them?

Nick: How could I help them? How could I serve them? How could we provide value, right? And then we build an operating model that makes that value repeatable and consistent. And we build networks of relationships, and we start understanding what that fundamental network and community could look like. And then we build a production layer on top of it where we make stuff that’s good for those people,

Nick: right? So it’s the exact inverse dynamic of an extractive system. And so people sometimes gonna be like, well, I don’t use AI, so I couldn’t possibly be extractive. Let’s not, we’re not talking about, we’re not talking about your individual behavior or your moral code or your intentions. What we’re talking about is how systems work in the flow of energy and what that does to create opportunity. So that’s the background, and this is why we’re doing this now, because this is everywhere.

Elliot: Amazing, amazing. One thing I really like that you said on another podcast is that it can sound, or it can feel very overwhelming, when you explain an extractive system versus an expansive system, we’ve got so much work to do. But you said that the beautiful thing is that history shows that as power becomes more centralized and more accumulated, it becomes more fragile. That’s right. We underestimate this. That’s right. And so we’ll get into rule number three in a moment. The problem is the problem, but I think it does tie into that in that if we can see the problems as they are, and the problem with the extractive system is a centralization of power to really simplify it, a centralization of power that becomes more fragile, but becomes more insular. Yes. And becomes more protective of itself, so that you believe that there’s no other route through. Well then, if we can recognize that, I think we’ll start to see the solutions a lot easier.

Nick: That’s right. And to give a very specific example of that, again, AI is such an easy way to understand this, not because AI is fundamentally worse than a bunch of other things, but because it’s so easy to understand it. You look at AI and you look at the ways that it’s receiving mass social rejection, particularly in younger people. And it’s not working and it’s not being appreciated, and people don’t want data centers in their neighborhoods and in their towns and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What’s interesting to think about, is AI fundamentally more toxic than social media?

Nick: You could really make a case that it’s not. You could make a case that of the two, if you had to pick a real toxin, social media is the toxin. But social media retains a level of cultural acceptance. Well, why is that?

Nick: If we follow the model of extractive systems, it’s only simply because AI is the next more fragile layer of the system. So it’s trying to use all of the tooling of social media, all of the addictive habits, all of the freemium, and then high prices, and then closing the doors and keeping you trapped, and isolating into monopolistic players. It’s using all of the learnings from social media and certainly scraping the internet and stealing everybody’s content and all that.

Nick: It’s using all those tools, but doing it in a way that is more fragile. There’s more mistakes, there’s more errors, there’s more problems. And this evolution from social media to AI is exactly how extractive systems always work. They get more fragile, they get more rigid, and they get more insular. The AI guys couldn’t give a crap about what the public thinks. Couldn’t care less.

Nick: There was an error in social media where there was a literal attempt to actually pander to the culture. And I think that’s part of the reason why social media still retains some level of resilience is because you have an Instagram or something like that that people say that they hate, but it feels like a cultural hallmark. Where people say they hate X because it’s not Twitter anymore, but they still go on there because their celebrities are on there, stuff like that.

Nick: You’re just not seeing that kind of resilience with AI, and I think it’s just because it’s a later stage in extraction.

Elliot: So let’s dive into rule number three. Let’s do it.

Elliot: When I was reading the book and when we were having a chat, this rule stood out to me. To remind people, the rule is the problem is the problem. And it stood out to me because really, the summary of it is that the way I read the chapter is that problems often sit below the symptoms. So we see the symptoms, but the problem is much deeper. And we see this when we do client workshops, and I’m sure you do as well when you sit in meetings is as you talk through things, those symptoms become clear, but the problem sitting below those symptoms becomes clear. And a lot of the time, I notice at least, is that the symptom management, the firefighting, is so addictive for people that they don’t want to recognize that the problem is deeper. They’d rather just look at the symptoms and solve the symptoms. I know you mentioned a few things like that in the chapter, but give us a bit of a context on how you find that level of things.

Nick: Yeah, for sure. So human beings love symptoms no matter what, right? We’re in pain, we want the pain to go away. And I try to be very empathetic about that. Like this is just what it is to be a human, like make this go away, right? And then you think about what it’s like to be a founder or a CEO of a medium or large size company, and you realize that that person sitting in that chair, and this is where some people have to kind of step away from the class warfare that has become the logic of our time and go, well, you think it’s a pretty good person sitting in that chair, they’re abutted with problems all day long, their whole life is problems. All day long, it’s different people reporting them, hey, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong. And so when they convene a room, whether it’s for a workshop or they brought in a consultant or they gave you some budget or they decided to elevate a problem and put a team around it, when they convene a room to say, hey, we’re gonna work on this,

Nick: their emotional framework for that is, why are you mad at me? I said we were gonna try and fix it, right? And what happens in the room, because they are the primary recipients of the pain, is, hey, we don’t want just

Nick: lip service, we want to actually solve the problem.

Nick: But usually the team in the room doesn’t have the visibility into the root causes to actually know what the systemic problems are. Certainly have instincts, but they’re not necessarily at the tables where decisions are made, they have opinions about what’s made, the decisions are made at those tables, right? And so you have this dichotomy between the relationship between access to information and felt pain.

Nick: And when you have that dichotomy where the people who have access to the knowledge are different than the people who feel the pain, you have the ferment of extraction, you have the environment where extraction thrives, it’s like, hey, cool, we can do breads and circuses for these people in pain and keep power allocated over here. And that’s not because these are bad people, it’s because this is how systems work and how systems play on the neurology of human beings. Now we add that up a whole other level and go, well, what happens when everybody’s neurologically cooked? Right? They’re overwhelmed by information from the internet, they’re lonely as hell because we did disconnected and isolated from each other, they’re emotionally anxious and high tension because of the way we live our lives, right? And so then inherently trust broken, right? They can’t, they bring distrust to almost every situation and cynicism is right there ready to be grabbed. That’s the ecosystem under which every, almost every firm and every team meeting and every situation is making decisions. Not because you aren’t trying to build a trustworthy firm, but because this is how our lives are adding up. And so if we want to get past symptoms, which I think inherently everybody does, if you go to a CEO and say, “Hey, do you want us to just solve these symptoms “or do you want us to make the root cause go away?” They’re all gonna say, “Well, I want the root cause to go away.” But we have to understand all of the forces that are keeping everybody playing this broken game and they’re intensive. And one of the things to really solve system problems, a brand or product or whatever, whatever systems you’re playing in, one thing you have to understand if you’re gonna solve at the systems layer is to understand that whatever the status quo is, no matter how bad it is, it’s that way because everybody wants it that way.

Nick: And so you have to really start to shift incentives and all of those kinds of things to start to get at something below that.

Elliot: And in each chapter you present a system for each rule, I guess. And that features a vulnerability, a kind of extractive offer, which I see as the easy solution, like the shortcut to address the vulnerability, to address the pain. But then you present an alternative route, which is the trust factor and then the inefficient practice, the expansive practice.

Elliot: In the problem is the problem, the vulnerability is ignorance. And that essentially describes what you just said there. You’ve got separate, almost like siloed parts of the business, there’s ignorance between them, there’s ignorance between the layers. When I think about marketing and my experience as a marketer, either in-house or as an agency slash consultant, to me the ignorance leads to marketing being at the sharp end of everything, right? Earlier on with the sin eaters, most symptoms just get linked to marketing because it’s the easy thing to do, right? Yep. But then I guess the way that you’re presenting it is that the extractive system makes that worse despite you thinking that you’re solving the symptoms, it makes the marketing worse. You’re spending too much time solving for the symptoms and then essentially creating a leaky bucket on the other end. So nobody wins.

Nick: That’s right, it gets more expensive, more labor intensive, more challenging, right? And if you’re a marketer, you’re like, “Hey, welcome to my life, right? This is the last 10 years of my life.” What used to be easy now is hard, there’s more steps, the ads are more expensive, the ROI is worse, the ROAS is worse, right? No matter what area of the space you deal in, there is overwhelming consensus that it’s 10 times harder than it used to be. And that is the cumulative effect of extraction.

Nick: But it’s also more importantly the cumulative effect of people running from that vulnerability of ignorance.

Nick: Right, if you think about what has really plagued marketing over the last 10 years, a lot of it comes down to attribution.

Nick: And the enormous amount of money spent and credibility spent to try and convince the universe that we could tell you exactly where revenue came from, exactly what behaviors produced it, exactly what did it. And then of course you get marketers to the bar and buy around, all of them will tell you, well, you can’t, it’s impossible. Even the people who sell attribution software will tell you it’s impossible, right? Go to a HubSpot conference, for heaven’s sakes.

Nick: And what that really is, is marketing bought into a lie, unwell meaningly, I was a part of this, I was on those stages, marketing bought into a lie in the middle 2010s of we don’t have to be afraid of ignorance anymore, because of the data rich quality internet, we can know everything.

Nick: So we don’t have to feel the vulnerability of ignorance anymore. Whereas if you were doing marketing in 1988, ignorance was everything, you didn’t know, right? You’re like, hey, we’re gonna test some things, we’re gonna try some things, we’re gonna put some ads out, we’re gonna, you know, and there was an acceptance that ignorance and not knowing was part of it, and which is why you brought creatives in, because when you don’t know what to do, you use creativity to explore your options. Well, by 2018, 2019, there’s no need for creativity more, because we’re supposed to know everything.

Nick: And unfortunately, the CEOs are late adopters of this knowledge, because they don’t pay attention to this stuff, so CEOs today are still thinking it’s 2018, and going, don’t you know? Don’t you know whether this blog made us money? Don’t you know how many clients, customers this ad added? And all of this is our deep angst about feeling like we don’t know what we’re talking about. And marketers, unfortunately, have been so pummeled that they can’t, maybe can’t or shouldn’t sometimes, come to the table and say, hey, we don’t know that, and pretending we know that it’s actually gonna waste everybody’s time, so let’s actually work on what we can know. But that’s really hard to do.

Elliot: Yeah, it almost gives me anxiety thinking about having that conversation with certain people. It’s a bit like a therapy session, hearing you say that, Nick, because over and over again, I guess you mentioned HubSpot, there are plenty of other tools. We did an episode on this about how tactics aren’t really gonna save you. When you want to pull the marketing lever,

Elliot: people just go to tactics, but that’s not the solution. The solution, it goes deeper, it goes into strategy and making sure that the decisions you’re making are actually the right ones before you go, ah, we’ll just put it into chat GPT, or we’ll just run some Facebook ads. Yep, yep. I guess there’s two things. From a marketing point of view, we have this deep-rooted anxiety that we always need to justify what we’re doing, right? That no other department seems to have or seems to need to show as much. So from a vulnerability of ignorance, if we’re trying to lean into the resistance that we feel when we think of that as marketers,

Elliot: you mentioned in one of your “Dams Given” podcast episodes about leaning into the energy of resistance.

Nick: Yep, that’s right.

Elliot: How do we do that? How do we push through and actually realize the potential of that energy?

Nick: Yeah, well, let’s look at it from two layers. Let’s look at it from the layer of you and your own resistance, which really is gonna start to feel like therapy, just warning you.

Nick: And let’s look at it from a team or a business level, the resistance of other people in the room, right? So we’ll start with the easy one first. So one of the things we have to do when we’re doing systems work is point out when a narrative has become blindly accepted, even if the narrative has the elements of being true. And one of the narratives that marketers blindly accept is no one appreciates us, no one believes in what we do, and we’re always gonna be the ones to get blamed for everything. There’s a sort of a littlest brother narrative here that’s been developed and it’s kind of impenetrable, right? If you actually talk to marketers and try to do some coaching and say, well, okay, what if we didn’t let that be the prevailing narrative? What if your boss who pays you a lot of money and pays your agencies a lot of money and pays your team a lot of money actually wants you to succeed, but he doesn’t know how?

Elliot: I’ve just sensed a few dozen people sticking their fingers in their ears and saying, “La, la, la, la, la, la, la.”

Nick: Yeah, and if you want to white-knuckle a narrative and say, “I’m gonna hold onto this belief “and I’m gonna hold onto it until the ship goes down. “I hope you enjoy the bottom of the ocean.” I don’t mean to be harsh, but to actually solve problems, and that is what we agreed we were gonna talk about today, is how to actually solve problems. You have to hold your narratives loosely.

Nick: The stories you tell yourself, the hey, it’s always this way or this is how it’s always gonna happen or this is, any of those framing narratives, you have to hold them loosely because what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna cause you to see the problem in the way you’re expecting it to be rather than what it actually is. So if we always assume the CEO’s problem is a lack of belief in marketing, we just start with, “Well, let’s see, oh, it doesn’t.” And I’m not saying that there are people on this call that don’t have a CEO that doesn’t believe in marketing. Like, that does exist. I’m not saying that those individuals don’t exist. But if that’s the case, if you’re the lead marketer at a firm where the CEO fundamentally thinks you’re a waste of time and money, you really probably should get a different job. I mean, that’s insane.

Nick: Or if you’re an agency and one of your clients fundamentally thinks you’re a waste of money, you really probably shouldn’t work with that client. I mean, like, that’s it, what are you doing? This is a recipe for-- Simple solutions, right? Just get out. Right, yeah. So we have to believe that maybe the narrative that they don’t believe in us and they fundamentally think we’re gonna fail might not be the best prevailing narrative. And so we open ourselves up to a different narrative, which is maybe the CEO wants this to succeed, but is a mixture of things, deeply uninformed,

Nick: maybe disinterested, maybe afraid.

Nick: What I find with a lot of CEOs, many, many, many CEOs who often create a lot of chaos for their marketers is they find it all very intimidating.

Nick: They don’t think they’re creative people. They don’t understand the jargon. The jargon overwhelms them. The giant reports of the 17 pages with a meter for this and a meter for that and a meter for this feels like, it feels like distraction. Well, ironically, it is distraction,

Nick: right? And so what we mean by surfacing resistance and using it as a superpower or what we sometimes call trusting the distrust is if we treat our quote unquote adversary in this relationship as a reasonable actor. If we’re like, okay, the CEO or the C, sometimes the CFO is a challenge, right? If the CFO is challenging it and when we look at her and go, okay, she’s a reasonable actor, she’s doing reasonable things, everybody in the system is behaving the way the system wants them to behave. So if our intent is to break the system, then we have to treat people in the same way we would treat ourselves, which is we are slaves to a broken system. Well, the CFO is a slave to the broken system. And what is she, if she’s giving us distrust, if she’s giving us resistance, what does she want? I bet we’ll find that in a lot of cases, she really wants this to work so that she can stop thinking about it. And she really wants a way to look at this so that she doesn’t have to become an expert in marketing metrics, because that’s a real pain in her ass, right? And it’s always gonna be contextual. We gotta look at the particular person, we gotta look at the particular roles, we gotta look at the particular, but once we accept that resistance is just the system trying to keep itself in the status quo, it’s all resistances, it’s just a system trying to hold the status quo. We can go, oh, okay, well, you’re afraid, I’m afraid, everybody’s afraid, everybody’s afraid that change is gonna be, something changing and this is gonna be worse. So how can we engage that in ways that actually move us towards solving problems? You may need more support to do that. You may not have the authority or credibility to do that. That’s sometimes why people bring us in as we help break the log jam, right? Or we can say the same things in a different way to the people in the C-suite, right?

Nick: You may need some training. You may need, there’s a lot of things that may be needed to disrupt the status quo, but the first thing we have to do is we have to lay down our battle lines and go, what else might be happening here?

Nick: Because that resistance usually means somebody gives a shit

Nick: and then we have to figure out maybe they’re just giving a shit in a way that’s also

Nick: driven by the fact they’re very afraid.

Elliot: And that sounds completely reasonable in a lot of ways, but it also sounds like difficult work, like work that takes time and takes trust and takes conversations that are maybe more difficult than what most people are used to. So I guess this is where there’s a fork in the road, right? When it comes to your system within each chapter and the fork in the road within rule number three is you have this vulnerability, you have this ignorance. You can choose the extractive off of the shortcut, the temptation, which is to just use the users.

Elliot: Dive into that for us, explain how that works.

Nick: Yeah.

Nick: So use the users is a hand-me-down from the VC world, right? The idea of use the users really stems from media platforms and things like that, of like, well, we’re just gonna create these systems where a bunch of people are gonna work for us for free by virtue of being able to live on our land, right? So, and that gets into data scraping, it gets into all these other things. But the more kind of complex and insidious ways it starts to show up is in like freemium communities, in

Nick: putting everything into customer surveys and oh, we’ll just interview the customers, marketers do this all the time, where they can’t get the leverage with the CEO. So they’re like, hey, let’s go talk to some customers.

Nick: And of course, it’s good to talk to customers, talking to customers is important, having relationship with the customers is important. And expansive system starts with relationships.

Nick: But expansion cannot start with me going to the users and going, hey, who do I need to talk to to get the narrative I need to convince these guys to give me the budget I want? That’s use the users.

Nick: And so I feel vulnerable when I’m in the room in a business setting that I don’t have, I don’t have the weapon of choice. I don’t have the access to the finances. I wasn’t in the strategic planning session or whatever. I feel the vulnerability of ignorance. I don’t have the knowledge that I think I need. Oftentimes marketers feel like they don’t have the training. They can’t read a P&L in the way that other people in the room can read a P&L. Like they just don’t feel like they have the juice to compete in that dialogue.

Nick: So they go, well, where can I overcome my, knowledge gap? I’ll just bring in some user stories. Let’s pepper the deck with some user stories. Let’s get some quotes.

Nick: And this is all well-meaning but insidious forms of use the users because what happens is it calcifies the resistance.

Nick: And what happens on the other side is, oh, great, here they go with some anecdotal thing that they can’t prove or here’s another quote or here’s another long story about somebody they did an interview with. I mean, it’s a great story, but that’s not even our good client. I know that lady. I don’t even like that client. I wish we didn’t have, right? And all of a sudden it becomes more triggers for more cynicism because you started from the vantage point of how can I use this to overwhelm my vulnerability and win the upper hand in this war over the symptoms versus the problem. And that’s always gonna come to extractive ends. It’s always gonna create more tension and more distrust.

Elliot: So I guess it’s thinking

Elliot: in the moment about the long tail effect of the extractive habits that you’ve chosen or the extractive choices that you’ve chosen. So using the users might feel good in the moment

Elliot: but then over the long term.

Nick: Yeah, and it can be, right? This is the problem is that any given tactic can work, right? It’s not that the tactic is bad, but the difference between I feel vulnerable, I feel scared, I feel powerless in these arguments. So I’m gonna juice my arguments with a bunch of samples from user data

Nick: is very different than me walking down the hall into the CEO’s office, say, hey, can I have 10 minutes? And say, hey, I think we’re on opposite sides of this ABC question.

Nick: And I don’t know that having customers in the conversation is gonna solve ABC question but I think it might help inform it.

Nick: Are you comfortable if I bring some customer data in there, I interview a couple of customers and I’d like you to help me pick the customers? All of a sudden now we’ve built a bridge and you can feel the resistance softening. Now it may soften 1% and you get, yeah, God, I guess, I don’t know what that’s gonna do. And you have to be strong and you have to say, yeah, we’re not entirely sure what it’s gonna do but I think we will be better for it. And I think you and I agreeing on the five customers I’m gonna interview is probably gonna make it even better. And all of a sudden now you’re on the same side of the table and something expansive could happen. So you talk about forks in the road, Elliot, and there is a way in which there’s always these sort of dynamic forks in the road

Nick: of heading toward expansion versus extraction. But I also want you to notice that it’s also a decision that you make in an afternoon and then you make a different decision the next day and you make a different decision the next day because systems don’t break because you fixed them. Systems break because you birthed a thousand new things underneath them and they fracture under the weight of the new thing.

Nick: So I want you to imagine those old roller coasters and things like theme parks that have gone dormant and then nature just sort of collapses them in on themselves. You’ve seen those pictures on the internet.

Nick: So we’re not gonna go in here and try and fix how things are done because everyone’s gonna feel that and it’s gonna produce more resistance and what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna plant a thousand good things. And that 10 minute conversation with the CEO saying, hey, can we together agree on bringing customers into this in a way that makes us smarter and helps us understand the problem better.

Nick: All of a sudden that’s one of your thousand good things. And now we have the seeds of an expansion. An expansion grows by seeds, extraction grows by infrastructure and you can always plant seeds.

Elliot: And planting those expansive seeds, Nick, is a way to build trust, right? Or to rebuild trust. And part of the system for rule number three is that to rebuild trust, you present it as, how do we create value here? So creating value is the solution, I guess, or one of the solutions. That’s right. And this comes up so often in our conversations with clients where we talk about the problems within the business, but the question always comes back to, these are the problems that you have and these are the things you want to achieve. Well, the gap in between those

Elliot: is where we can create value for the user, for the customer, for the client.

Elliot: And building that bridge or planting those seeds

Elliot: is where the work needs to happen. That’s right. Does that align with what you were thinking with the chapter in the book?

Nick: Yeah, that’s right. So

Nick: as we’re thinking about, really, part of what the book is doing is to help you develop expansive habits in the way that you tackle almost all forms of, there’s stuff about HR in there, there’s stuff about culture, there’s stuff about marketing, there’s stuff about, we come at this from all these different sides so that you start to develop these trust-making habits and behaviors in the organization.

Nick: And when it comes to the problem, it’s a problem, what happens almost always at some point in a sort of problem research sort of a situation, whether you’re bringing in an outside agency or your internal teams are gathering,

Nick: it’s usually a customer dissatisfaction or lead flow or something like that. And somebody in the room is gonna say, well, how do we get people to feel like dot, dot, dot?

Nick: And

Nick: almost always that’s well-intended, no one’s trying to do demonic things with that, but your little hair should go on end when, particularly if it’s you’re the one that’s saying it, your little hair should go on end, when that happens and go, wait a second, that’s not how we solve problems. We don’t solve problems by reaching across the manipulation line and try to get people to feel things. We solve problems

Nick: by digging deeper and finding an opportunity to deliver value.

Nick: So think about this at a very tactical level. Let’s say that there’s a drop off between people coming to the website and people signing up for your latest landing page, right? There’s a bounce rate or something. I’m not a digital marketing expert, let’s pretend that’s a thing. The temptation and marketing so easily veers into manipulation, which is why extraction loves it. Man extraction loves marketing.

Nick: You have to really catch yourself and go, not how do we get people to click or how do we get people to do blah, blah, blah. But where can we deliver value? And when your entire CX, the entire journey that the customer goes on, and this is the antithesis of use the users, right? The entire journey that the customer goes on becomes a question of how do we deliver the right value in the right places to produce the right amount of trust? So we’re just getting to know this person. They maybe just found us, they saw us on a social media page, they saw us on LinkedIn, or maybe they actually came to an event if we’re doing things in the real world, which you should do, right? And they’ve got this tiny bit of trust for us. What’s the right value for that tiny bit of trust? Too much and it feels overwhelming and like what are you doing, right? Too little and it doesn’t move the needle, right? And too intrusive, right? If it’s based on, if you’re scraping a bunch of customer data and going, look, we know you love these seven things, do you want us to give them to you? And all of a sudden now I feel violated at a very fundamental level, right?

Nick: We have to calibrate that delivery of value. And that’s really how we solve fundamental problems in almost every business is you get down to the calibration of value. We were doing this with a software firm not that long ago. And there was some struggle after the first meeting, passed the first meeting into getting into the decision maker.

Nick: And what we ended up doing was really doing sort of a deep dive on what is the person who wants to sponsor you? And if you’re selling software, you usually have some sort of an middle manager, or VP or something who’s like, hey, I want this, but I need somebody to sign off on it, right? So what’s happening in the life of the sponsor that was buying this particular, that wants to buy this particular software?

Nick: And we dug deep into what their narrative is and what’s going on with them and what might be happening that’s causing resistance. And then what it all came down to is, hey, this person needs to be able to have a conversation with their direct person to help them be able to communicate. What they need from meeting one is the way to be able to communicate this internally.

Nick: Well, then that’s our answer. How do we deliver value here? Not hand them a pre-filled PDF of like, hey, here’s our script for how to talk to your boss.

Nick: But we have an empathetic conversation with our sponsor and say, hey, some people in situations like yours get really worried about how they’re gonna talk about this with their boss, because we’re introducing a different way of solving a familiar problem.

Nick: Does that feel real to you? Do you feel like you have what you need to have this conversation with your boss?

Nick: And people would say, well, I don’t know. Maybe I do. What does everybody else say? What do you know? And all of a sudden we were in a co-creation conversation for 10 or 15 minutes at the end of the first call to co-create a strategy to bring this idea of this software into the conversations within the business. Well, that’s obviously good for me as the person selling, but it’s also good for the person who stuck his ass out there to be your sponsor, right? Because we delivered value that built trust at each point in the CX. These are expansive seed planting behaviors.

Elliot: Yes, what I’m sensing here throughout all of this conversation is that,

Elliot: I guess this is also what we say to clients as well, is that your problems can be beyond marketing, very far beyond marketing. And bringing us on board might not be the best solution for the problems that you have, but we’ll be honest with you about that regardless. But at every step of what we’ve spoken about so far, it feels as if empathy and just human understanding is the way to almost get what you want selfishly, but also get the best possible solution for other people and for the business. And just having that level of human empathy for each other so that you can understand each other and then move forward in the best possible way.

Nick: Yeah, I think that’s true. I mean, what you’re gonna bump into, and I’ve said this some other places, is I’m very slow to use the word empathy. I use it sparingly,

Nick: in part because marketers grabbed onto it and ruined it.

Nick: As with everything, yeah. In part because some people hear it and it’s like, that’s too high a bar. I don’t know if I can get to empathy.

Nick: And because they equate empathy with like, hey, I need to imagine what life is like in another person’s shoes and I can’t imagine what life is like in this other person’s shoes. Well, it turns out that’s actually a really reasonable response. There’s a lot of really good neurological and psychological research that says we’re actually terrible about putting ourselves in other people’s shoes. Like our human brains just are not built for this.

Nick: So I don’t mind the use of the word empathy, but if we’re gonna use it, I wanna really narrow it down in terms of how we talk about it. And what I’m talking about is

Nick: some very specific things. One is to choose to believe that your interlocutor, the person that you’re engaging with, is a reasonable person who’s doing things for reasonable reasons

Nick: and that they’re not trying to harm you. Now, if you do firmly believe they’re trying to harm you, then you need to get out of the situation. Like, this is crazy. But it does change our nervous system

Nick: for me to look at you through the screen and think, Elliot doesn’t wanna harm me. Elliot’s doing what he thinks is right with the information he has in the context he’s in. Now, I don’t know what context is Elliot is in. I’m not trying to imagine myself in Elliot’s context because what I’m gonna end up doing is just projecting all my own baggage onto Elliot. That’s not helpful, right? But I can trust, can offer a tiny bit of trust that he’s a reasonable person trying to do reasonable things. And then that can bring me to a level of what I’m more interested in than empathy, which is curiosity. And I can be curious about, I wonder what Elliot’s situation is. I wonder why he’s asking that. So even if someone on a call or someone in a meeting says something really

Nick: that triggers you or makes you feel defensive or go, oh my gosh, I’ve gotta prove myself now, right? All of that vulnerability trigger starts happening for you.

Nick: The expansive offer, the expansive choice, the inefficient choice is to, you may not be able to get to empathy. In fact, we almost never can when we’re neurologically triggered. But what we can do is get to curiosity.

Nick: And I can say, hey, Elliot, you just said, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. And I repeat back what I heard you say. Can you help me understand why you said that in the way that you said it? Like, tell me more about that statement.

Nick: And all of a sudden, everything slows down.

Nick: You slow down, they slow down, the room slows down, and everybody’s nervous systems are now moved just a little bit from the back of the brain and all of that resistance and cynicism and fear and moved a little bit forward because curiosity has to live in the prefrontal cortex. So all of this is somatic. We’re trying to help everybody in the room take that little journey from the back of the brain to the front of the brain. And once we’re in the front of the brain, we can calm the fuck down.

Nick: But we have to get everybody to the front of the brain. And we don’t get there by telling stories, by convincing, by selling, by arguing. We get there by way of curiosity and opening up the floor for people to go, I wonder why? I remember I was doing a kind of a big brand strategy sort of seminar, not like a branding, but like, what is this business gonna be? There was a big merger and they had to figure out what the merge companies were gonna look like. And the head of client experience was in the room and she was just being a terror on every single thing that I was doing. Like she was fighting me on everything. If you’ve run seminars, you know the person of which I speak.

Nick: She will not be offended though I’ll use her name. Her name was Annie. And this was within probably the first hour of it. I said, “Hey, Annie, my sense is that you don’t wanna be here “and you think this is kind of silly. “Is that the right read?”

Nick: She’s like, “I don’t know. “This isn’t my thing. “I’m not creative. “I’m practical. “Oh.”

Nick: And I said, “Okay, so in this next exercise,” and I gave her an invitation, “If we’re in this next exercise, “are you willing to engage it in a, b, c way?” She’s like, “Sure, I’m a team player. “I’m here. “I showed up. “I’m not a good at it.” You know, she’s very verbal and very funny person.

Nick: Well, by the end of it, Annie was my sponsor in that business and she and I worked together for a year

Nick: side by side, solving problems together. Because I was willing to believe

Nick: that there was something else going on with Annie other than just her cynicism.

Nick: I didn’t know. So that’s why I don’t jump to empathy because I’m like, “I don’t know.” I’m not like, “Oh, she has a horrible backstory “and she’s probably hated marketers before.” Like, “I don’t know.” But I was curious. I found her interesting. And then those were seeds we could work with.

Elliot: To encapsulate all of this is that level, and you call it humble curiosity in the book. I think humble is a really important word to include in that if you just have the sense of self to maybe, like you said, not as far as empathy, but to understand where you are and where other people are and all be trusting that you’re working towards the same goal. And I like that you say that everyone within the system is working either reasonably within the system or how the system is intending for them to work, right? So it’s much bigger than just the person across from you, right? And if we can move away from the short-term thinking, if we can move from the back of the brain to the front of the brain where anxiety reduces and decision-making becomes less protective and less insular. Yes. So that we reinforce expansion and not extraction.

Nick: That sounds great. The challenge is, and maybe this is where your question is heading, and we’ll go all the way back to our previous conversation where I said we were gonna look at resistance both in the external force

Nick: and resistance internal. And the primary reason why we don’t do what you just described is because of our own internal resistance. Because we’re afraid.

Nick: And we don’t wanna trust Annie.

Nick: We don’t wanna give, what if I give Annie the floor and Annie blows up the whole meeting and she says, “This guy’s a moron,” right? Right, we have resistance. We have so much resistance to planting the seed, to taking the risk, right? And so the beginning of all, and you’ll see this through the book, the beginning of almost every step of moving toward expansion is a monocle, just a tiny little spark of self-trust.

Nick: Because it’s not, “Oh, I’m sure Annie’s gonna be fine. “I believe in Annie. “Why would I believe in Annie? “I don’t know her.” Right, she could be awful. Turns out she’s not, she’s lovely. One of my dear friends, right? But what I believe in, what I have a monocle of trust in is myself. And that even if Annie blows up the meeting, I can save it. I trust myself. I will be okay.

Nick: I can open up these curious humble doors, a little bit of a crack, and even if they don’t go well, I will be okay. Because I’m not hinging my whole strategy on how Annie responds to this question. I’m not hinging my whole strategy on whether the CEO shoots down my idea to co-create with a group of customers. None of these things are my whole strategy. They’re just seeds. And I have enough self-trust to do that. Now to get to self-trust, you usually have to face your own resistance. And what I find, particularly with a lot of marketers, when I start opening up these ideas, I’m like, “Hey, this is the way forward “and this is how you’re gonna move “into greater levels of influence,” and et cetera, et cetera. And we’ve had lots of good and beautiful successes with people doing this. But early on in the process, when we’re training marketers on these ideas, there’s almost always a fundamental, “I don’t wanna do it. “I got too much scar tissue. “I’ve been beat up too many times. “I have been treated like crap too many times. “I don’t wanna do it.”

Nick: And I don’t begrudge anybody there, I don’t wanna do it. I don’t begrudge people listening right now are like, “This guy’s a moron, I don’t wanna do this crap.”

Nick: I don’t begrudge anybody that, I don’t know what your scar tissue is. I don’t know what you’ve been through. I don’t know what the right next move is for you. But I know that you can’t get to expansion,

Nick: that you can’t get to problem solving out of symptom chasing

Nick: without facing your own resistance. You can’t. So it’s totally fine if you don’t want to face it. It’s totally fine if you’re like, “No, I am rigid. “I like my stories. “I like my narrative. “I like my beliefs. “I like my fundamental understanding “that nothing’s gonna get better “and I don’t need to change.”

Nick: Then you are the largest protector of the status quo. You are now the king soldier for the status quo.

Nick: And you have to look in the mirror and go, “Okay, what does that mean for the work I want to do?” Now that I’ve decided that I will be the protector of the status quo, that I will not change. I will not look in the mirror. I will not try something new. I will not question my prevailing narrative.

Nick: Can you now live in the status quo being permanent? Because my guess is if you decide you’re gonna protect the status quo, it’ll be happy to be protected. So what does that look like for you as the director of marketing or as the head of the agency in this relationship or whatever, because now you own that choice

Nick: and now you own the consequences.

Elliot: It’s a place to ask you where you want to go in terms of the secret sauce.

Nick: Yeah, I think if we’re looking to move from symptoms to down the lens to problems,

Nick: the very first place you want to look at, the very first starting line is, what’s my incentive to keep things the same? Because you have them. The system has offered you so many incentives to protect the way things are. You can say, “I hate it. “This sucks. “I don’t like it. “I don’t like this dynamic. “I feel like I can’t get anything done. “All we’re doing is symptom chasing.” You can say all those things and you can mean all those things. But decisions are made by way of incentive. And so some part of the system, maybe many parts of the system, are organized in a way to keep you complicit. So the very first starting point is to look in the mirror and go, “What’s my incentive to protect the status quo?

Nick: “Why would I want things to stay the same?” Because we’re very easy to go. These people won’t change and these people won’t let this get better and these people won’t get down to problems. But once we get to systems, we realize everybody’s complicit.

Nick: That’s what chapter six is. The villains are in the building. Yes, the villains are in the building, all of them, including me.

Nick: And so what do I want to do with the resistance I feel? But first you have to have the big bite of courage to go, “I am resisting the exact thing I say I want.”

Nick: And what do I want to do with that resistance?

Elliot: It’s a powerful way to end a powerful secret sauce. The way I looked at the expansive system is a regenerative system. It’s the way that my business coach explains that, that alternative to extraction and capital. That’s right. And one of the quotes that she gave to me was where attention goes, energy flows. That’s right. And I think everything you just said is almost summarized in that quote in that you have to be aware regardless of what you’re doing within a business, regardless of how fast you’re moving or what your responsibilities are, is where your attention is going, where the business’s attention is going, where the system’s attention is going, is where the energy will flow and it will continue down that path for as long as the attention goes down there.

Nick: That’s right.

Elliot: Nick, thank you so much for joining me on this episode. Wonderful conversation.

Nick: I enjoyed it.

Elliot: The book, “The Damn Rules.” If you’re listening before the 15th of September, this episode’s coming out on the 9th of September. So if you’re listening, if you’re one of the keen beans who are listening straight away, then you can pre-order the book at damnrulesbook.com.

Elliot: In the UK, it’s available, I think, Nick, you said just on Amazon at the moment.

Nick: I think that’s right, but there’s all the links to the different booksellers are there at damnrulesbook.com so you can find the one that works for you. But it’s definitely Amazon if not anything else.

Elliot: Perfect, and then, obviously, if you’re listening after the 15th of September, you’ve

Elliot: got all the options if you’re outside of the UK in the US, and then maybe there’ll be more options in the UK once the book is released, but there is an ebook and a paperback. Is that correct, Nick?

Nick: Yes, yes. Potentially, we’ve got the hardback in production. I don’t know if it’ll be ready by the 15th, but for people who love a hardback, I love a hardback, so I said, hey, I want to do them both.

Elliot: Amazing. So, Nick, where can people find you? What else can they consume of yours?

Nick: Yeah, so if you’re interested in these conversations and really breaking down these ideas, I do a lot of this on my own podcast. The easiest way to access that is damrulesbook.com. So that access is both the podcast and the newsletter. And then some of you, I’m guessing, are like, hey, I would like to get more knowledgeable, better training, better ideas about this. We have a free guild that is literally free. There’s no secret back door. It’s a community of people who sort through these things. Elliot’s in it. He can attest that it’s terrible.

Elliot: It is the alternative to LinkedIn. That is how I joined it. Lauren Lang, who, wonderful writer, explores lots of amazing topics. She promoted it through her Substack blog and pretty much, say, if you hate LinkedIn, the guild is the place to be, and I haven’t regretted it for a moment.

Nick: So that you can get access to that at culturecraft.com slash guild. So culturecraft.com slash guild. And we’d love to have you, because we’re having great conversations about how to solve these problems and to learn from each other and to celebrate each other’s wins along the way.

Elliot: For sure, sure. Yeah, I can second that. All right, thank you, Nick, and thank you, everyone, for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, then do drop us a follow or subscribe on whatever platform you’re listening on. If you know anyone who might also like this episode, feel free to share, because it helps us out a ton. Check out the episode “Show Notes” for links, the ones that we’ve mentioned on the book, and the ones that Nick has mentioned for “Culture Craft” and the guild. And you can also find links to find us on socials. Please get in touch if you have any marketing or branding pain points, because we would love to hear from you. There is also, because by the time this episode launches, there is the Bon Sauce website. If you want to check it out, you can look at all the past episodes. You can look at the key ideas and takeaways. You can go on there. It’s bonsource.co.uk. Check it out. Let us know what you think. We’ll be back with a new episode in two weeks’ time. As always, thank you for listening, and see you in the next one.