Turn Disruption Into Opportunity: Jonathan Fields on Building Antifragile Brands

Welcome to AdSe Week's podcast about the business of marketing, media, and creativity. In this episode, we're sharing a conversation recorded live at one of AdWeek's events featuring leaders from across the industry discussing the ideas shaping brands right now. Let's get into it. Morning. Oh my god, you actually responded and it's so early. That's a good sign already. Um, I'm excited to speak to you this morning. I'm going to speak to you from three different perspectives. one, a multi-time founder. Um, so I had been the brand many times myself. Two, as the executive producer and host of Good Life Project podcast where we have partnered with more than 400 brands for over a dozen years. So we've been in the space a long time and we've done every possible variation of collaboration. three as an author and researcher who spent a lot of time going deep into uncertainty, how it affects individuals and also leaders and organizations and really it does a lot of different things. So topic today is navigating uncertainty. We are in a moment right now um a moment where a lot of us are experiencing a lot of volatility, a rapid pace of change. I don't have to tell you that. Um but how we respond to this moment is everything. Right now, we tend to default to what I call the protection mindset. So, here's what happens. We have a lot of uncertainty in the world. Along with that, high stakes. So, it's not just I'm uncertain about what to order for dinner, which can be pretty high stakes depending on the evening, but it's what's going to happen in business, what's going to happen in brands, what's going to happen in the market, what's going to happen with AI. We don't know. So, we have to live with that rather than try and solve for it. But we have to actually be constructive and perform at the same time. What tends to happen in these moments is not having enough information, it leads us into a state of anxiety and fear, right? So we feel the stress kind of consuming us. The thing is we actually don't have to feel that. That's a default state that our brains go to. But we can skill ourselves to feel very differently. And the big problem with this is that we feel awful as individuals when we feel that. And as a business, what it ends up doing is it drops us into a protect and defend stance. It stifles our creativity. It leads to short-term decision-m and tactics and really degraded decision-m. These are all things we don't want. We don't want it in marketing. We don't want it as brands. We don't want it as human beings. It feels bad. It fragments our efforts because we don't know what to say yes to or what to say no to. So we say yes to everything hoping one thing will work. And at the end of the day what it does to us is it leads to a situation where the brand suffers and the human being within the brand suffers. But the thing is volatility doesn't have to destroy us. Volatility doesn't break brands or us. It's an opportunity to make brands or us to be decision makers and leaders in the marketplace and to telegraph to the people on our teams that actually we can figure this out together and we're not just going to leave you in a head spinning scenario which is the opposite of what often happens in these moments. Here's the big paradox. Disruption cannot exist without an equal and upper an equal and opposite amount of possibility. They are two sides of the same coin. So if you are feeling high levels of disruption and the stakes are high, there must be an equal level of possibility where the stakes are also high. And if you're not feeling that or seeing it, your job becomes to seek it. So I want to share just five sort of short ideas and we'll talk about them a little bit more in the conversation, but let me introduce them to you to help shift your mindset into this space. Five principles door finding trust currency less but sharper com communications and personal peace. So let's go through these one at a time. One door finding when we default to that protection mindset it's all about how do we protect and defend what we've already accumulated market position brand equity for an agency clients all we want to do is not lose. That is a disaster. An absolute disaster. In high disruption, high stakes, fastmoving environments, there is no middle. There's only disrupt door or disrupted. You must choose a side and start looking for what are the doors that I can open. Where is the possibility? So you become a door finder, not a door holding back. Principles two and three, trust in decisions. Trust is something that is absolutely critical in high volatility times. Right now, we can lean on the trust of our own brands. And if you have a high trust brand, that's fantastic. Deepen into that. What we're seeing, and I know some of the conversations that have been happening around here yesterday, we're talking about really leaning into the trust or what I call trust transference from individuals, from creators, from individual brands. How do I borrow their trust? Because we all know that trust and affinity are different. What we're looking for now is not affinity, but trust. And trust ignores to people way more deeply and quickly than it does to entities. So we want to look for people to partner with and let their trust transfer to us. On the third metric here, decisions less but sharper. There's a huge impulse in these moments to throw everything up against the wall to just test it all. We don't know what's going to work. That's not a bad thing. But at some point, testing it all becomes failing at all. We cannot do this. We can start there, but at some point we have to actually dial back, call and say, what matters most? What are the one to three things that I'm going to center and resource? Because if you do more than that for more than a short amount of time, it's almost guaranteed all will fail. Last two principles. These tend to be the most ignored and in my mind most important calm communications. Moments like this, we're used to leading up to moments like this where we're solving for the surface level problem of our customers. What is their surface level their felt their need where if you ask them the question, they'll say this is what I need. That's great. Keep solving for that. But there's a second meta level need problem that we can solve for now that is so much deeper and that will bring people into our fold in a way that nothing else will. That's the meta problem. The meta problem in high uncertainty, high stakes environments is anxiety and fear. Everybody is feeling this right now. So how do we do that? We want to solve for that problem by really thinking through our communications and saying are we speaking not just to the surface level problem which used to be enough but are we taking the opportunity to speak to the deeper level meta problem which is people's anxiety and fear. Can we in some way support them in moving through this moment where they can just exhale? Because if we can do that in addition to offering the products and services that let us keep solving that surface level problem, then as we move out of this window or as we stay in it, now they're connected to us in an entirely different level. We want that. I want that, right? As a brand, I wanted that. As somebody who regularly partners with some of the biggest brands in the world now and has for many years, I want that, too. One of the things that we know our show has been around for a long time. So we have a big audience. We have have built a lot of trust with a lot of people. We have introduced so many people, so many concepts and so many ideas that solve problems. Medicine, health, well-being, relationships, life. We're literally called the good life project, right? But underneath that, there's one consistent thread that we get in feedback and we have for the entire duration of the show, and that is when we listen, we feel like everything is going to be okay. There's apparently something about the sound of my voice that makes people like to listen to our show when they're trying to go to sleep at night. It's a bit of a mixed blessing. Um, so we know that we're actually we've been solving for the meta problem the whole time. And I think that's also one of the reasons why we've been able to sustain really big long-term brand relationships because we're going another layer deeper. So think about how you can solve for that. That brings us to the last item before we drop into our conversation and it's this personal peace. Sounds really goofy. It sounds really fluffy. Sounds really woo. Personal peace. See it on Insta all the time. Protect your peace. Right? As organizations, as brands, as agencies, we do almost nothing to speak to this. This is the single biggest lynch pin in moving through moments like this. If you do not address this, no matter how good your strategy is, no matter how many doors you see to open, no matter how good your comms are and your partnerships are, you will fail. The reason is because your people will fail. High uncertainty, high stakes environments cause people to retreat, to contract, to experience anxiety and fear. And if you amplify that over days and then weeks and then months, it is devastating to individual mental health and eventually physical health. We tend to think of equipping people with the right skills as something that you just do to help out your people, to show that you really care about them. And yeah, we do and we want to do that. We want to support people. Whether you're a brand or an agency or a CMO or a brand leader, we want to take care of our people. We all know that. But I'll give you a different reason to say yes to this. We also know high anxiety, high fear states effectively are like putting on creative and cognitive blinders. You are asking teams to come up with their biggest best new ideas and you want them to innovate and step out of the box and be creative. And if you do not address their ability on the most basic human level to be able to breathe more easily and relax and downregulate their nervous systems at high uncertainty moments, their brains will not be capable of solving the problems you desperately need solved at the level that they could be solving them. We are hurting ourselves by not helping our people and our teams and our leaders gain the practices and skills that let them move through this moment in a more humane way and had the beautiful side benefit of giving us bigger and better ideas than we ever imagined possible. So we want to resource this in our organizations. And when we do this right, then we get to actually turn moments of disruption into moments of great advantage to effectively make us and our teams and our brands antifragile so that if these moments sustain or they repeat, we don't get pummeled by them in the future. We know how to move through them. So that's my opening and I think we're gonna roll into a little conversation now. I want to talk about each of the five pillars you just laid out and dive a little more deeply. Um, starting with door finding. So, often times when moments of disruption hit, brands immediately move to protect what they have and sort of turn inwards versus trying to find these different doors of opportunities. How can leaders retrain themselves in that sense? >> Yeah. And and it is a default state. um no matter how high you've gotten your organization or how successful you've been in the past. One, I think we need to normalize the fact that door finding actually is the thing we need to be focusing on now and not protection. If you've been in organization for a long time, the stakes are high personally and also organizationally and we get really concerned about losing them. Operationalizing it can look like a couple of different things. One, acknowledge the fact that we get to choose and we have to ask the really big leading question. Are we leading from a protection mindset right now or a possibility mindset right now? If you actually literally overtly ask that question to yourself and to your team, give them an opportunity to answer that question anonymously. By the way, >> you will get a very different answer than you'll get sitting around a table or on a Zoom call where everybody is sort of like being shown. You can literally take take an online like video conferencing thing, have everyone blank their screens and change your names to just like person and then have them answer the question in the chat. It will be remarkable what you see happen there. also really operationalizing this great example of this actually is Steven Bartlett who a lot of people know from Diary of the CEOs you know just this podcast that exploded onto the scene really in the last 3 years or so and he's building an a media entity in the UK um flight studio he has what he's effectively called a kill team he's deputized a small number of people in the organization to effectively try and stop Klay Christensen's innovators dilemma from touching down. He says, "Look at everything that we're doing, every every process, every product, every person. Your job is to see if we can make it all obsolete before somebody else does. Can you deputize a person, a group of people in the organization with the power to speak truth to you in a way that may end up dismantling things, but you know that if your team can identify that, then the wellunded startup question is the final one, which is what would a wellunded startup who needs to deal with this same situation do right now? Almost always, it's going to show you all the things that you're not seeing in the moment. M how do you make this like a regular practice and not just something that you do when disruption is occurring? >> Yeah, I mean I think you have to really bake it into culture one. So literally make it a part of your like a weekly meeting agenda. >> Anonymize feedback at least on a weekly basis especially in super fast moving times like this. And we see this so many times. Organizations do not punish identifying potential new doors that would violate the current norms. A lot of times people they see stuff but they're not going to actually say anything about it because they're really afraid of actually being punished because something brand new is going to challenge something that exists and the people who are associated with it. >> Right? So let's talk about trust. The next the next pillar um you say that you know consumers trust humans more than brands right that's why we kind of see the rise of the creator ecosystem how can brands build real authentic long-term creator relationships that don't feel like oneoffs >> yeah so three things come to mind one David had the famous quote I'll get a little bit wrong don't hire a dog then bark for it and we see that happening not infrequently in especially in the ad space you know if you come to a creator whether a podcaster or an influencer, somebody on social, a video producer, you're coming to them because they have a voice. And if they stray from that voice or the or the way that they show up for their audience, for their communities, their audience will feel it. >> They will lose trust with their audience. So rather than telling a creator how to actually communicate something to their audience, tell them what is the end state that you want from them and let them use their language and their presence to show up and do in a way that's organic to them because then their community will feel that. Um the other thing that that pops out to me is more creative collaborations. So rather than just here's an ad spot, here's a campaign, here's a bunch of postreads and programmatic. Yes. And we love it when people come to us and say, you know, you said yes to this brand because and we love you. We share values. We share we're aligned in a lot of different ways. How can we play together? What can we create here? How can we create entertainment and information that is more collaborative? So, we'll regularly do spots that are, you know, 2 to four minutes. We partnered with a major automotive brand where my wife and I did a 3-day road trip in Colorado. we called Oddities at Altitude where we looked for the weirdest human-made things and actually like we visited a castle, four-story castle made out of beer cans and a hub caps at 7,000 ft of altitude and then we get to share stories like this, you know, and and that turned into like an episode long road trip story. So, opportunities to collaborate and be more creative is something that I think it's this huge untapped potential with right now. Do you think are brands getting more open to those types of partnerships? >> I mean, we're seeing it in relationships that we have and and I think the more that we do it, the more brands can see what we're doing and that that's possible. >> And I know there was conversation yesterday around quote Gen Z, which don't call Gen Z, of course. And like the notion of really just letting people play together and drawing an affinity to the brand and then over time if it it turns into trust that is going to be such a better long-term play than sort of sell sell. >> Yeah. Clarity filter. This one's super important I think because in times of disruption especially right now there's often a lot going on and as marketers we're tempted to just do more more and be in more places. How do you get leaders comfortable doing less and kind of just focusing in on really specific important areas? >> Yeah. So, I think we have to twostep it, right? One is in the early days, nobody's going to do less because everyone is sort of like the call to action is always, you know, like we need everyone around the table. We need your best ideas. We need to brainstorm. We need everything now because everything we've been doing isn't working the way that it used to. How do we get new, better, great ideas? That's awesome. We we actually want to do that. So we it's okay to start wide. The challenge is we often hold the window open to wide way longer than is constructive. And not because we're not seeing signals that some ideas are actually good ideas to deepening into, but because we're terrified of deepening into the wrong ideas and then being held to account in a public way. So what we want to do is basically have our own checks and systems. say, "Okay, start wide." Great. Get all the ideas we can, but give yourself very specific triggers to narrow. So, if you find yourself 3 months later, if you start with 50 ideas, right? And 3 months later, you've still got 50 ideas on the table and you're trying to resource 50 ideas, I don't have to tell anyone. That is a total disaster. It's a disaster for a brand. It's a disaster for an agency, right? Because you you cannot resource all of those and have them succeed. It's like the classic drilling 50 wells, none will ever hit oil, right? So, I would have time triggers. I say start wide. Great. But we have to have a four-week, a 6 week, and 8we time trigger where we have to say if we still have all these wide ideas, like we have a mandate to narrow this by 50%. Every 6 weeks. Do it as an experiment, you know, and see what happens. Like 6 months, we start wide and then every 6 to 8 weeks we narrow by 50%, we narrow by 50%. over a period of time, very quickly, you're going to get down to the like the three to five ideas that keep showing up and keep saying, "This is working, this is working, this is working." And I think that's critical because these moments aren't about showing that you're busy. They're about really allocating resources with precision. >> Yeah. When you're trying to narrow down those ideas, like what is one question CMOs or marketers should ask themselves to understand like what's one I should go after versus leave behind? >> Yeah. I mean, I'm such a data person. >> Um, so I'm always looking at as much data as I can get. So I I want to know like and I think part of it is setting up your feedback mechanisms and your data sources so that you actually know what's working and what's not working. Um, and again, this is a weird thing, but a lot of times ideas get green lit and they stay green lit because of the person who presented them, not because of the quality of the idea. And because you don't want to challenge another person's authority or perceived social currency in organization, you keep ideas alive, not because they're good ideas, but because you don't want to actually go through the dance of dealing with that. So if you create a much more objective is that like every 6 weeks we're going to do an analysis. Here are the five metrics that matter to us, right? And I can't, it's going to be different for every brand, for every agency, but you've got to what are the three to five analytics or metrics that matter most? Make decisions based on that, not based on personalities and politics. >> Yeah. So, calmcoms. >> Yeah. >> Love that phrase. Um, >> from the person who puts all his listeners to sleep. [laughter] >> So, a lot of brands often they'll escalate the noise in a crisis. talk about how you you think they should become the calmst voice in the room in times of crisis. So, how can brands kind of project certainty and calm without sounding passive or out of touch? >> Yeah, this is going to sound really self- serving, but I think partnering is a really really powerful thing in this moment. So certain brands actually will just have that if it's built into your brand already, your brand voice, you know, like that you're somebody who sort of like eaten ke grounded as a brand and that is that's part of your brief and that's just the way that you always show up. Great. Like to an extent keep on keeping on that is that is actually not a lot of the way that it shows up for a lot of brands. That's not sort of like their day-to-day voice. So if you try and shift as a central brand proposition to that voice in a time especially of high volatility uncertainty is going to read as pandering if you do it directly and we've all seen that. So in my mind one of the most effective ways to do that is find the right voices who already exist who represent a sense of calm and groundedness and find ways to partner them so that you can get the transference from their voices to your brand. To me, that's a faster, more effective way to do it. And then, like I was saying before, you're solving not just for the surface level problem. You're solving for the meta problem, which you know, everybody is feeling and nobody is talking about. They're all freaked out. Yes, they have to report to somebody and say like, we're solving this particular business problem or if it's a consumer, I'm solving this one problem in you like my life and at the same time there's a meta problem. If you can speak to that by just making someone be able to exhale transforms the nature of your relationship and if you can partner with people who do that on a regular basis that again enores over time to the benefit of your brand. >> Yeah. It sort of you know plays on the trust pillar too right because if you're leveraging trusted calming voices like creators or podcasters or whoever you can kind of hit both of those levers. >> Yeah. In in a huge way. And I think like one of the questions that often will come up for a brand or CMO is like well how do we know who that person or who that voice is and and we're looking for all the the classic we we have engagement metrics. You can see views, you can see listens, you can see comments and likes and right but trust is a much harder thing and sort of like com trust is a harder thing to gauge. And one of the things that I think we don't look at that we should be looking at more is time in the game. You know, like I said, affinity and trust are related, but they're not the same thing. You can build affinity very quickly. you cannot build trust very quickly. So if you have somebody who's actually developed a large audience, who's been in the game for a long time, chances are the reason people are still with them is because there's a high level of not just affinity but trust. And if their brand is one of groundedness and calm, then you sort of like got the whole package. So I think we should be looking at sort of like time in the game a lot more and and distinguish between affinity and trust better. >> Yeah. So personal piece which I know you for you yeah is the most important because it doesn't matter how brilliant a strategy is or how good an idea is it falls apart if leaders can't navigate disruption. What's one thing everybody in this room today can do to start practicing calm in these moments of high anxiety and change? >> Yeah. So, number one thing not to do to yourself and definitely don't do it to anyone else is ever use the words, can we just calm down already? >> Oh god, >> we've all been in those meetings. >> Never tell a woman to calm down either. >> There you >> just my free advice. >> I'm married 33 years. So, I learned that very early in the U um Yeah. So, but it like we do it to ourselves also. It's like it doesn't work. You know, there's a reason why we feel activated right now. And so we actually need to change the state of our nervous systems that happens over two time frames. One is long-term practices. And it's the boring stuff that we've all heard of mindfulness, meditation. These don't work overnight, but over a period of months and years they built. I do not I know a lot of founders. I know a lot of people who built big things. I do not know a single highle leader who's built really big things who does not have some kind of consistent mind stealing practice because it's too hard on a sustained basis not to have it. But what can we do? The flip side is intervention. We're in a moment. In a very very past life I was a lawyer. I was in a huge firm in New York City. I was on a phone call and I was a private equity lawyer back in the day where they called them hedge funds and securities. And I remember picking up the phone on a regular basis and getting screamed at by people who had a lot of power and a lot of money and I would freak out on the phone. And I started learning breathing techniques back then. So there's so many different breathing techniques. And the power of breathing is a direct beline to your nervous system. So there's something we can all do this right now. If you want to try it, we'll have a little fun to wrap up our session called the physiological sigh which is about the fastest thing that you can do to downregulate your nervous system that exists right now. It's free. Anyone can do it. Do you want to try it? >> Let's do it. >> Okay. So, I'll kind of talk you through it for a second first. And it literally it takes 5 seconds to do it. First, you inhale and then you do a final sniff through your nose and then you exhale through your mouth. So, it looks like this. [snorts] So, not that hard, right? right? Pretty accessible. A lot of people, I'll have CDs out for you all later. 1099. Um, anyone can do this. This is a beautiful thing. And because our breath is so directly connected to the state of our nervous system and our nervous system is directly to the state connected to the state of our minds, it has an amazingly rapid effect on letting us come down to a place of where we're shaking and freaked out to like, all right, there's still a lot going on. I'm still kind of freaked out and I'm okay. >> So if you do that or some version your version of that, whatever is accessible to you do for a minute or so, it's remarkable how quickly you can actually come back to that place. So this is like one tool in a whole toolbox of things that I'll often talk about in different ways. And when you have a whole toolbox of things to access, it's it's transformative in terms of how you can step into and function in moments like this, but also just as a human being, your relationships with yourself, with your friends, with your partners, like and how you show up in your life. It makes such a huge difference to have that toolbox. >> Yeah. So, you talk about becoming anti-fragile, which kind of means going becoming stronger in the face of disruption and not weaker because of it. So, if you could give one piece of advice to everyone sitting in here today about how to move from defense to offense, what would it be? >> So, physical sigh. Uh, I think it's a great starting place, super easy for a lot of people. But I'll just piggyback on the last part of the conversation that we're having cuz again, I think this is such a touchstone for everything. If you cannot find a way to downregulate your nervous system and steal your mind both in real time and over time, nothing else that we've talked about today will matter. it just won't matter because you won't have access to any of it. You won't be able to find doors. You won't be able to figure out how to partner the proper way. You won't be able to know who's like how to develop trusting conversations because your brain won't be online to handle that. So to me, the the real key here is in becoming anti-fragile as an organization, whether you're a brand, a CMO, an agency, a creator, is to operationalize mind spilling practices as a part of culture. Like say this matters. um demonstrate it, live it as a leader, and then resource it. To me, if we do that, and almost nobody does this beyond lip service, they'll bring in somebody to lead a workshop here and there, but nobody actually operationalizes it on the level of culture. If you do that as an organization, you won't see the effect in the first month, but 6 months later, all sorts of things will start functioning better, and you'll wonder why, and you'll be able to point a finger back to it. >> Awesome, Jonathan. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. That was a conversation recorded live at an AdWeek event. You can find more coverage, analysis, and interviews from across the marketing and media world at adweek.com. Thanks for listening to Adspeak. If you like the show, be sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.