Why is it “ineffable”?

It’s hard to explain what it is

The title of this website is a bit of a joke. I used the word “ineffable” on LinkedIn a few times when trying to explain some ideas around the concept of thought leadership. That grew into this site.

The title was meant to sound …overly dramatic and pretentious.

Mission accomplished.

But it’s also wildly accurate.

Here’s the strict definition of the word “ineffable”:

incapable of being expressed in words; indescribable

That fits, because when professionals talk about thought leadership, they intuitively know what they’re discussing, but they would struggle to describe it to any reasonable degree. That’s one of the reasons I started this project – if I tried hard and long enough, could I describe thought leadership in such a way as to provoke common agreement around the idea?

In some ways, this echos Justice Potter Stewart’s writings in a 1964 obscenity case. The judge had a need to describe what was meant by the phrase “hard core pornography.” He wrote:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

I looked for an answer to the question: “How do you describe something that everyone knows, but that no one can really explain?”

Some AI engine gave me “paradoxical.” I didn’t love this, because it implies self-contradiction, which doesn’t really fit. (But keep reading…)
Then there’s “tacit,” which means “implied by or inferred from actions or statements.” That’s closer.

Then I stumbled on the duo of “unspeakable” and “unutterable.” But those had a mystical, Voldemort-ish quality that made it seem terrifying.
I got closer with “indescribable.” But there was a marketing spin-feel to that I didn’t like. People use that as a hyperbolic synonym.

…and so I finally landed at “ineffable.”

I’ve put a lot of thought into it, and here’s the problem with trying to describe thought leadership –

It disguises itself. When “doing” it (what does that even mean?), no one really admits to it or acknowledges it directly. Rather, it slides into frame masked as something else.

It’s… nonchalant.

Say, someone writes a blog post about something. It’s valuable. It gets read and shared. The person who wrote it gets noticed. They write other things that get noticed as well. They’re emboldened to take greater leaps and create more content in different formats. They become a “known person” in their industry. Next thing you know, someone refers to them as a “thought leader.”

The idea of “thought leadership” kind of slipped into the conversation as a result of other activities.

People often talk about “creating thought leadership.” I think this is a misnomer. You “create” a blog post or a webinar. Thought leadership happens as an indirect result of that, and it can only happen in the hearts and minds of the consumer, not the creator.

Along this same vein, thought leadership is emergent. It’s a thing that emerges from the confluence of other things. It’s an intersectionality, which makes it hard to describe.

In science, an “emergent property” is something that happens only through independent actions of other things. Ants perform a million activities with no one really in charge, yet they end up with an anthill. Starlings spin and dive individually, and together they form a mumuration which only has form because it represents the collective result of the individual birds.

An inherent characteristic of emergence is that you can never quite know what single action will push you across the line into some emergent state. How many molecules of H2O do you need to gather before something feels wet? One? One billion? Is there a clear number, and when you cross it, will you suddenly exclaim, “Egads! This is wet!”

When I was in the Navy, I spent some time working with the Navy SEALs (to be clear: I was not a Navy SEAL, I just spent some time with a few of them).

The dream of an aspiring SEAL is to get “the Budweiser,” which is a medal of an eagle holding a trident (it looks like the Budweiser logo, hence the name). The SEALs I spoke to said that you don’t get this when you graduate from the schools you have to complete to become a SEAL. There’s no clear “finish line” you cross when they give you the medal.

So, when do you get it? When your team leaders feel like giving it to you. And it’s different for everyone. The few SEALs I talked to said it was pretty random when they got it, and totally unceremonious. One guy said an officer just tossed it to him in passing one day and said, “You should probably start wearing that.”

The “coronation” of a SEAL is emergent. You accumulate experiences with your peers until you cross some random line where you “become a SEAL.”

(Note: my experience and conversations were 30 years ago, and these were older guys who became SEALs in the 1980s. The coronation process may have changed since then.)

The larger point (warning?) here is that all the writings on this site will have a Janus-like quality to them. They will:

…speak of “thought leadership” as a definable thing
…stubbornly maintain that “thought leadership” cannot be defined

Which, weirdly, brings me back to the adjective “paradoxical,” which suddenly seems extremely appropriate.