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The Flavors of Thought Leadership

There are different types of thought leadership artifact.

There are different types of thought leadership artifacts – the things you produce and publish. I’m not talking about specific artifacts here (see: The Formats and Artifacts of Thought Leadership), I’m more talking about… tones or styles of content. These might be specific to a single artifact, but they’re often a trend or continuing theme throughout someone’s body of output.

Where possible, I included some examples from my body of work… which means they’re all from the content technology space, which may or may not make much sense to you.

Explanatory/Educational

This is content that explains a topic. This is pure education, delivered from the perspective of someone who has a deep knowledge of it and wants to share that knowledge.

Theoretical

This is content that examines a topic from a specific angle, expands a frame of reference, or links together some practices or disciplines. The person who produces this has significant depth of knowledge and experience in their industry. This is filtering, analyzing, and synthesizing an aggregate body of work done over a long period of time.

Investigatory

This is content that examines a problem and some potential solutions. The person who produces this is willing to admit to mistakes and how what solutions they tried, whether or not they worked. This is storytelling and narrative.

Experiential

This is storytelling about a thing someone actually did. These are tutorials, case studies, experiments, post-mortems – some of which were successes, and some of which were not. It’s lived experience, and often involves mistakes and dead-ends. This is actual data and lessons from a specific, bounded unit of work.

Functional

This is content based around a specific working tool or artifact. For a developers, this would be code snippets or entire open-source projects. For others, it can be things like checklists, guidelines, templates, maturity models, checklists, etc. This is altruistic (or promotional) sharing of actual tooling that someone uses.

Social

This is not content so much as events: conferences, calls, social gatherings, etc. This is about convening like-minded people to exchange information. This is “impresario” thought leadership – being the organizer or convener of other minds.

Participatory

This is “responsive content” – answers to questions, replies on public forums, comments on blogs. This is about experience, spot analysis, and thought process.

Ignoble

This is… absurdist thought leadership, when someone takes a concept or comparison to some absurd extreme. It’s often very funny (you see a bit of it around April 1), but sometimes it also makes a valid point about something that would be too subtle to grasp under normal circumstances.

Zeitgeistal

This is a reporting or summation of the “spirit of the times.” These are things like surveys or reports that provide information or perspective about the larger state of a subject matter and the people who practice it.

…

So, what’s the “best” type? Clearly, there isn’t one. All of those described are valuable at some time to some type of audience. How your content is perceived and valued really isn’t up to you to decide. Beauty only exists in the eye of the beholder.

If there’s a common theme here, it’s that all of these are reflective of experience – either acute or aggregate.

You have to do the work, because the work is the only thing that gives it value.

To create something Theoretical requires expansive knowledge and experience of your industry, and the perspective to thread disparate bits of information and theory together.

To write something Experiential, Investigatory, Functional, or Paticipatory you have to actually do the work. And you have to do it enough that you observe something most other people don’t. This involves some amount of professional rigor. Even fewer people can do this.

To create something Social, you have to have “convening power” in your industry. You usually have to a level of gravitas which compels people to attend.

In professional circles – and on LinkedIn especially – I feel like not enough people want to actually do the work. They just want to talk about it. Performative thought leadership is rampant.

So, is that the key to thought leadership? …uniqueness? …scarcity? True thought leadership is scare. It’s rare.

And it’s rare because you have to have a body of work from which it naturally springs forth.

There’s no way to fake that body of work. You just have to do it.