Why do so many thought leadership initiatives stall? They often lack the spark of genuine excitement. They aren’t fun. But they can be. Get on the “idea sled” to glide through thought leadership projects with ease, grace, and joy.
Thought leadership projects should be fun, fast, and fearless because they tap into excitement about new ideas and advocate for something better. That’s the mindset behind what I call the idea sled. Projects glide forward gracefully. It’s the momentum of commitment.
Sadly, many thought leadership initiatives become fraught with anxiety and stuck in the mud. They don’t come from joy or passion. They get started because “we need to do some thought leadership.” Marketing teams start projects by going out and recruiting thought leaders—sometimes unwillingly—to get them to come up with something. Even worse, they try to make thought leaders commit to ideas they don’t care about.
When marketing doesn’t get it and business leaders don’t care, you have a recipe for sludge and muck. You can’t force people onto a sled. It’s more like dragging a cart through a swamp instead of gliding across the snow.
There’s a better way. Get on the idea sled together. When you let ideas lead the process, you can realize the potential for fun, fast, and fearless thought leadership.
Here’s what that means in practice.
- Take a generative approach to ideas from the outset. Ideas aren’t just a natural resource for marketing to extract and create assets. Instead, set up a systematic process for collaboration with marketing, sales, product, and leadership teams. Seek and find ideas that matter.
- Emphasize thought leadership that reflects what your best innovators are actually thinking and doing. Demonstrate the work you’re doing to reorient your business and industry. To be effective and create a sense of purposeful fulfillment, you must include both thinking and leading.
- Synchronize thought leadership with development activities that put ideas into action. If you fake it, you’ll worry more about falling and getting hurt than about having fun and moving faster. If you’ve actually done it, your thought leadership will not only benefit readers but also come from a place of joy.
- Treat communication like an act of sharing. Communicating only for the sake of checking boxes or collecting engagement data is an act of desperation. Compelling thought leadership should aim to help people make high-stakes decisions. Your revenue comes from influencing those decisions in a way that results in sales, not from likes or clicks.
- Make ideas the engine for expanding into new concepts and new possibilities that set the stage for your business over the long haul. The idea sled is a fun ride—you’re going to want to do it again. Similarly, when thought leadership brings your best ideas to the surface, you build up speed. You also tap into those next ideas that will create future value.
But, maybe you object. Fun isn’t the point, after all. However, the emotional tone matters. Here’s why.
- People want to get on the idea sled and join you. It’s an invitation to internal thought leaders to come on board and share their ideas. It also helps make your customers want to come along for the ride.
- On the idea sled, the quality and resonance of thought leadership go up. It represents ideas at their best and highest creative power rather than the lowest common denominator of conventional wisdom.
- Playful metaphor aside, the idea sled is also a repeatable process that helps businesses generate ideas, reorient around them, act, communicate, and expand. Each part of the sled comes with detailed blueprints.
When it comes to thought leadership, for the love of ideas, let’s do better. Get on the idea sled!
Three Grace Notes
“I certainly didn’t deserve to spend the rest of my life avoiding joy. I didn’t want that for anyone else. Why did I want it for me?” — Kathleen Hanna, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk
“Imagining the future is more like the release of a potential through a sensuous medium, where the medium is not a simple vehicle for an already formed idea, but an idea that takes hold and assumes shape, sound, and texture, releasing a potential of its own.” — Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?
“But freeing ourselves alone is limited, considering that others suffer just as we do and they have been amazingly kind to us. To free ourselves from the prison of self-centeredness, we learn how to cultivate immeasurable love, compassion, joy, and equanimity.” — Dalai Lama and Thubten Chodron, Approaching the Buddhist Path
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