The Age of Mass Production – or what the Clangers have to teach us about thought leadership

“Our thought leadership production process is a well-oil machine.”  It was a throwaway line someone said in early December which has been reverberating around in my head ever since, for several reasons.

First off, many consulting firms wouldn’t agree.  For them, producing thought leadership continues to be a struggle to get agreement around which subjects to focus on, to find people prepared to be brave and opinionated enough to write material that stands out from the crowd, and to ensure that the best of their thought leadership is effectively leveraged across their firm as a whole.  But go beyond these long-standing and still serious issues, and things are changing.  As if to compensate for problems elsewhere, firms have honed their ability to do commission surveys, wordsmith material and produce eye-catching design.  Thinking and engagement may still be difficult, but production has, indeed, become much easier.

We’ve entered the age of mass production where thought leadership mass is concerned.  Sourcing the raw material remains a challenge (good ideas are the consulting equivalent of rare earths), as does getting the output to the right people at the right time, but producing it?  No problem.  In fact, it’s so much not a problem that we produce too much of it.

That brings me to my second point.  Anyone who watched British children’s television in the 1970s will remember the Clangers – endearing little pink creatures which lived under dustbin-lids in craters on the moon.  The Clangers were ecologists ahead of their time, constantly finding creative ways to use space junk.  In one searing episode, a machine dropped out of the sky which, when a lever was pushed, made plastic pots and pans.  Initially intrigued, the Clangers were then terrified to discover they couldn’t stop it, almost drowning in the stuff produced.  Disaster was averted but, even so, the story remains an allegory of craft work (hand-knitted pink Clangers) exposed to the dangers of mass-production – and it’s hard to find a better parallel with thought leadership.

Thought leadership is a craft: its mass production is an attempt to conceal the difficulties inherently involved in its creation.

And that takes me to the third and final point I want to make.  Mass-produced thought leadership is as easy to read as it is easy to produce.  And, like anything that can be skim-read and quickly digested (think bullet points on slides), it’s instantly forgettable.  Because we’re dealing with a time-poor audience, we don’t want to take too much of their time.  If an article can be read in a couple of minutes, we reason, it’s more likely to be read.  But the purpose of reading is not to get through as much material as possible; it's to be entertained and to learn.  I’m not arguing for obscurity for its own sake and I accept that you have to make it clear why someone should invest their time reading your article, but I don’t believe clients think, “I won’t read that longer article, even though it looks really relevant, because I can read ten less interesting articles in half the time”.

Thought leadership – either its production of consumption – shouldn’t be easy.