What if you and your team were lost in the Alps. It’s cold, snowing and disorienting. You know that if you don’t do something to get these people moving forward, you’re going to die out here.

You rummage around in your backpack for something – anything – to spark action. You find a map. On closer inspection, you see that it’s a map of…the Pyrenees Mountains on the other side of Europe. 

What do you do?

Companies big and small – even entire industries, like retail – can feel a bit lost in the mountains today. Change comes from numerous directions at a dizzying pace. Uncertainty is high on a number of political and social fronts. Businesses would love a map, but might settle for an arrow scuffed into the snow.

Enter thought leadership. Giving someone an idea to chew on, to consider with their staffs, to test in their businesses moves people forward, helps them find some direction in a chaotic environment.

This is the third in a series of blogs on the nature of thought leadership. We’ve been musing on the basic question, “What is thought leadership?” This deep dive into the nature of the basic words derives from Geoffrey Moore’s notion in “Crossing the Chasm” that the “first step toward enlightenment is to get a firm grasp on the obvious.”

The “obvious” in this case is deciphering an ambiguous term that produces everything from tweets to blogs to keynote speeches. The first part focused on the word “thought,” and the second on the word “leadership.” Put together, we can see that thought leadership has something to do with the idea of analyzing complexity on behalf of an audience’s needs and aspirations. That’s a good start to settling some of the term’s ambiguity.

My goal in this post is to turn these observations into a working definition of thought leadership that can drive action. My own working definition borrows another concept from leadership studies: sensemaking. 

Start making sense, making sense (apologies to Talking Heads)

Organizational researcher Karl Weick gave us the concept of “sensemaking in organizations.”

Leaders help their followers make sense of confusing circumstances through coordinated explorations and an ongoing dialogue that creates a map of where you are and where you’re going. 

But, the map itself is not the point. Weick would flummox people telling them that even a wildly inaccurate map (such as using a chart of the Pyrenees to navigate while lost in the Alps) was useful to the organization. The map is a story-building tool, a catalyst for communication. To extend the analogy, having a map gives your explorers the confidence to go talk to people in the local village and learn more about the surroundings. You could pencil into the map any accumulated information to make it more accurate as you learned more. Once you have some progress and confidence builds, the team can start drawing on past experiences in similar circumstances to see if those lessons apply to the current situation.

In short, the leader’s job amid confusion isn’t to wave a magic wand and make it all right. The leader offers tools to help followers make sense of the situation. It’s not necessary that each of those tools is 100 percent accurate if the collective narrative drives people to constructive action – because standing still and dying in the Alps is not an option.

A complex world creates a lot of need for sensemaking and the idea can provide a mission for program and content development.

Thought leadership: the working definition

Thought leadership, then, is the process of providing others with tools they can use to make sense of a changing world and their own situations. That’s our working definition that we apply to our clients. We can fine tune this further to define thought leadership programs for a given client or individual pieces of content.

Thought leadership, then, is the process of providing others with tools they can use to make sense of a changing world and their own situations.

The key to developing the program – or any specific piece of content – is to avoid the arrogance that you have the complete answer. Convincing people you have the answer sounds a lot like “marketing” and that’s not what people are looking for when they take to the Internet or come to the plenary session for your keynote. They are looking for some tools they can use to make sense of the industry or their own situation. They want an argument they can make for more funding, or for taking a calculated risk. 

A program, then, aims to make sense of situations A, B and C for target audiences X and Y. A given piece of content provides Tool A to audience segment B to make sense of Situation C. Frequency matters because, remember, it’s ideally an ongoing dialogue. You need to target the issues in the audience’s lives that create needs. This could be figuring out a new technology or getting budget approved for a major project.

But, isn’t this marketing? Of course. The call to action is either an implied or explicit “contact us to talk about how we can help.” No one needs to apologize for that if your first goal is to give your explorer the confidence to go talk to people in that village over the hill – whether we call it an Alp or the Pyrenees.