Thought leadership has a supply problem that the industry pretends is a distribution problem.
You can tell because of where the money goes. Firms spend on production, on design, on the newsletter platform and the LinkedIn strategy and the SEO audit and the podcast studio.
They spend on the megaphone.
They spend almost nothing on the thing the megaphone is supposed to amplify. They make the assumption that the ideas already exist. That they’re sitting somewhere inside the organisation and the only job left is to get them out into the world efficiently.
Sometimes that’s true. Often it isn’t.
In reality, often there’s just nothing there to amplify. Don’t get me wrong, the executives are perfectly capable people. They’re good at their jobs. Respected by their peers. But when you sit them down and ask them what they actually think about their industry (something that isn’t a repackaging of the last conference they attended) you get a long pause. You get received opinion delivered with confidence. You get the sensible middle of the road, the position no reasonable person would argue with. Which is exactly why no reasonable person will remember it.
This is the expert drought. And most thought leadership programmes are built as if it simply doesn’t exist.
Here’s the story the marketing world prefers. There’s a wealth of expertise locked inside every organisation. Brilliant minds, deep experience, hard-won insight. SMEs everywhere. The place is dripping with them.
In this world, the problem is purely mechanical. These clever people are too busy to write. They’re too modest to promote themselves. Too close to the work to see what’s interesting about it. So the job of a thought leadership programme, or an agency, or an in-house team, is to extract that expertise and translate it into something the market can consume.
Interview the experts. Ghostwrite the articles. Build the distribution. Feed the algorithm.
It’s a comfortable story because it lets everyone off the hook. The executive isn’t the problem, they’re just busy. The agency isn’t the problem, they’re just the plumbing. The content isn’t the problem, it’s the reach.
If the programme underperforms, the fix is always more of the same machinery. More posts. Better hooks. A fresh look at the funnel.
And it’s comfortable because it’s sometimes true. Some organisations genuinely are sitting on a reservoir of unexpressed genius. I’ve worked with many in my career. Interview the founder or key SME and out pours a worldview so specific and so earned that my only job is to stay out of the way and channel them to the outside world.
Those projects are a joy. They’re also rarer than the industry admits.
The uncomfortable version of the story is different. A great deal of the expertise inside organisations is real but not original. It’s competence, not conviction. These people know how to do the job. Of course they do. But that’s different from having a distinctive view about the job or the wider world around it. You can be an excellent tax adviser and hold no interesting opinion about the future of tax for global enterprises. You can run a logistics business beautifully and have nothing to say about logistics that a hundred other operators wouldn’t say in the same words.
Competence is common. A genuine point of view is scarce. And thought leadership, done properly, runs entirely on the scarce bit.
There are commercial reasons the industry avoids naming the supply problem. And they’re worth being honest about.
If you’re an agency, telling a prospect their executives have nothing original to say is a strange way to win business. The pitch that gets signed is the flattering one. We’ll help your brilliant people shine. We’ll give voice to your untapped expertise.
Nobody in a pitch meeting says: we suspect the reason your last programme failed is that your leadership team, lovely as they are, holds no views worth publishing. While that may be true, it’s also professional suicide to say it in the room.
So the diagnosis gets softened into something safer. It becomes a strategy problem, or a consistency problem, or a distribution problem. Something fixable with a retainer and a content calendar. The agency gets to sell the machinery. The client gets to keep believing the raw material was always there. Everyone signs.
Then, months later, the programme produces a stream of technically fine content that nobody remembers and nobody shares. The engagement numbers are flat. The pipeline attribution is fuzzy at best. And now the search for blame begins.
The agency gets blamed first. Naturally. They were the ones who promised the shine. The client concludes the writing wasn’t good enough, or the strategy was wrong, or the channel mix needs rethinking.
They fire the agency and hire another one, who inherits the same executives with the same absence of a point of view and produces the same forgettable output eighteen months later. The cycle has a rhythm to it. I’ve watched firms run it three or four times. Each round more expensive and more disillusioning than the last. All without anyone stopping to ask whether the problem was ever downstream at all.
The real cause is upstream. It nearly always is.
This is the trap that catches almost everyone out. The symptoms are the same.
Content that underperforms because it’s badly distributed looks exactly like content that underperforms because it’s saying nothing.
Flat engagement. Low shares. No inbound. A sense that you’re shouting into the void.
From the dashboard, a supply problem and a distribution problem are indistinguishable. Both show up as numbers that stubbornly refuse to move.
And because they look identical, people reach for the diagnosis that’s cheaper to act on. Distribution problems feel solvable. You can buy your way out of them. Post more often. Change the timing. Repurpose the long piece into ten short ones. Hire someone who understands the algorithm. Yeah, that’ll do it.
There’s a whole industry ready to sell you the fix and it’ll feel like progress because you’re doing things.
Supply problems are horrible by comparison. You can’t buy your way out of having nothing to say. You can’t schedule your way to a point of view. The fix can be slow, it’s uncomfortable, it involves telling senior people that their current thinking isn’t good enough, and it can’t be outsourced to a junior with a scheduling tool. Given the choice between an easy wrong diagnosis and a hard right one, most organisations pick the easy one. Every time.
So how do you tell them apart? Well, you look at the ceiling.
A distribution problem has a ceiling that lifts when you improve the mechanics. Get the content in front of the right people and it starts to work. A single piece breaks out. Someone influential shares it. The inbound trickle becomes a stream. The material was always good, it just wasn’t reaching anyone. And once it does, you can feel the difference.
A supply problem has a ceiling that doesn’t move no matter what you do to the mechanics. You can put weak thinking in front of exactly the right audience at exactly the right time and it still lands with a wet thud. The reach improves. The result doesn’t.
When you’ve genuinely fixed distribution and nothing changes, you’ve found your answer. Problem is, it’s the answer nobody wanted. Doh!
I should be precise about this because the term ‘point of view’ gets thrown around until it means nothing.
A point of view isn’t a topic. ‘We have a point of view on cybersecurity‘ isn’t a point of view, it’s a subject heading. A point of view is a specific claim about a subject that someone else could disagree with. If nobody could reasonably hold the opposite position, you haven’t said anything. You’ve described the weather.
A point of view isn’t a summary of the debate. Lots of ‘thought leadership’ is really just a well-organised tour of what other people think. Here are the three schools of thought. Here are the pros and cons. Here’s a balanced conclusion. That’s useful, sometimes. But it’s a literature review. It isn’t leadership because it doesn’t lead anywhere. It leaves the reader exactly where they started, only better informed about the range of available opinions.
A point of view has a cost. This is the part so many people miss. A real position closes doors. If you believe something specific about where your industry is heading, you’re implicitly betting against the people who believe otherwise. Scarily, some of them might be your prospects. A genuine view will alienate someone. That’s not a bug. That’s the evidence that you’ve actually said something. Thought leadership that offends nobody has usually said nothing of interest because it’s carefully sanded off every edge that might have caught someone’s attention.
Here’s a simple test. Read the piece and ask: could a direct competitor have published this word for word, under their own logo, and had it be equally true for them? If yes, it isn’t thought leadership. It’s category wallpaper. It describes the shared assumptions of an entire industry. Which means it belongs to nobody and will move nobody.
The pieces that work fail this test on purpose. They contain a sentence a competitor couldn’t safely say because it’s rooted in something only this particular firm believes, or has seen, or has bet its business on.
If a point of view is the scarce input, the obvious question is: Where does it come from? And the honest answer is that it doesn’t come from a content workshop. (Shame, I love a content workshop.)
You can’t brainstorm your way to conviction in a ninety-minute session with sticky notes. It doesn’t matter how high you get on Sharpie fumes. Original thinking has sources and they’re mostly not the kind of thing an agency can install from the outside. But they can be found. They can be drawn out. They can be sharpened. If you know where to look.
Broadly speaking, there are five sources to explore…
The most interesting views usually come from someone who’s been repeatedly annoyed by something everyone else accepts. The operator who’s watched an industry standard fail again and again and can’t understand why nobody else sees it. The adviser who thinks the received wisdom in their field is quietly wrong and has the scars to prove it. Irritation is underrated as a raw material. When someone gets genuinely worked up about how their industry does things, you’re usually within touching distance of a real position. The job is to follow the irritation to its root.
People who’ve done something for twenty years have seen things repeat that newcomers can’t see because they simply haven’t been around long enough. They know which fashionable idea is just last decade’s fashionable idea with a new name. They can feel a mistake coming because they’ve watched it arrive before. That accumulated pattern recognition is genuinely valuable and almost never written down because, to the person who holds it, it just feels like obvious common sense. It isn’t. It’s expertise so deep it’s become invisible to its owner. And part of the work is making it visible again.
Ask a senior person what they believe about their industry and you’ll get the official line. Ask them what they think their peers get wrong, the thing they’d never say on a panel, and you’ll often get something far more interesting. There’s usually a gap between what people say in public and what they actually believe in private. The good stuff lives in that gap. Real positions are frequently the ones people have been slightly nervous about saying out loud.
What has the organisation actually staked money and time on that runs against the grain? A company reveals what it truly believes not in its content but in its decisions. Where it invested when others didn’t. What it refused to do when everyone else was doing it. Those decisions embed a worldview. Importantly, it’s usually a sharper and more defensible worldview than anything executives would articulate if you just asked them to share their thoughts.
There’s a fifth source. It’s easy to miss. It’s the thing the person is slightly embarrassed to believe. The view they hold that feels too simple. Or too obvious. Or too much at odds with what clever people are supposed to think. Some of the strongest positions live exactly here, in the territory a person has talked themselves out of because it sounded unsophisticated. When someone says, ‘this is probably too basic to be worth saying‘, my ears prick up. At those moments, they’re often standing on the most valuable thing they’ve got. The sophistication of an industry is frequently just its shared way of avoiding the plain truth. And the plain truth, said clearly, can sometimes be the most contrarian thing in the room.
Notice what all five have in common. None of them is generated on demand. They’re excavated. Birthed. They already exist inside the person or the organisation, buried under the received opinion and the sensible public line. The work is archaeological rather than creative. You’re not inventing a view. You’re finding one that’s already there and helping it come up for air. (Really mixed metaphors here. You get the picture.)
This is why the interview is such a delicate instrument and why so few people run it well. Ask an executive to ‘share their thoughts on the industry’ and you’ll get the polished public version. It’s the one they’ve given at conferences, the safe composite of everything acceptable. That version is useless. Sorry, it just is.
It’s the received opinion wearing the executive’s face. The thought leadership equivalent of a tired stock shot. The skill is in getting beneath it. And that means asking the questions that don’t sound like content questions at all. What made you angry this week? What did the last three failed projects have in common? What do you privately think your smartest competitor is wrong about? What would you do if you didn’t have to defend it to the board?
Those questions bypass the public line and reach the actual person. And the actual person is where the interesting point of view lives.
Which is precisely why the supply problem is so often misdiagnosed. The raw material is there or it isn’t, and no amount of downstream polish can conjure it if it’s genuinely absent. But when it is there and simply buried, the firm that knows how to dig has something the market badly needs.
Imagine, hypothetically, an agency willing to have the conversation the industry avoids. Bear with me here, I know this may be shocking.
A prospect comes in. They’ve run two thought leadership programmes already, both disappointing, and they’re convinced the problem is execution. They want better thinking, better writing, better distribution, a fresher approach. The whole kit and caboodle. They have a budget and a sense of urgency and a slide deck full of engagement targets.
The easy move is to nod, agree the previous agencies dropped the ball and sell them the machinery. We have a process for that. That’s the sale that closes on the day.
The hard move is to say: before we talk about any of that, let’s find out whether your executives actually have anything to say. Let’s sit with your leadership team and test whether there’s a genuine point of view in there or just competent received opinion. Because if it’s the latter, no programme we run will work. We’d be taking your money to produce the same forgettable output your last two agencies produced. So let’s do the diagnosis first, honestly, even though it might conclude that you’re not ready for what you came here to buy.
That conversation is commercially terrifying and it’s also the only honest one. It reframes the whole engagement. The question stops being ‘how do we produce more content‘ and becomes ‘do we have anything worth saying, and if not, how do we develop it?‘.
Those are completely different products. The first is a factory. The second is closer to a coaching relationship, or an editorial partnership, or something we don’t quite have a clean word for yet. (Though it’s encapsulated in so many agencies trotting out the ‘extension of your team‘ line.)
Most agencies can’t have this conversation because their entire model depends on the raw material already existing. They’re set up to package thinking, not to develop it. If a client turns out to have no point of view, the agency has no product to sell them. So the incentive is to pretend the point of view is there and get on with the packaging. The economics depend on the supply problem staying hidden.
Almost the entire thought leadership industry is in the packaging business.
You bring the thinking, they make it look good and get it seen. Ghostwriting, design, distribution, the podcast, the newsletter, the SEO. All of it assumes the thinking exists and takes it as the fixed input. This is a perfectly legitimate business and there are firms that do it superbly. But it’s a packaging business, and packaging has a hard limit.
You cannot package what isn’t there. Wrap nothing beautifully and you’ve got a beautiful nothing.
Developing thinking is a different business entirely, and hardly anyone is in it.
Developing thinking means starting further upstream before there’s anything to package. It means working with executives to find and sharpen an actual position. It’s part interrogation, part therapy, part editorial pressure. You’re helping someone discover what they really believe, which is harder than it sounds because most people have never been forced to articulate it. You’re separating their genuine convictions from the opinions they’ve absorbed without examining. You’re finding the irritations and the patterns and the private disagreements and the bets. And you’re building a defensible position out of raw material the executive didn’t know they were carrying.
It can be slow. It can be uncomfortable. It resists being productised into a neat retainer with predictable monthly deliverables. And it produces something categorically more valuable because at the end you don’t just have content, you have a point of view the content can express for years.
Here’s the relationship between the two, and it matters…
Packaging without development produces polished emptiness. Development without packaging produces valuable thinking that nobody ever sees. You need both, in that order. Develop the position, then package it well.
The industry has become expert at the second half of that sequence and largely skipped the first. This is why so much thought leadership is beautifully produced and completely forgettable.
The firm that can do the upstream work, the finding and the sharpening, is offering something packaging firms structurally can’t. Not because the packaging firms lack talent, but because their model was never built for it. They’re optimised for a world where the raw material arrives ready. When it doesn’t, they’ve got nothing. And their client has a problem they can’t name.
The supply problem was always there. But it’s about to get much more visible. The reason? AI. (You could have guessed, eh?)
For years, the scarcity of genuine thinking was hidden by the cost of production. Producing content was expensive. It was slow. So the bottleneck was always the making, never the thinking. If your output was thin, you could blame capacity. We’d say more if we had the time, the writers, the budget, etc. This constraint hid the deeper problem. As long as production was hard, nobody had to confront whether they had anything worthwhile to produce.
Now, that constraint has collapsed. Anyone can generate fluent, competent, professional-sounding content in seconds. The production bottleneck has gone. And when you remove the thing that was hiding the supply problem, the supply problem walks out into full daylight. (It was the old fairground owner after all, Scoob.)
Because here’s what AI is exceptional at. It’s exceptional at producing the exact kind of content the expert drought produces. Fluent, plausible, balanced, comprehensive, utterly generic.
It’s a machine for generating category wallpaper, the competent received opinion a competitor could have published word for word. That’s not a criticism of the technology. It’s undeniably clever. It’s just what a system trained on ingesting/stealing the aggregate of everything written naturally produces: the average, the consensus, the middle of the road.
Which means the floor has risen and the ceiling has stayed exactly where it is. Everybody can now produce competent content. So competent content is worth nothing, because scarcity is the only thing that ever made it worth anything and it just stopped being scarce. The market is being flooded with fluent, professional, forgettable material. Most of it machine-made. Some of it human-made but indistinguishable. And all of it worthless as a source of differentiation precisely because anyone can make it.
The only thing that survives this is a genuine point of view. A specific, defensible, occasionally uncomfortable position that a machine trained on consensus can’t produce. Because it’s rooted in a particular person’s particular experience and conviction rather than in the average of everything ever written.
AI raises the value of original thinking by making everything that isn’t original thinking free. The expert drought used to be an expensive inconvenience. It’s becoming the whole game.
There’s a second-order effect too. As the volume of competent, machine-made content explodes, readers adapt. They get faster at recognising the generic and quicker to dismiss it. The half-life of a forgettable piece was never long. It’s now close to zero.
People have developed an almost involuntary filter for content that says nothing (in truth, they probably don’t care whether AI is involved or not) and that filter is getting sharper every month, trained by the flood. Which changes the penalty for having nothing to say. You don’t merely fail to stand out. You actively signal emptiness.
Publishing generic content used to be neutral, a waste of effort but harmless. Now it’s a negative, a way of telling the market you’re one of the firms with nothing to add. Move along, nothing to see here.
So the organisations that developed real institutional thinking are about to look very clever. And the ones that were relying on production to disguise the absence of thinking are about to find themselves competing with a machine that produces the same nothing faster and cheaper than they ever could.
If you’re commissioning thought leadership, the questions you’re probably asking are the wrong ones. Harsh I know.
You’re likely asking about deliverables. How many articles, how often, on what channels, with what results. Can you write? Can you design?
You’re treating it as a production problem, buying capacity and measuring the vendor on output. Which makes sense if the thinking already exists and only needs expressing.
Thing is, you don’t actually know yet whether it exists. And neither, probably, does the agency you’re about to hire.
So what should you ask? Four questions.
The first isn’t about production at all. It’s diagnostic. Do we have a point of view worth publishing, and if not, can it be developed?
That’s what determines whether any of the production questions even matter. Ask it before you sign anything. And be genuinely open to a no, because a no discovered now is far cheaper than a no discovered after eighteen months of expensive, forgettable output.
The second question is about differentiation. What can we say that a competitor couldn’t say word for word under their own logo? If the honest answer is nothing yet, that’s not a reason to abandon the programme. It’s a reason to change what the programme is. You don’t need more content. You need a position. And you need it before the content is kicked off in anger. This why so many of our engagements start with Fast-Track Positioning and/or Mapping & Gapping.
The third question is about willingness. Are your executives prepared to hold a view that alienates someone? Because a point of view has a cost. And if the leadership isn’t willing to pay it, if they insist on the safe, balanced, offend-nobody line, then there’s no programme in the world that will make them memorable. Sorry.
That’s a decision only they can make and it’s worth bringing up before anyone writes a word. Plenty of firms discover, when it’s finally put to them plainly, that they want the rewards of a strong position without any of the risk. Better to know that on day one.
The fourth and final question is about honesty from your vendor. Will they tell you the truth about your raw material, even when the truth costs them the sale? An agency that only ever flatters your expertise is an agency optimising for the signature, not the result. The one worth hiring is the one prepared to tell you that you’re not ready. That the thinking needs work before the packaging can begin. And that they’d rather do the hard upstream work with you than sell you a factory that produces polished nothing.
That agency is rarer, and it’s the only kind worth having.
Thought leadership has a supply problem the industry keeps dressing up as a distribution problem because the distribution problem is the one you can sell a solution to.
The real work is upstream and it’s harder. It’s the work of finding out whether an organisation has anything genuinely original to say, and if it doesn’t, developing that thinking before a single piece of content gets made. Most programmes skip this step. They assume the raw material exists, they package the absence of it beautifully and then everyone acts surprised when the beautifully packaged nothing fails to move anyone.
The buyers most frustrated with their programmes are usually the ones whose problem started right here, at the source, long before any content was ever written. They fired the agency when they should have questioned the premise. They bought more megaphone when they had nothing to say into it.
And the reason all of this matters more now than it did, say, five years ago is that the thing which used to hide the supply problem, the cost and difficulty of production, has vanished. Competent content is free. Original thinking is not. The gap between the two is about to become the only thing that separates the firms people listen to from the firms people scroll past.
So the question isn’t how to produce more. It’s whether you’ve got anything worth producing in the first place. Answer that honestly and everything downstream gets easier. Duck it, and no amount of clever formatting will save you.
The expert drought is real. Pretending it’s a distribution problem just means paying to irrigate a field with nothing planted in it.
Jason Ball is the founder and managing director at Considered. With a multi-decade career in B2B marketing, he’s worked with world-leading brands such as Adobe, Google, EY and Cisco together with niche specialists in technology, manufacturing and professional services.