Thought Leadership, Ancient Alien Theory, and Beavers

When I first got the idea in my head to write an article on Thought Leadership, I was overconfident that I'd be able to find what I needed and that there would be plenty of research materials that I would be able to pull from. Chris Parsons, the CEO of Knowledge Architecture, can attest to this, when we met-up in Madison, WI recently for a community workshop KA was hosting, he expressed that it would be a hard concept to nail down, and I essentially 'p-shawed' the idea. I'm stating publicly that I was wrong, it was a hard one to nail down. Once I got into the research I found that so much of it was fluff. It was really really difficult to find quality conversations on Thought Leaders and Thought Leadership. Most of my searches returned short articles declaiming that 'X' company was a thought leader in 'N' practices, mostly marketing copy. Taking some extra time to wade through this morass did prove fruitful, however, which I hope I demonstrate below in my review of five pieces of research and commentary on Thought Leadership that I found to be valuable.

The first resource we will look at was a blog post from Peter Cook, CEO of the company (wait for it) Thought Leaders. This was the only bit where I could find some of the history behind the term, which as I've asserted for previous elements, an important step towards cutting through the fluff. According to Cook's post 'A Brief History of Thought Leadership', the term Thought Leader is recorded to have first been coined by Joel Kurtzman in 1994, in the magazine 'Strategy and Business'. Kurtzman's original definition follows:

"A thought leader is recognized by peers, customers and industry experts as someone who deeply understands the business they are in, the needs of their customers and the broader marketplace in which they operate. They have distinctively original ideas, unique points of view and new insights."

The emphasis then and now is on being an individual with original ideas and unique points of view, but there is a bit more too it than that. Let's look at Cook's post again as he extrapolates on the definition:

"an expert used to be someone who knew stuff. Now anyone with an Internet connection can get more information than they will ever need. This information overload has created three vacuums: meaning, relevance, and engagement. And that... is what a thought leader needs to provide – meaning, relevance, and engagement."

I like those three qualifiers, meaning, relevance, and engagement, mainly because that is the exact job of a librarian when it comes to information resources. Are thought leaders actually shadow librarians? Let's find out.

Two more things jumped out at me from Cook's post, the first is a paraphrasing of the inimitable Dr. Stephen Covey:

"[Stephen Covey states that thought leaders] spend less time on the urgent, non-important stuff, and give much more priority to the important, non-urgent stuff."

and Cook reinforces Covey's thought using a quote from Goethe:

"Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least."

We will come back to this characterization from Goethe that sets Thought Leaders apart from formal leadership; in the vernacular of one of my all time favorite 90s era John Cusack films 'The Grifters' Thought Leaders are more concerned with the 'Long Con', they recognize that non-linear thinking, pattern recognition, and to some degree disruption of the status quo is healthy for their organization, so that is where they place the majority of their efforts.

And that is about it for Cook. The next paper I found to be relevant is titled 'Making Sense of Thought Leadership' and comes to us from the Rotterdam School of Management. Their take on Thought Leaders and Thought Leadership is an internal / external one. The authors here assert that Thought Leaders can be outspoken on subjects and issues that have a much larger social impact. They work both inside the company and outside the company, on a very public scale, towards solving these issue. Now, this paper has a bit of that marketing bent to it, which isn't 100% aligned with what we, as KMEs, are looking for out of this element, but I think there are some useful bits here that can be applied to our context. Let's dig a deeper into what the authors are saying here:

"By developing novel points of view (NPOVs) that catch not only the attention of society, but which break with or challenge conventional thinking, companies are able to create a platform from which they can differentiate themselves from competitors and be seen by stakeholders as intellectual leaders in the fight against society’s worries... It is from this perspective that we propose a definition of thought leadership as: the action of introducing and promoting convention-breaking ideas that cause people to change how they think about marketplace or societal issues."

Looking at Thought Leadership through this lens, a business should not be afraid of speaking out on sensitive issues. Taking a stand on, for instance, wage disparity or indigenous water rights, should not be above a thought leader at an organization and if that role is embraced, the firm should not be afraid to publicly support their representative.

I see this as an active barrier to thought leadership. For example, many designers and architects are passionate about issues like bird-collisions, but won't speak about it publicly. Thought Leadership as a business strategy is saying that the public trust you gain by speaking out, by being a visible thought leader, is more valuable than the client lost that held an opposing view. This, obviously, isn't going to align with a lot of business models. The author's continue, however, giving us some practical tech to hold on to:

"Thought leadership is comprised of two pillars. The first is novelty (the NPOV), and the second is trust. Without trust stakeholders will not endorse the NPOV. Nor will they perceive the organization as being the preferred partner to work or associate with."

Thought leadership is a type of activism. Again, relating this to the role of librarian. Librarianship, public and academic, is one of the few professional roles where activism is not suppressed , and is at times, endorsed by the institution that the activist librarian works for.Another analogue could be the 'hacktavist' *queue ominous Mr. Robot theme music*.

From the Two Pillars, novelty and trust, the authors pull a very useful process that can be applied to a wide variety of context:

"Tied in to the two pillars is a four-step process. The first step is to articulate a novel point of view... it is enough to be the first to bring an idea or perspective to the attention of stakeholders and to propel... discussion about it. the NPOV needs to be something that changes the way we think or perceive the subject matter... The second step is made through sharing the expertise and information the company has accumulated around the NPOV... it is important for thought leaders to build trust-based relationships with stakeholders. One way for companies to do so is by openly sharing information about their novel point of view... Creating strong interactive networks with stakeholders is the third step... Thought leaders... seek to create a dense community or network with [stakeholders]... The fourth step requires the company to act in line with the desired positioning."

The hard part about this four-step process is articulating a novel point of view and for the firm to accept the individual as a thought leader. Thought leadership is not a job that can be hired for, it is a personality type, it is an individual with a combination of an unique worldview and that is unafraid to speak their mind. Thought Leadership can't be hired for but it can be cultivated through a corporate culture open to experimentation and multiple points of perception. Once a thought leader 'emerges' from this corporate culture, the next steps can be articulated by the firm. The thought leader becomes an element of the firm's brand both internally and externally.

Finally, this last quote really appealed to me:

"When looking to develop a thought leadership position, companies must fully comprehend that as a commitment it is akin to picking up and bearing a flaming torch."

The Thought Leader is the Prometheus of the business world.

This can be the Bulfinch's Mythology Prometheus (I loved that book as a kid), the Titan and Trickster who defies the gods (formal leadership), steals and gives fire (out-of-the-box ideas) to humanity (the enterprise community), thus starting the process of innovation and evolution. Or it can be the Ancient Alien Theory Ridley Scott Prometheus where the seeds of humanity's (the enterprise community) evolution are planted by visitors from another planet (the Thought Leaders). Neither archetypes really meet a very pleasant end, the Trickster was banished to Tartarus (driven underground) by Zeus (formal leadership) and Scott's Prometheus became the host for a whole different, much more destructive alien life form (Thought Leadership as a buzzword maybe? Which has eroded the effectiveness of the role to a large extent).

They wouldn't be myths if they didn't come with warnings at the end, and I think either of these are relate-able, speaking to the risk that a Thought Leader takes when starting down their path.

The third paper in our queue, coming to us from the Harvard Business Review, is entitled 'Why the term 'thought leader' isn't gross'. This is an interview with the marketing and strategy consultant Dorie Clark. This interview had some real substance and was very recently done (2015). Dorie begins with a thought that echoes Cook's from above, that being an expert in something is no longer sufficient in today's competitive business world:

"Being an expert is great, right? It’s fantastic. But I don’t think it’s sufficient anymore. Thought leader, if you parse it, if you break it down into its constituent parts, so number one, thought, right? It means that you are being known and recognized for your ideas. It means that you have that expertise. That’s a valuable thing that I think we can all agree on... the leader part is the essential one... people who are out there and active and engaged and making a difference with their ideas. That’s how we get real change. And so aspiring to be a thought leader, somebody who has great ideas that he or she shares with the world, I think is actually a pretty noble endeavor."

Through this lens, the sharing of one's ideas is the crucial aspect of thought leadership. One can have great ideas but if, either through individual personality traits (shout out to my fellow introverts) or through a corporate culture that doesn't actively (emphasis on that word) encourage new ideas and explorations, those ideas aren't shared and thought leadership is not in any way achieved. Clark offers us a three-step process (if business processes were nickels...) for working within an enterprise community as a thought leader, Clark is a great communicator, so I'm going to post some wholesale quotes from her below instead of paraphrasing:

"a three-step process to building a following around your ideas, to becoming the leader part of the equation... It’s first building your network, next building your audience, and then finally building your community... the essential initial starting point is building this one-on-one network of trusted people that you surround yourself with... build that network. Then once they’ve said, you know what, this is great, go for it, you start to build your audience, which is where you begin to communicate the idea more broadly. And again, this is kind of a testing phase... This is where you start going public. You come out a little bit with your idea. You write blog posts. You give speeches. Maybe you do a webinar. And you start to see what the response is. And if people are liking it, if they’re finding it helpful, if they’re finding it useful, then you can double down on it, and the word will began to spread... if your idea really is good, if people really find it valuable, then you can begin to build your community around it. And what I mean by that is that there’s kind of a tipping point that happens where your audience, if they are engaged enough, they start talking to each other."

Let's pause and recap, we have our Two Pillars:

1) The NPOV [Novel Point of View] (can we just call them New Ideas? If acronym's were nickels... I wouldn't need processes)

2) Community Trust

The Four-Step process related to the Two Pillars:

1) Articulate the Novel Point of View

2) Share the research and innovations from implementing the NPOV

3) Cultivate a grassroots network around the new ideas

4) Gain Formal Leadership's adoption

and Clark's Three-Step Process:

1) Build Your Network

2) Build Your Audience

3) Build Your Community

which plugs in between numbers 2 and 3 above, given some more granularity to the 'how' of the sticky human interface portion of Thought Leadership.

It was at this point in the article that Clark said something that sent off a whole marquee of vintage light bulbs in my head:

"It enables you to create a niche of one, and so you can really own it. I mean, one of the examples that I talked about in my first book, Reinventing You, was Tim Ferriss, who I’m sure many avid podcast listeners are familiar with. He was the author of The 4-Hour Work Week... it was interesting because he wrote this book that was a business book essentially. His follow-up book was called The 4-Hour Body, which was a fitness book. And then his follow-up to that was The 4-Hour Chef, which was a cookbook. I mean, it’s crazy. I mean, there’s a lot of business authors you have on this podcast. Probably not a lot of your listeners would be interested in having the Michael Porter cookbook... But Tim Ferriss was able to pull it off. And the way that he was was that he said, you know what? It’s not that I wrote a business book, and then I do fitness, and then I do cooking. It’s that I’m doing the same thing. I do lifestyle design. And then it’s like, oh, whoa, he’s created this new category, and he’s able to be the expert. He’s able to be the best at it."

Clark is essentially describing Thought Leadership as an act of Cultural Niche Construction!

Which, I'm sure, begs the question:

Drew, what the heck is cultural niche construction?

Niche Construction Theory is something I grew to be very familiar with during my college career when researching and working with the urban American Indian community in Milwaukee on issues of indigenous language revival and revitalization.

NCT (I don't mind this acronym, I'm fickle), started as a theory in the biological sciences, in a nutshell, niche construction is an alternative way to look at the evolution of organisms. Instead of the environment placing pressure on organisms so that those organisms that have adapted to the environment the best are the ones that pass on their genes, niche construction states that those organisms in turn, change their environment, shaping the pressures put on themselves and other organisms.

In the next paper, 'Cultural Niche Construction: An Introduction', it is states that:

"By transforming natural selection pressures, niche construction generates feedback in evolution at various different levels. Niche-constructing species play important ecological roles by creating habitats and resources used by other species and thereby affecting the flow of energy and matter through ecosystems"

Humans, presumably high level organisms in the environment, are said to interact and learn about the world primarily through cultural means. Therefore, cultural niche construction is a unique human behavior where cultural practices affect the environment and other organisms in that environment.

The paper offers a nice example of traditional niche construction activity that might help to make this a bit clearer:

"[Niche construction] activity can have significant impacts on community structure, composition, and diversity. Young beavers, for example, inherit from their parents not only a local environment comprising a dam, a lake, and a lodge but also an altered community of microorganisms, plants, and animals... [For example,] the browsing of cottonwood trees by beavers stimulates elevated levels of defensive chemicals in the resprout growth and that these chemicals in turn are sequestered and used by leaf beetles for their own defense. Conversely, other invertebrates are driven out by the chemicals."

Thought Leaders are the Beavers of the business world.

TL Beavers, in an organizational setting, carve out cultural niches built with their own ingenuity. These niches, which are reinforced through our Pillars and Processes, set in motion what the authors of this paper call 'cycles of contingency':

"Niche construction, then, is a process rather than merely a product. Organisms and environments are treated by NCT as engaged in reciprocally caused relationships... that are negotiated over both ontogenetic and phylogenetic timescales, entwined in, to coin a very apt phrase from developmental systems theory, ‘cycles of contingency’"

What are 'cycles of contingency' from a Thought Leader as Niche Constructor perspective? The Thought Leader, in sharing their outlook, speaking, changing minds, engages with an 'ecology of stakeholders' or rather, a community or communities. Not all ideas, processes, perspectives take hold, but those that due travel through time-depth. Those niches that are successful contribute to the creation and development of new ideas and processes related to the the niche (ontogenesis) and those new entities, knowledge objects, or processes in turn affect the others in that same environment phylogenesis). This phenomenon, which needs to be tracked longitudinally [read: The Long Con], is the above mentioned Cycle of Contingency engendered by a thought leader within and without the firm.

Another useful concept from the authors is that of the 'Smart Variant', forgive the long science-y quote, I think the context is helpful:

"the variants that occur during genetic evolution—mutations—are random (or at least blind relative to natural selection), those acquired through ontogenetic processes are not. They are ‘‘smart variants’’... During learning, animals typically demonstrate inherited a priori biases in their associations and patterns of behavior that are likely to be adaptive. These biases influence the behavior of each individual, the associations it forms, the antibodies it generates, and the developmental pathways it takes, usually in the direction of being functional and adaptive. Because the information-acquisition entity for these ontogenetic processes is no longer an evolving population. but rather each individual organism in a population, the adaptive knowledge acquired cannot be inherited by successive generations. Nonetheless, processes such as learning can still be of considerable importance to subsequent generations because learned knowledge can guide niche construction, the consequences of which can be inherited through ecological inheritance. In this respect, learning provides a second source of semantic information that can be expressed in niche construction."

'Smart Variants' is another term that can be applied to the actions of a Thought Leader, as they are informed by the combination of prior learning and experience and a drive to construct new niches, which in turn create new experiences and learning opportunities for others in the community. Smart Variants could be defined in our context as changes, perceptions, attitudes, processes, etc. that are successful in creating new cultural niches for the Thought Leader (and the communities she belongs to [enterprise, practice-based, or social]).

I mention above that I found niche construction theory via the vehicle of linguistics. Language and culture are two sides of the same coin, therefore cultural change has a direct impact on languages used within a culture and adjacent to it. The paper offers an excellent explanation of how cultural change is related to niche construction below:

"Cultural change can also be regarded as loosely Darwinian in character in the sense that cultural variants are generated by individuals and as a result of social learning are culturally selected through their differential adoption. Cultural processes, as with biological evolution, may accumulate functional solutions to problems posed by the environment. Most of the time, cultural processes can be regarded as a shortcut to acquiring adaptive information, as individuals rapidly learn or are shown what to eat, where to live, or how to avoid danger by doing what other, more knowledgeable individuals do. Experienced others such as parents are a reservoir of smart variants, allowing naive individuals to shortcut the many iterations of ontogenetic selection necessary to learn for themselves behavioral patterns appropriate to their environment and thus leapfrog to the functional and already-tested solutions established by others"

Focusing on the practice component of Thought Leadership, Thought Leaders are the 'reservoir of smart variants' that allow others in their Community of Practice to 'leapfrog' through an established learning process and help fill the niche constructed by the TL, bringing exponential advantage to that CoP. The Thought Leader is not just an innovator, but an effective social-learning catalyst. The authors continue, connecting culture to learned behavior as we move even closer towards theory relevant for the enterprise community environment:

"niche construction that is based on either learned or culturally transmitted information may be expressed ‘‘intentionally’’ relative to a specific goal, such as planting a crop or constructing terraces. Other components of cultural processes, such as fads and fashions, are less clearly directed and may be subject to so many complex and frequency-dependent selective processes that their evolution is unpredictable and more difficult to describe quantitatively"

Niche construction engaged in by a Thought Leader must not only be transmitted but also expressed 'intentionally'. In other words, the transmission must be connected to a specific goal and the achievement of that goal. Otherwise, the cultural change can easily fall prey to becoming a fad, or in other words, ephemeral.

We are all wired to create and fill cultural niches, Thought Leaders take advantage of these traits and use them to drive change.

OK, Drew, you're way out in an erratic orbit now, aren't you. Isn't this a pretty big jump between evolutionary ecology and organizational theory?

Well, Drew, let me tell you, there is precedent for this connection. Our last paper, 'Niche Construction and the Evolution of Leadership' is a modern example, published in 2015 in the Academy of Management Review.

Consider the authors argument for making the connection between NCT and business management:

“it is now time for less consolidation and more provocation” in theory development in the organizational sciences... we combine insights derived from biological science with existing organizational theory to model the evolution of leadership and its impact on organizational change."

Which, in a very meta way, fits the aforementioned definition of Thought Leadership, bringing to seemingly unrelated disciplines together to create a new intellectual, practice-based niche.

I've mentioned briefly that the Thought Leader can be considered a risk in an organization, depending on how strong the formal leadership is and what type of hierarchical structure the firm has. On the subject of risk the authors have this to say:

"organizing the efforts of groups—that is, interdependent individuals who share social identities and have common interests—comes with costs and risks... if “group” is defined at the organizational level, then transaction costs of coordination are high because of the increased likelihood of divergent incentives and routines among individuals and subgroups"

This suggests that our model of the Thought Leader Beaver is a potential risk, or a higher cost to a group with an organizational group identity. The risk, then, of a thought leader's niche construction activity needs to be outweighed by past and potential benefits for the group identity to tolerate the risk her divergence from the norm creates. The authors continue in this vein:

"formal leadership is a mechanism for maintaining adaptive levels of cohesion between increasingly unrelated group members to enhance the relative fitness of an organization. This makes large-scale formal leadership an essential component to coordinate the behavior of loosely related groups in competitive organizational environments."

To me, this statement reinforces the requirement for a Thought Leader to be social and share her endeavors with first a small cohort and then a community. She takes the role of the coordinator of others that see her niche construction as valuable to their own wellbeing and profit. The concentration on formal leadership as niche constructors continues:

"To execute large-scale niche construction in competitive social environments, learning the rules for coordination is paramount. Formal leadership addresses this concern by increasing the pace of cultural transmission through directed social learning, rather than by relying on individuals to separately adopt their own models, which can decrease relative group cohesion. Specifically, formalized leadership interacts with culture to institutionalize norms and promote uniform acculturation. This is an outcome that is especially desired in modern organizations, which typically comprise unrelated group members who bring their own potentially divisive normative beliefs and practices into the collective."

Formal leadership constructs niches and directs firm culture according to predetermined plans. Conversely, thought leaders diverge from the current niche, building new ones. There are multiple points of tension here, which gets at the heart of the complexity that niche construction theory shines a light on. You have formal leadership constructing cultural niches based on strategic plans. You also have tension created through competition between groups inside a firm (practice areas, market studios vying for resources, etc.) and tension from outside firms trying to expand their own niches into that of our hypothetical firm. The authors speak to these tensions when they state:

"Regardless of whether the pressure is coming from the [outside] environment or from an organizational niche constructed by leadership, there will exist the same continuing and observable cycle of variation, inheritance, and selection. Incorporating this logic into the study of organizational behavior generates a clear set of propositions for analyzing and predicting change over time... if competition between groups is stronger than competition within groups, adaptations benefiting the group will emerge."

Competition within groups takes the form of knowledge hoarding, information silos, etc. Even if the competition is not overt, the covert compartmentalization of knowledge assets has the same effect as if the distinct groups were actively competing against one another. Additionally, as we all know, there is a lot of overt competition between departments and roles in an architecture firm. Thought leaders bring together groups, much like CoPs, by bridging caps, pulling on different knowledge assets, and connecting the firm through their social knowledge sharing activities.

Strict hierarchical organizations, or even strict practices that result in temporary hierarchies, are, in my perception, the enemy of thought leadership. This is the farmer dynamiting beaver dams on his land so she can maintain the borders and utility of her fields, instead of allowing the beavers to change the environment. The authors speak of another concept that might be useful, followership investment:

"followership investment... can then be used to capture this self/group trade-off and the opportunity it provides for formal large-scale organizational practices to evolve. The act of following can be considered an investment of capital, energy, time, or anything else that is a potential cost to an individual in order to accomplish organizational goals. This form of large-scale, asymmetric coordinated investment is possible only if (1) there is a prevailing between-group pressure relative to within group pressure, such as market competition, and (2) the perceived return on followership investment is sufficient to increase the fitness of both the group and its individual members. Any form of loosely related, large-scale coordination without these basic rules of multilevel return on investment would revert to a more primitive dominance hierarchy where a leader’s power was absolute and coordination coerced, generally with minimal benefit to other group members."

If we, as knowledge managers, are interested in protecting and encouraging the behavior of Thought Leaders, we need to be aware of a shift back towards a dominance hierarchy. I have seen many instances of a KM program trying to use this as the model to affect change. The 'you-have-no-choice-but-to-share' maxim.

One might argue that a Thought Leader is a figurehead in a dominance hierarchy. While on the surface the model looks like a one-woman-at-the-top with followers model, the Thought Leader is placed there due to the thoughtfulness, applicability, and effort she put into sharing her ideas. The Thought Leader creates niches outside of this model and is successful only when her cultural, or maybe by now we can call them knowledge niches, bring value to the widest array of a firm's overall community.

Strong leaders in a hierarchical environment can either frustrate Thought Leader niche construction activities, or cultivate it, depending on their own goals. Leadership that encourages or at least, allows Thought Leadership to flourish, creates for their group a firm that is more competitive due to the cohesion and innovation that a Thought Leader engenders. Those that frustrate it gain stability, but at the cost of rapid increases in profit and efficiency that might set them ahead in the between-group competition environment.

In closing, I think that applying the concepts in Niche Construction Theory to the behavior of Thought Leaders is very beneficial because it cuts through all of that fluff, all of those companies and individuals that market themselves as thought leaders without really understanding what the term means, which is why I've undertaken this exercise. To clarify the terms on our table, to find ways to track, measure, and explain them that don't include the same recycled copy from those three articles on LinkedIn that everyone reshares. NCT gives a valid metaphorical and literal platform to understand, track, and theorize about Thought Leadership in the 21st century.

REFERENCES

Clark D (2015) Why the term 'thought leader' isn't gross. Harvard Business Review. pp 1-11

Cook P (2012) A brief history of thought leadership. petercook.com. 

van Halderen M and Kettler-Paddock K (2011) Making sense of thought leadership. RSM Insight (6) pp 4-6

Laland K N and O'Brien M J (2011) Cultural niche construction: An Introduction. Biological Theory (6) pp 191-202

Spisak B R, O'Brien M J, Nicholson N and Van Vugt M (2015) Niche construction and the evolution of leadership. Academy of Management Review (40, 2) pp 291-306.