Creating More Credible Content

Yesterday I wrote about an article titled "Learning to Live with Paradox," by Mercer Management Consulting's Stephen Rhinesmith. It offers so many different lessons in writng thought leadership pieces, that I could not resist going back and mining it again. Yesterday, I looked at how it frames a presentation -- specifically, by using a device I call "the big hairy concept" -- and how that approach can be extended and applied elsewhere. Today, rather than look at form issues, I want to look at content.

When you boil it down, what most readers want from thought leadership content is a solution to their problems. (It's also one of the hardest things to provide.) What's fascinating here is that Rhinesmith flies in the face of that expectation by starting from a premise that you can never solve some problems because they're not really problems, but paradoxes (the big hairy concept). A good manager will recognize a paradox when he or she sees one and adroitly balance opposing interests (like local operational autonomy versus standard global best practices). As he says:

"For example, moving products close to the customer in order to achieve fast delivery times may result in excess local inventory. if both sides can agree on an acceptable level of inventory they can manage the tension. On a global level, an agreement might call for 70% of new products to have global branding and applicability, with 30% of new products customized for local consumption."

The issue for the reader is whether the offered solution is credible. That comes up all the time in technology marketing where it's common practice to use thought leadership to push proprietary products. Too much proprietary content and the white paper is a sales brochure. Too little and the paper doesn't say anything new. Too much and you're giving away trade secrets. Too little and you're asking readers to accept what you're saying on faith. One way you can tell if a writer has not successfully solved this dilemma is if the paper or article spends most its length defining the problem and has little space left for the actual solution -- perhaps with a sidebar highlighting the author's product.

Rhinesmith shows how content is more convincing the more it has the logic of the reader's own experience behind it. Prsented in that light, most readers will intuitively accept the abstraction that optimizing a part of something can often suboptimize the whole. That's just life — from which it's possible to draw numerous examples, which are at the heart of Rhinesmith's case. His five recommendations on how to strike appropriate balances also square with everyday experience -- as in the 70/30 inventory example just cited. Tech marketers take note.

Invoking objective reality (in this case, the reader's) is probably the best way to build credibilty -- the extreme example of which is scientific peer-reviewed research. Often that's not available, and even it it were available it might not be the most persuasive content since it might have to be translated for lay readers.

Even so, there are ways that thought leadership authors can build more persuasive content by grounding it in rigorous scientific methods. Take Rhinesmith's example of striking a 70/30 optimum global/local inventory allocation. Advanced quantitative methods exist for solving exactly these types of optimization problems. My client, Analytics Operations Engineering -- an MIT spinoff -- does this kind of thing for a living and I am currently writing 12 client case studies for the firm. You don't make cases like this persuasive to a general business audience by walking through the math. You do it by successfully conveying the underlying logic and showing the result in a business context (see chart).

Objectifying problems has benefits beyond making content more credible. It also helps manage the tension when these balancing discussions come up. Making it a math problem is a great way to save face -- and go on living with the paradox.