What if your best content ideas are in someone else’s head?
Somewhere in your business, someone is sitting on an idea that could shift the way your market thinks. It ‘s probably not in a strategy deck, or posted on LinkedIn. It’s likely not even written down.
It’s in their head. Waiting for the right question, the right audience, the right moment to be spoken out loud.
This is actually a topic I am super passionate about and keen to help explain, because as companies increasingly use AI to generate content, we’re starting to wallow in a sea of sameness. Customers simply won’t be able to distinguish between you and your competitors if you’re exploring the same trends, using the same language, and drawing on the same second-hand ideas. Your only real point of difference will be your own insights and perspectives.
What I’ve learned from years inside brands, rooms, and minds
The first thing is (and the brilliant news for marketers) that the best and most interesting ideas are usually already in the business. They’re sitting with your engineers, your sales team, your customer success leads. They’re rooted in the moments, challenges, and insights that only your people have lived, and that can’t be replicated with a prompt. AI can help shape and scale that content, but it can’t replace the judgement, and lived perspective it comes from, the very things that communicate true experience, expertise, authority, and trust.
Most of these people aren’t writers. They’re not thinking about “content pillars” or “brand voice”. But they’re full of insight. They just need someone to pull it out and shape it.
First, aim your telescope
Thought leadership works best when you know where you’re pointing it. That means some brand strategy up front.
What’s the big-picture positioning you want to reinforce every time you speak?
What are your supporting pillars, the themes you want to own in your space?
Once you know those, you can go hunting for ideas that serve them. Without them, you’re just collecting shiny fragments.
Make it matter
To drive an opinion, you have to have one. It sounds obvious, but I’ve lost count of how many ‘thought leadership’ pieces have all the edges sanded off. No heat, no conviction - or worse still are thinly veiled product pitches. If you want thought leadership to move the needle, it can’t just be noise, it has to matter to the people you want to reach.
Sometimes that means solving something tangible, helping them get unstuck or see a clear way forward - you know, the classic big 4 consulting company deep dives for example.
But sometimes it’s about offering inspiration, a vision they can measure themselves against. Sometimes it’s a quick sense-check, helping them to validate their own thinking. And sometimes it’s simply reframing the conversation in a way that makes them stop, tilt their head, and see the world differently.
Whatever the shape, it still starts with your audience. What’s occupying their thoughts? What’s shifting in their world?
If you can connect your perspective to those moments, in a way that feels fresh, relevant, and maybe even a little provocative, you’ll change the way they think. You’ll get their attention and earn a place in their mental shortlist of brands that get them. I saw the phrase attention changes minds once and it really stuck with me, so make it interesting if you want to achieve that.
If you want to validate an idea, I suggest asking yourself:
What do we have a burning opinion or deep-seated knowledge about?
Does my audience care about this?
What’s unique about our perspective and will it appeal to the audience?
Is this a trending topic? If so, does it offer a take which will cut through the rest of the discussion?
Four angles your thought leadership can take
Once you’ve found a topic, you can approach it in more than one way. I’m sure there are others, but here’s how I often break it down:
Position – Share fresh, standout insight from your lived experience
Distillation – Curate, summarise, and save your audience the work of figuring it out
Abstraction – Spot the pattern others have missed and connect it to something new
Disruption – Challenge the status quo or say the thing nobody else will
You don’t need all four in every piece. But knowing them helps you see the angles.
How to get those ideas out of heads and onto paper
The trick is to create space for people to talk before you try to shape or edit. Think improv’s golden rule: yes, and. Springboard in a deliberate way to keep ideas flowing and build momentum instead of shutting them down. A few ways to apply it:
Build, don’t block
When someone shares an idea, you acknowledge it (“yes”) and then add something to expand or extend it (“and…”).
Yess, and if we applied that to our healthcare audience, we could…
Layer perspectives
Use it to stitch together different people’s contributions into a bigger, richer idea.
Yes, and what Jane mentioned earlier could be combined with this to…
Turn tangents into fuel
If someone goes off track, treat it as a sideways door rather than a derailment.
Yes, and if we follow that thread, it might lead us to…
Test extremes
Take the original idea and push it to an exaggerated version to see what new possibilities open up.
Yes, and what if we made it ten times bigger… or ten times simpler?
Encourage quieter voices
After someone makes a point, invite others to add to it rather than replace it.
Yes, and what would you add to that from your perspective?
Capture every suggestion, and every take. You can always shortlist later.
And here’s the other trick: work with their brains, not against them.Some experts light up in a room with peers, bouncing thoughts around until the ideas get bigger and better. Those people will love a relaxed group session where they can spar, build, and riff together.
Others are busy, or just wired differently. For them, show up with a tight set of questions and a starting point to argue with. Nothing gets an expert talking faster than something they disagree with! Give them something to react to, not a blank page.
Either way, emphasise that it’s a small ask, just fifteen minutes on the phone. You’ll do the heavy lifting, shaping, writing, editing. All they need to do is talk, then check the final piece before it goes out.
Most people think ‘thought leadership’ means sitting down to write an article themselves, so show them it’s not. All you really want is what they think. That’s when they relax, and that’s when the good stuff comes out.
Wrangling the wild ideas
Raw expertise is a messy thing. It needs to be distilled into a narrative that resonates, with enough shape to hold attention but not so much polish that the life’s been squeezed out.
Don’t always assume thought leadership needs to be read. The real goal is for people to recognise that your business has solved something important to them, the format is secondary.
Start with three questions:
Who’s our audience?
What do we need them to understand?
What’s the best format for that to land?
Sometimes that’s a two-minute conversation you capture on video, a quick grab in a hallway that delivers more energy than a carefully crafted article ever could.
Sometimes it’s a deep dive in writing, because your audience needs the space to study and absorb.
Sometimes it’s storytelling in a short video or a talk, because emotion carries the point better than detail.
Look at the content and find the space where it will be most alive. That’s where it will work hardest.
And for the people who ask how does thought leadership help us sell? When you’re briefing or writing, make sure there’s one clear takeaway you want your audience to leave with; something about your brand, your approach, or your way of seeing the world. Not a product pitch or list of features, but a clear sense of this is who we are and what we believe.
That’s the part that stays with prospective customers and earns you a place in their consideration set long before they’re ready to buy.
And if you’re wondering where to start?
Don’t open a blank doc. Walk into the room where the smartest people in your business are already talking. Sit down. Listen. And ask the one question that turns a passing comment into a point of view:
“Can you tell me more about that?”
