cf #82: two thought experiments to help you see what’s next
You are reading contentfolks—a fortnightly sporadic blend of sticky notes, big content ideas, and small practical examples. Thank you for being here! ~fio
Hey there 👋
If you’ve ever gone through a growth phase, whether as a solo marketer or as part of your org’s trajectory, you may have encountered this sentence: what got us here won’t take us there. It acknowledges that there are inflection points where your current mental models, tactics, processes, and knowledge become obsolete—and to move forward, you need to upgrade or maybe even completely redesign them.
Inflection points have different causes. Maybe you reach a significant milestone, like 100+ employees, $100m ARR, more clients than you have bandwidth for. Maybe there is a large shift in the market, like the current one with its generative AI discourse, ChatGPTification of content, and whatever Google has been doing to its search result pages. Or maybe you’re just experiencing one of the usual events that happen in tech—hello acquisitions, mergers, hypergrowth phases, reorgs, layoffs, IPOs, funding rounds, pivots, exits & co.
Whatever the reason, you hit an inflection point and soon thereafter BAM!, things stop working like they used to. Suddenly you need to rethink existing systems, find new decision-making frameworks, and learn how to do things differently because, indeed, what got you this far won’t take you much further.
Does it sound hard and tiring? Well, yes, it is 🫠 But it can also be fun and rewarding, especially if you enjoy building order out of chaos and can remain mentally flexible when work things get thrown at you that you did not see coming.
What’s helped me a lot with the latter is running ongoing ‘what if?’ thought experiments. I’ve done a couple recently that brought valuable breakthroughs (in under 2 hours each!), and I thought you might like to give them a try too.
1. The ‘what if you were a different person’ thought experiment
Biases and personal preferences affect our work decisions more than we give them credit for. They inform the content formats we gravitate towards, the tactics we’re willing to investigate, the tools we have an affinity for. I am clearly biased towards the written word, which is why you are reading this newsletter instead of watching my YouTube channel.
This thought experiment is about acknowledging the biases and preferences that got you this far, and imagining what things might look like if you were the opposite person to the one you currently are.
For example: as a hands-on content practitioner, you may be skeptical of the role of generative AI tools in content marketing and reluctant to make them part of your workflows. That’s your preference right there. So now imagine what your processes and deliverables would look like if you had been an enthusiastic ChatGPT adopter from day one:
How would you have approached content over the last 12 months?
What formats would you have chosen?
What decisions would you have made?
What processes or tactics might be different? Better? Worse?
The goal is not to do a complete 180 and become a YouTube superstar or a power user of tools you don’t want to use. You just want to spot opportunities you may have ignored because of your biases and investigate them further.
Running this thought experiment helped me see that my bias against AI-assisted work was not just depriving my team of potential growth opportunities, but maybe even making them reluctant to experiment in the first place. Not a good look for a content lead. ❌
With this insight, I decided to organise an AI & Automation R&D afternoon where we all went on personal generative AI deep dives and shared what we’d learned. I even surprised myself1 by building us a couple of dedicated GPT research assistants. ✅
2. The ‘you have an extra $1mil’ thought experiment
Sometimes your brain sees a constraint and automatically restricts thinking. You make content decisions not because they’re the best ones to make, but because they are the best ones given your current team, time, budget, and situation—and you often do it unconsciously, without noticing the difference.
This thought experiment is about understanding what you would do differently if you had no budgetary constraints. The goal is not to come up with bananapants ideas and demand money to get them done, but to figure out how your awareness of existing constraints might have limited your vision and execution so far.
I was inspired to run this thought experiment after a 121 in which I told my manager (hey, Siobhan 👋) that if she asked me a hypothetical “What would you do with an extra $1mil for the content team?” question, I wouldn’t have a good answer. That’s because I find pragmatic execution easier than speculative planning (see thought experiment 1, biases and preferences).2 And again: not a good look for a content lead ❌ who should have a plan both for what is possible and for what is ideal, then try to work at the intersection of the two.
You better believe I later spent some time figuring out to spend a large amount of fictional dollars. Knowing what the ideal state is makes it easier to reverse engineer the path to get there. ✅
If nothing else, thinking about being a different person with a million work dollars to spend makes for a fun afternoon. Try it! And while we’re at it: do you have any thought experiments to recommend? I’d like to add them to my repertoire 😉
Despite these changes, I remain a very reluctant user of most genAI tools. Aside from not being a fan of the ethical implications of a) underpaying humans to train large systems, without b) the explicit consent of the original creators and also without c) crediting or compensating said creators at any point, I am concerned about the lack of regulation and appalled at the bonkers environmental cost of these tools. I have been thinking about this classic Jurassic Park quote so very often this year:
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Funnily enough, I think I might have reached similar conclusions re: how to spend a million fictional dollars via the ‘what if you were a different person’ first thought experiment → what if I was someone who finds it easy to ignore constraints, is a bold risk taker, and lives her work life through a ‘go big or go home’ lens? That’s an exercise worth doing—though it raises questions that are probably better answered through therapy than content strategy!
This is profound ❤️💡
One thought experiment that I learned in a creativity class always yields surprising outcomes: upside down. Basically, you take the status quo and flip its rules on their head (e.g. what would a night school look like?) Go into as much detail as possible. Another one that is adapted from design thinking is a variation on what you did (and I played with it in some ideation sprints) that focuses on limits: What if you didn’t have any resources? Write as many ideas as you can. Then, what if budget was not an issue? Write as many ideas as you can.
I will also “steal” yours, now. Thank you 🤓