Authorities aren't contrarian

Authorities aren’t contrarian, at least not intentionally.

I used to believe they were because their thinking contrasts so clearly with the status quo. That's part of what makes them appealing.

But my intuition was wrong.

Not around the output, but the approach to input.

Broadly speaking, influencers are intentionally contrarian.

B2B influencers grow out from social media, and one surefire way to get traction and attention on social media is to say something contrarian, or more likely, controversial.

They’ll start posts with lines like “Hot take” (does anyone with a genuine hot take really feel the need to announce they have a hot take before revealing said hot take?).

Other times, the inner workings of their writing are transparent. They’re clearly working hard to engineer contrarian material.

That’s not what authorities do.

Authorities:

• Focus on solving one interesting, painful frustration as experienced by one relatively small group of people. That frustration is framed as one big question, either implicitly or explicitly. For example, Carl Richards’ might be, “Why is there a gap between what people know they should do with money and what they actually do?”
• That big question represents a creative boundary. It’s the framework for all the small questions and observations the authority answers on a daily or weekly basis.
• They study the data of how that frustration plays out in the wild in at least one of three ways:
  1. Data derived from experience - Patterns observed from working directly on this frustration with clients over time.
  2. Primary data - Unique datasets their business collects, often through a product or service.
  3. Secondary data - Public information analysed and critiqued from their specific perspective.
• They take the role of a pundit, delivering analysis on what they find, along with thoughts and solutions to the frustration.
• They frequently share that punditry in public.

When an individual follows that path…

Contrarian insights form as a by-product

They’re studying this one frustration as experienced by one group of people to a greater degree than anyone else. Very few people go this deep on one frustration, never mind one taken from a particular perspective of a group of people (not the masses).

When they look this closely, they inevitably notice inconsistencies with 'best practices.' Not because they’re trying to be different, but because best practices are written by generalists for generalists. They work broadly, but break down in specific contexts.

To be clear, authorities are strategic about the craft. They think carefully about which insights to share, how to frame them, what will resonate. They're looking for interesting angles. But they're not strategic about the truth itself. They don't start with "what would be contrarian?" and work backwards. They start with "what's actually happening?" and discover that reality happens to contrast with conventional wisdom.

That's why authority insights feel contrarian - they're specific where conventional wisdom is generic. But the authority never set out to be contrarian. They simply studied one problem more closely than anyone else did.