The Disruptive Wisdom Framework
Designed to help expert consultants become the Undisputed Authority in your field.
There are six pillars to the framework. Each element is built out of your own unique Disruptive Wisdom that we unearth.
Disruptive Wisdom: The foundation—where we challenge, refine, and crystallise your unique perspectives. Without this, your ideas lack the sharpness needed to stand out.
Who: The specific audience for your insights and products. Without knowing who you’re speaking to, you risk being too generic to resonate deeply with anyone.
Borrow an Audience: The growth strategy—appearing on external platforms to attract followers. Without borrowing an audience, your reach is limited and growth is stagnant.
Home Base: Usually a newsletter where you consistently connect with your audience. Without this, you lack a place to nurture relationships, build trust over time, and sell new products.
Product: The value proposition of each product or offer you sell aligns with the needs of your who and the ideas you promote. Without that clear alignment, your Disruptive Wisdom won't translate into sales or impact.
Hit: Your breakthrough content—a book, podcast, or talk. This is your signature body of work. Without a Hit, you'll struggle to move to the very top of your field.
Disruptive Wisdom: The foundation—where we challenge, refine, and crystallise your unique perspectives. Without this, your ideas lack the sharpness needed to stand out.
Who: The specific audience for your insights and products. Without knowing who you’re speaking to, you risk being too generic to resonate deeply with anyone.
Borrow an Audience: The growth strategy—appearing on external platforms to attract followers. Without borrowing an audience, your reach is limited and growth is stagnant.
Home Base: Usually a newsletter where you consistently connect with your audience. Without this, you lack a place to nurture relationships, build trust over time, and sell new products.
Product: The value proposition of each product or offer you sell aligns with the needs of your who and the ideas you promote. Without that clear alignment, your Disruptive Wisdom won't translate into sales or impact.
Hit: Your breakthrough content—a book, podcast, or talk. This is your signature body of work. Without a Hit, you'll struggle to move to the very top of your field.
Disruptive Wisdom
You're so busy in your day-to-day that you rarely stop to question why you believe what you believe. Often, when you dig a little deeper, you discover that you may never have developed your beliefs in the first place. They were borrowed.
The foundations of Disruptive Wisdom are about getting to the bottom of what you believe, tearing those beliefs down, then uncovering the roots of your true philosophies.
When I work with clients on Thought Partner, we spar on ideas and frames.
I play devil's advocate, hold the reader's ear, and highlight the magic within your thinking that you don't yet see.
l ask questions that help you get beyond the surface level of your knowledge. I'll help you summarise the nucleus, refine the points, and make comparisons and observations you haven't thought to make.
We sharpen how you tell a story, too, and if you need a skeletal framework to work from, a structure, I'll give you that.
Maybe you have ideas framed already, but you resist taking a really hard position. You have a degree of confidence in your perspective, but there's an element of lingering doubt. I'll attack your ideas and stress-test them. So, once we're done, you can take those hard positions in the confidence that, though they may be contrarian, they're completely defendable.
We develop a library of these frames that you can access and share at any time. In a newsletter, on a podcast, on stage, or for today's LinkedIn post.
And you can absolutely do this on your own, hire someone like me, or battle-test it through trial and error by seeing what the market resonates with.
These ideas we develop through this Disruptive Wisdom feed into the five remaining pillars. The order in which we approach them can vary from consultant to consultant.
The foundations of Disruptive Wisdom are about getting to the bottom of what you believe, tearing those beliefs down, then uncovering the roots of your true philosophies.
When I work with clients on Thought Partner, we spar on ideas and frames.
I play devil's advocate, hold the reader's ear, and highlight the magic within your thinking that you don't yet see.
l ask questions that help you get beyond the surface level of your knowledge. I'll help you summarise the nucleus, refine the points, and make comparisons and observations you haven't thought to make.
We sharpen how you tell a story, too, and if you need a skeletal framework to work from, a structure, I'll give you that.
Maybe you have ideas framed already, but you resist taking a really hard position. You have a degree of confidence in your perspective, but there's an element of lingering doubt. I'll attack your ideas and stress-test them. So, once we're done, you can take those hard positions in the confidence that, though they may be contrarian, they're completely defendable.
We develop a library of these frames that you can access and share at any time. In a newsletter, on a podcast, on stage, or for today's LinkedIn post.
And you can absolutely do this on your own, hire someone like me, or battle-test it through trial and error by seeing what the market resonates with.
These ideas we develop through this Disruptive Wisdom feed into the five remaining pillars. The order in which we approach them can vary from consultant to consultant.
Who
Disruptive Wisdom comes through specificity.
Everything worth saying has already been said. There are no new ideas. But there are always new frames, and Undisputed Authorities rise to the top by creating interesting frames. Often, that involves taking an old idea and framing it for a specific audience (with whom it’s not yet been presented).
Everything worth saying has already been said. There are no new ideas. But there are always new frames, and Undisputed Authorities rise to the top by creating interesting frames. Often, that involves taking an old idea and framing it for a specific audience (with whom it’s not yet been presented).
“If you try to speak to everyone, usually you reach no one. Singling out the person you want to reach clarifies things big-time.”
- Schwartz, Allen, and VandeHei in Smart Brevity
April Dunford didn’t invent positioning. She created a new framework to help early-stage tech startups develop positioning.
David C. Baker also talks about positioning, but because he targets a different audience (creative firms), his frames differ from April’s, and his advice on developing positioning is slightly different because his audience has different circumstances.
Seth Godin would call this targeting the ‘smallest viable audience.’
The question of who filters through to all other decisions, and it helps if you pick a real person. Select the person you’ve worked with who best represents your ideal fit client, then write and make products for that person alone.
Every decision is made through the lens of what this person thinks, feels, and believes.
But like ink on a napkin, positioning bleeds.
You start from a very specific place (one Who) with a Product perfectly framed to solve a painful problem. Disruptive Wisdom reaches the right people, at the right time, and the product (or content) spreads beyond that smallest viable audience. In David C Baker’s case, creative firm founders share his material with dev firms, who share it with consulting firms, and on and on.
But they share it because the content is interesting and valuable. It’s Disruptive Wisdom. And it’s Disruptive Wisdom because he got specific about who he was writing for.
David C. Baker also talks about positioning, but because he targets a different audience (creative firms), his frames differ from April’s, and his advice on developing positioning is slightly different because his audience has different circumstances.
Seth Godin would call this targeting the ‘smallest viable audience.’
The question of who filters through to all other decisions, and it helps if you pick a real person. Select the person you’ve worked with who best represents your ideal fit client, then write and make products for that person alone.
Every decision is made through the lens of what this person thinks, feels, and believes.
But like ink on a napkin, positioning bleeds.
You start from a very specific place (one Who) with a Product perfectly framed to solve a painful problem. Disruptive Wisdom reaches the right people, at the right time, and the product (or content) spreads beyond that smallest viable audience. In David C Baker’s case, creative firm founders share his material with dev firms, who share it with consulting firms, and on and on.
But they share it because the content is interesting and valuable. It’s Disruptive Wisdom. And it’s Disruptive Wisdom because he got specific about who he was writing for.
Borrow an Audience
Your Disruptive Wisdom does little for your business if prospective clients don’t see it. Every Undisputed Authority builds their own profile by borrowing audiences. You take the frames developed from your Disruptive Wisdom, then share them through people, businesses, or networks, that have the trust and attention of the Who you’re trying to reach. You only need success on one external channel, so focus on the one that's best aligned with the ideal format for you and your audience.
That could be:
That could be:
- Speaking or guesting on podcasts (develop the talk, visuals, identify the ideal speaking opportunities, put together an outreach plan)
- Guesting on newsletters (identify the newsletters we want to guest on, post ideas, and an outreach plan.
- YouTube (write scripts, identify filming requirements and budget, build visuals, develop a publishing strategy)
- LinkedIn (work on LinkedIn specific content and a plan to maximise reach and visibility)
- LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, Newsletter Sponsorship (I connect clients with ad experts on the respective channels to manage campaigns, we'll work on creative and A/B testing for each ad).
Home Base
Once we attract the attention of the Who by borrowing an audience, we want to build an ongoing relationship with them. You do that by sending them to your Home Base. Usually, that's a newsletter. Somewhere where ideal fit prospects subscribe to receive regular posts from you (your Disruptive Wisdom).
Readers get to know you, like what you have to say and buy into your beliefs around the problem you help them solve.
If you're simultaneously working on a Hit (writing a book), you'll release passages to gauge feedback.
You build the email list, and when the time comes to launch a Hit, or a new offer, you've got a captive audience ready to buy.
But that's not all the Home Base is. It could be a blog, a sales page, or a video series sharing your methodology.
Here are the types of things I work on with clients for the Home Base:
Readers get to know you, like what you have to say and buy into your beliefs around the problem you help them solve.
If you're simultaneously working on a Hit (writing a book), you'll release passages to gauge feedback.
You build the email list, and when the time comes to launch a Hit, or a new offer, you've got a captive audience ready to buy.
But that's not all the Home Base is. It could be a blog, a sales page, or a video series sharing your methodology.
Here are the types of things I work on with clients for the Home Base:
- Selecting an email provider and launching a newsletter
- Design and layout of a newsletter
- Writing scripts for video content
- Copywriting for sales pages
- Writing newsletters
- Writing an intro email series that warms readers up to your most interesting points of Disruptive Wisdom
Product
You might develop great insight, tell engaging stories, and build an audience. But if there's no alignment between what you write and sell, it's all for nothing.It's like giving free sample dishes outside a restaurant. People love them, ask to see the menu, and you say, "Oh, sorry, we don't actually have any dishes available for sale right now."
Sounds crazy, but it happens.
What's more common, though, is a misalignment between content and product. Sticking with the analogy, it's a chef offering free cutlery outside his restaurant as a sample, hoping it'll persuade customers to come in and buy a meal.
This section of the framework focuses on things like:
What's more common, though, is a misalignment between content and product. Sticking with the analogy, it's a chef offering free cutlery outside his restaurant as a sample, hoping it'll persuade customers to come in and buy a meal.
This section of the framework focuses on things like:
- Jobs to be Done - We map out the job you help your Who solve (and a problem they'd happily pay to solve)
- Positioning and Core Messaging Audit - Headline, subheading, one paragraph description, longer form description, etc.
- Methodology - Do you have a methodology? Is it articulated and visualised?
There are two elements to this section of the framework. The first is your customer. We need to understand the demand you're tapping into and the problem you solve from their perspective.
We also want to introduce the body of work and the unique ideas we develop in Disruptive Wisdom. Your new thinking feeds into your product (methodology), and your Hit may also be something like a book version of your product (i.e. a workshop in a book).
The calls to action in your Home Base (newsletter) will also connect with your product.
We also want to introduce the body of work and the unique ideas we develop in Disruptive Wisdom. Your new thinking feeds into your product (methodology), and your Hit may also be something like a book version of your product (i.e. a workshop in a book).
The calls to action in your Home Base (newsletter) will also connect with your product.
Hit
Every Undisputed Authority took their step to the very top on the back of a Hit. Often that's a book. Sometimes it's a talk. Other times, it's a Podcast. Either way, it's a place that represents your core body of work. The place where you hang your library of frames together.
Maybe you're ready to start writing one right now. Maybe it's something further along the horizon. Either way, if you aspire to become recognised as the number one consultant in your field, it's on your road map.
In Thought Partner, I work with clients to figure out the overall structure of the work, how ideas connect, plus practical elements like:
Maybe you're ready to start writing one right now. Maybe it's something further along the horizon. Either way, if you aspire to become recognised as the number one consultant in your field, it's on your road map.
In Thought Partner, I work with clients to figure out the overall structure of the work, how ideas connect, plus practical elements like:
- Pulling each chapter out of you on our calls
- Deadlines and accountability to get the book out
- Connecting you with editors and line editors
- Organising (or providing)visuals for the book
- Developing book design and title
Interested in working together on this framework?
Book a call and we'll figure out if we're a fit.
Or, if you want to learn more about how I work, check out the Thought Partner Package.
Book a call and we'll figure out if we're a fit.
Or, if you want to learn more about how I work, check out the Thought Partner Package.