Every 4 weeks, I publish deep dives into B2B thought leaders, breaking down the content strategy they used to go from unknown consultant to top tier personality.
Puppets have been around for centuries, through Egyptian, Greek, and Roman cultures. An age old method of telling stories of myth and religion.
Entering the 1900s, they were more or less exclusively used as a form of children’s toys and entertainment, but it was outdated and old fashioned.
Attention had shifted to the television screen and the medium didn't successfully translate.
Not until Jim Henson arrived.
He used puppets to deliver adult humour on TV shows and sell products in commercials.
An old idea with a new frame, and he gave it a new name.
Muppets.
But he wasn’t finished there.
After he reframed the old idea of puppets for grown-ups, he reframed his own frame for preschoolers.
The Children’s Television Workshop was launched to figure out what preschoolers liked to watch, understand what they needed to learn from a developmental perspective, and then connect the two.
Though he had zero experience with children shows, Jim was invited to the workshop.
He subsequently came up with the idea for Sesame Street and repurposed characters with all the humour and charm from his previous work.
The Cookie Monster and Gleep appeared as different characters under different names in Henson’s TV ads and shows.
They were old ideas moved to Sesame Street with new frames.
Hits are born from new frames of old ideas.
Lin-Manuel reframed the biography of Alexander Hamilton with Hip Hop.
Gregory Maguire reframed The Wizard of Oz from the misunderstood perspective of the Wicked Witch.
Jon Favreau reframed the classic Western with the Star Wars Universe and named it The Mandalorian.
And this approach is not exclusive to the Entertainment Industry.
The frame is the language that carries an idea, not the idea itself.
And that frame shapes the way people think about the idea. It helps people develop mental pictures and feelings around an idea they didn’t previously have.
The number one consultants in every field invent new frames for old ideas, like:
Those were new frames created by Daniel Goleman, Seth Godin, and Eric Ries, respectively.
It resonates in a novel way that previous frames did not.
I call it Disruptive Wisdom: interesting, contrarian insights and stories.
There’s a reason old ideas are evergreen. They’re valid, foundational, and going nowhere.
But those old ideas and best practices follow expected patterns. They’re boring, and when you write content that follows those patterns, it’s ignorable.
Disruptive Wisdom is the opposite of that.
It breaks a pattern.
It’s novel, and novelty catches attention.
You’re not going to suddenly invent a new idea from nothing, but equally, you can’t expect to serve up the same ideas in the same way as everyone else and expect to get noticed.
A new frame changes the game.
Want to become a thought leader?
Every 4 weeks, I publish deep dives into B2B thought leaders, breaking down the content strategy they used to go from unknown consultant to top tier personality.
