The Lab, The Library, The Loop
Toward open source thought leadership
When I designed my SE-18 scoliosis exercise scale, I thought I was building an answer. What I ended up with was a pile of questions.
Adults with scoliosis (like myself) wrote in responses to my survey. They ignored my neat little checkboxes and went straight for the “other” option, over and over again. That avalanche of “other”s cracked my bias wide open. My tidy categories didn’t match lived experience. What I thought I knew about scoliosis pain gave way to something better: questions that couldn’t be answered without more research, more voices, more tests.
That’s the moment I saw it. In science, answers are fragile. Questions are durable.
And I’m starting to believe thought leadership works the same way.
The Lab: Where questions start
For years, thought leadership was sold as a product. Package your wisdom. Sell your formula. Deliver answers in a book, a keynote, a course. The guru model.
But answers without experiments stall out quickly. They age fast. They can’t adapt when the world changes.
The leaders who matter now are running labs. They name the problem with painful precision. They say, “I don’t know, but hey let’s find out together.” They invite their audience into a live experiment.
In the lab, curiosity is the science.
The Library: Where answers stall
How much thought leadership dies in home libraries?
Books are bought, stacked, skimmed, abandoned. Online courses gather digital dust. Programs sit unopened like January exercise equipment. The problem isn’t that the ideas are bad. It’s that the transfer never happens. The insight never becomes a system another person can actually run.
The Loop: Where cognition becomes portable
Science depends on replication. In a perfect and arguably theoretical world, if someone else can’t reproduce the experiment, the discovery doesn’t hold.
Thought leadership could learn from this intention. A replicable model doesn’t mean everyone gets the exact same outcome. For thought leadership, it might mean that enough people can run the process and get some variation of positive results. Even if those results are simply asking themselves better questions, that’s still progress.
The loop is where questions are tested, refined, and passed forward. It’s the opposite of one-and-done thought leadership. It’s open source cognition: a way of thinking that survives contact with the world.
Thought leadership as open source cognition
Maybe this is the new form of thought leadership: not the guru with the answer, but the scientist with the model. Not the bookshelf, but the loop.
What would it look like if thought leaders approached their work like open source science?
Naming problems instead of pretending to solve them.
Hosting questions that keep everyone honest.
Shipping replicable models so others can test, adapt, and improve them.
Answers are easy to shelve. Questions are harder to ignore.
The thread pulled tight
If thought leadership has always been about volume — books, posts, soundbites, content saturation — maybe the next chapter is about intentionality. About becoming thought anthropologists. About designing systems of ideas that travel, replicate, and evolve.
That’s what ABBI (my company’s custom gpts) is built to support. Not louder content. Portable cognition. Not more answers. Better loops.
The challenge for thought leaders now is the same one I faced as a researcher: to let the “other” box surprise you. To see your role not as the keeper of answers but as the host of better questions. To move past the library and into the loop.
If the work is real, it doesn’t live on the shelf collecting dust. It lives in the experiment.