It’s Time to Dig Up Your Company’s Content Graveyard
When you start treating internal insight as reusable infrastructure, everything from strategy to storytelling gets stronger.
Everything your people do well can be leveraged, documented, and then transformed into pithy and engaging material that speaks in your company’s most authentic voice. Think about the last time you listened to one of your executives deliver a persuasive keynote that captured an elusive but important idea or the way an offsite workshop helped senior leadership hash out the best way to launch your next product. Were you taking notes? Where does that brilliance live, other than in the very capable minds of your people? Figuring that out is critical.
The Quiet Death of Useful Ideas
After doing so much work to arrive at great ideas, what if you had a way of leveraging those ideas to do more work for you on the back end? You are almost certainly producing veritable mountains of brilliant raw material, and that’s impressive. We congratulate you. But it’s not the end of the road. Not to put too fine a point on it, but don’t you think it’s a little bit silly to bury these great ideas, these hard-won gems, before they are technically dead?
Not to belabor the metaphor, but it would be easier if companies had a unified, standard graveyard where all their great thinking went to die. But it’s hard to justify taking the time to collect and curate these ideas. So, if we are lucky, they tend to languish in digital folders, scattered notes (probably even handwritten, in some cases), and recordings. After all, if you haven’t empowered anyone to canvas rough transcripts, internal memos, voicemails, slack dialogues, all-hands minutes, and even employee feedback or surveys, then it’s a pretty sure bet that all of that raw material is just going to lie fallow. This can be a good opportunity to encourage your people to review their own minds for nuggets of insight. We promise: you will get more than you expect, and the effort will have the added benefit of reminding your people how delightfully clever they actually are.
Exhuming Value Requires Intentional Effort
Unless companies develop procedures or take explicit steps to mine this untapped resource, it’s hard to ignore how much time and brilliance is being wasted. It’s certainly not intentional neglect, but it still costs companies plenty in terms of potential influence, authority, and momentum. Rescuing these ideas from the company’s content graveyard gives them another life. In slightly less melodramatic terms, the ideas haven’t reached their fullest potential, which might be thought leadership articles, brand narratives, or even meaningful internal messaging and communications.
Moving to fill the often-wide gap between smart thinking and impactful storytelling amplifies the value of every call, meeting, and brainstorming session. Few companies recognize that their scrap paper and random notes are money and time left on the table. Using them, expanding them, and repurposing them is a great example of something you can do to show your people that everything they do has impact, and that their role is bigger and more relevant than they may realize.
Strategic Takeaway
Smart companies see every internal conversation as potential strategic content, not disposable dialogue.
Applied Insight
Maintain a shared, searchable digital folder where teams can upload meeting notes, transcripts, voice memos, or strategy docs.
