Think back over the things you’ve read and heard (rather than experienced first-hand) in the past week. What is most vivid?

For me, it’s the decisions made by the lead characters in a new BBC series Press (exploring the personal and professional lives of reporters and editors at two—officially fictional—British newspapers); the background story of an artist, Saima Rasheed, whose work I saw on Saturday (she studied miniature painting in Lahore and now applies those skills to contemporary scenes); and the recent experiences of a colleague who had a challenging summer.

What do all of my examples have in common? Stories. Stories with detail and meaning. Stories are memorable. They also help us explain the ideas behind them to others.

“If you have an over-preoccupation with perception and trying to please people’s expectations, then you can go mad.”*Self-help gurus and successful artists alike tell us not to worry about what others think and to focus instead on meeting our own high standards. In their view, the audience is a concept that is best ignored—an imagined entity that can only get in the way of great work. And in some aspects of life, I’d agree with this advice. However, when it comes to thought leadership, failing to worry about the audience is a frequent cause of content that fails to hit the mark.

During my consulting career, I worked in what we called “The Shop”. This wasn’t a tuck shop for hungry consultants but rather a small team created to deliver research—in the shape of carefully crafted PowerPoint presentations—for both internal and external clients. It was a dream posting for a young strategy consultant—a place to build contacts and friends, to learn about a variety of industries, and to finally spend time living in London (rather than some of the rather less exciting places I found myself posted to).

Whether its fitness, personal goals, or thought leadership, January is a natural time to reflect on the past year and, ideally, figure out what we can learn from both our successes and our failures.

When London’s Millennium Bridge opened in June 2000 there was much fanfare celebrating the first new river crossing to be built in the city for more than 100 years. People quickly swarmed to the “blade of light”, as it had been dubbed by its promoters, to try the new crossing between Tate Modern and St Paul’s Cathedral for themselves.

Asking “why?”, preferably multiple times over with a thoughtful look on one’s face, is a tried-and-tested consulting technique—and one we’re not averse to using ourselves. When we work with firms at the initiation stage, we refuse to budge until we’ve had a satisfactory response to our first why question: Why are you investing in this new piece of content? And a satisfactory response had better include both a very clear definition of the target audience—not just some vague sense like “senior executives in the retail sector”—and the desired impact.