Author: Shane Snow / Source: The Content Strategist
When I was a teenager, I decided that if I ever wanted to get a girlfriend, I would need to learn to skateboard.
This made sense to me at the time. But the point of this story is not about faulty teenage logic. It’s that once I started skateboarding, suddenly every piece of concrete looked like a skate park. I started seeing the world a bit differently, noticing things I didn’t before. And to this day, whenever I walk by a Wendy’s with a nice curb on the drive-through, I think, “Hm… someone could skate that.”
The same thing happened to me a couple decades later in a much more useful (albeit still dorky) context: when I started writing a book about the science of human collaboration. That book became a 3+ year project, and it just came out! (Check out Dream Teams here!)
I had set out to understand teamwork so I could do a better job as a leader at Contently. I wanted to study the paradox of why most growing groups slow down or break down—while some rare teams make incredible breakthroughs together—so we could build an awesome company and a great place to work. But in the course of studying the principles behind dream teams, I started seeing them at play in all sorts of contexts besides just growing a company.
And one of them was content marketing.
Here are three quick principles I learned in Dream Teams that can help you be a little better at building audiences and relationships through content.
1. The more diverse your inputs, the more potential for breakthrough ideas
Teams that beat the odds have several things in common. One of them is cognitive diversity. That’s to say, teams made up of similar people rarely become smarter or more inventive than their smartest team member. But teams with lots of different people with different perspectives can add up to more than the sum of their parts.
This is how creativity works in general—when we connect dots that have never been connected before. You can…
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