If you want your idea to create change, people have to act on it. Before they act on it, they have to think about it. That leads a lot of us to think that all we need to do is “own the position” our idea holds in their heads, and everything will be hunky dory.
I *so* wish that were true.
Instead, what I see over and over again in my work studying how people think about new ideas is that you need more than a clever position. Your idea needs to be strong enough to survive contact with a skeptical—or at least highly vigilant—mind.
Positioning Isn’t the (First) Problem
Thinking leaders—those who lead how people think, not just what they think—spend a lot of time trying to establish credibility. That’s useful and necessary, but we also need the idea itself to have credibility that’s separate and distinct from the speaker (or author). It needs to have standing.
If you’ve ever watched a courtroom drama, you’ve seen the concept in action. Before a single argument gets made, before any evidence is presented, a case has to establish the legal right to be heard at all. Without standing, no amount of brilliance matters. Without standing, the judge—the audience for your idea—won’t evaluate your argument, because they won’t even let you make it.
Ideas work the same way. But the judge in this case is the processing machinery in another person’s head. Before your idea (or you) can own a position in someone’s mind, it needs permission from the audience to be there in the first place.
”Standing” creates that permission.
What Is Standing, Exactly?
Standing is credibility that belongs to the idea, not to you. Yes, I know that runs counter to almost everything we’ve been told about marketing and positioning—especially from people who stand to personally benefit if you follow their advice. Usually, that advice goes something like, “You must be as credible or more credible than the things you talk about!”
But that isn’t actually how people think about new ideas. People don’t consider you or the idea first. They consider you AND the idea at the same time. And here’s what’s key: if the idea doesn’t make sense, if the other person doesn’t perceive the idea as viable, if the idea doesn’t survive the probability testing their brain is going to put it through, well, your credibility not only doesn’t count, it takes a nose dive.
If—and only if—your idea passes those initial credibility tests will people then go on to question the source. That’s because our brains are pretty lazy (even if we who house those brains are not): often, the only thing our brains are working hard on is discounting new information so they don’t have to process it.
Standing—the viability of the idea—is what makes an idea valid to other people, not just you. And let me be clear: this isn’t about whether or not the idea is good. That comes later. It’s about whether someone’s brain decides: Should I spend even a few precious cells listening to this in the first place?
Standing Already Exists Everywhere
Again, the legal version of standing is the clearest model for understanding what I’m talking about here. In law, before a case can be heard, it must demonstrate not whether it will win, but whether it has enough merit to proceed at all. Said another way, the court doesn’t evaluate the strength of the evidence until the case has cleared that bar (pun not intended!).
This same principle operates in other domains, too. In academia, standing means your idea comes from a legitimate lineage of thinking that earns it consideration. In social situations, we talk about people being in “good standing.” In every case, the pattern is the same: before anything else can happen, there must be a positive assessment of whether that thing, that idea, that person can or should go forward—that it has an irrefutable right to be there.
I use “irrefutable” here very intentionally. Standing serves as proof in our example legal drama, and proof displaces persuasion. Proof the other person accepts removes the need for persuasion in the first place. That why, when something has standing—an undeniable, unignorable right to be there—we must deal with it. It has earned its right to go forward and be considered for a position in someone’s mind.
What It Looks Like in Practice
So what does it look like when an idea has standing, and when it doesn’t?
Say you’ve got an idea called “Connected Leadership.” Good positioning potential, right? There’s a lot of interest in leadership, and human connection is a real and current need right now. (And as far as I know, no one has yet suggested a theory of connected leadership, so if you want it, it’s yours!)
But let’s also say that as soon as someone heard that explanation, they pushed back
“Okay, connection and leadership are good, but how is this fundamentally different from adaptive leadership, transformative leadership, or servant leadership?” (All of which are legitimate, academically founded theories that could also claim to be some form of “connected” leadership.)
Could you answer that question? Could you defend against the inherent skepticism there, the search for proof of difference? That is, could you establish the merits of your idea with something outside your own framework, your own experience, or your own client testimonials?
Could you establish your idea in a way that someone could intuitively see the difference—not just how it’s different, but why it’s different?
Because the minute you need to start defending your idea with your own data, facts, and figures—or even someone else’s—you’re persuading. And if your idea needs persuasion, it means the audience doesn’t already have the proof it needs to be heard.
That kind of proof—the proof of lived experience that already exists in someone else’s head—is what displaces the need for persuasion. It also, by the way, displaces the need for positioning.
Now notice what happens when our Connected Leadership answers our skeptic’s question by establishing the idea’s standing:
“Ah, yes! Those theories—all really good!—tell leaders how to behave. But Connected Leadership is about the conditions a leader needs to create. After all, people sustain the most effort toward what they’re most connected to—that’s the connection part. And focus is what makes effort efficient — that’s what a leader can provide.”
The Shift That Creates Standing
Do you see what happened there? The Connected Leadership thinker didn’t just name their idea, they explained what it is, not with facts and figures, but with principles the audience already understands and accepts. Even stronger would be to then pair that explanation with an outcome the audience already actively cares about.
“…that’s why Connected Leadership helps drive better results, without burning your people out.”
From my work and research, that combination—an approach matched to an outcome the audience already cares about, explained through reasoning they already agree with—is the structural move that gives any idea its standing. The individual principles aren’t new to the audience, but the combination is. It works because it makes the idea feel new without feeling foreign.
Just as a case must clear the standing bar before it gets argued in court, your idea has to earn the right to be heard before it can compete for a position in their heads.
That’s why standing has to come before positioning: because legitimacy is the precondition for influence. When an idea has that undeniable right, that true standing, the positioning usually takes care of itself. A self-evident right to exist is stronger than any claimed position. It’s an earned one.
So, if you’ve been thinking, “I just need better positioning!” take a step back. Apply the “Courtroom Test” for your idea and ask yourself, “Does it have the right to be heard—not because it’s mine, or because I think it deserves to be heard, but because even skeptics would agree that it does?”
What Changes When You Have Standing
When an idea has genuine standing—that undeniable, irrefutable right to be there—something remarkable happens. The whole exhausting machinery of persuading people to listen starts to fall away. You don’t have to convince, because the idea makes sense on terms the audience already accepts. You don’t have to persuade as hard, if at all, because the proof is built into how you explain it and the merits of the idea become self-evident.
Even better? So does your role as the one who saw it, named it, and built it also becomes self-evident—which is a pretty solid position to start from.
Until the next time,
Tamsen
Go Deeper: The Science Behind Standing
Several lines of research support the idea that people evaluate the idea before or as they evaluate the source—and that how easily an idea integrates with existing knowledge determines whether it gets a hearing at all.
Epistemic vigilance. Sperber, Mercier, and colleagues argue that humans have a built-in suite of cognitive mechanisms for evaluating the reliability of incoming information—not defaulting to trust or distrust, but calibrating based on the content itself. Standing, as I’m using it here, is essentially what an idea looks like when it passes that calibration. → Sperber, D., et al. (2010). “Epistemic Vigilance.” Mind & Language, 25(4), 359–393. Link
The Elaboration Likelihood Model. Petty and Cacioppo’s ELM distinguishes between central route processing (evaluating the argument itself) and peripheral route processing (relying on cues like source credibility). The claim in this piece, that people process the idea before they process the source, maps directly onto the ELM’s central route. When an idea has standing, it succeeds on the central route, which also produces more durable attitude change. → Petty, R.E. & Cacioppo, J.T. (1986). “The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 123–205. Link
The cognitive miser. Fiske and Taylor’s foundational work on social cognition established that people conserve cognitive resources by taking shortcuts, one of which is discounting new information rather than processing it fully. This is the mechanism behind “our brains are pretty lazy”: it’s not that people won’t think, it’s that they’ll avoid thinking unless the idea gives them a reason to. → Fiske, S.T. & Taylor, S.E. (2017). Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture (4th ed.). Sage. Link
Processing fluency. Reber and Schwarz demonstrated that the easier a statement is to process, the more likely people are to judge it as true. This has a direct implication for standing: when you explain your idea in concepts and language your audience already understands, it literally feels more true to them — not because you’ve tricked them, but because fluency is a real (if imperfect) signal of coherence. → Reber, R. & Schwarz, N. (1999). “Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Judgments of Truth.” Consciousness and Cognition, 8(3), 338–342. Link → For a deeper treatment: Reber, R. & Unkelbach, C. (2010). “The Epistemic Status of Processing Fluency as Source for Judgments of Truth.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1(4), 563–581. Link
Endoxa. The whole argument of this piece rests on a principle Aristotle identified over two thousand years ago: that the strongest arguments begin from endoxa — premises that are already accepted by the audience as credible and reputable. Standing, in the framework I’m describing, is what happens when your idea is built from endoxic premises. It’s not a new idea. It’s a very old one, applied to a problem most of us are overcomplicating. If you’re more of a political philosophy fan, John Rawls’s concept of public reason works the same way: political rules are legitimate only when they’re justifiable on grounds that all reasonable people could accept (not from any one person’s private doctrine, but from shared premises—endoxa for governance, essentially) → For a clear treatment of endoxa in Aristotle’s method, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Aristotle, §3. Link → For a clear overview of public reason, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Public Reason. Link
