Content Strategy is Decision Strategy

The greatest pains I’ve witnessed during content-driven projects were not related to content itself, but to making decisions: Which content goes where, who will be producing what, who will be responsible for whose actions, and so on.

At first sight, many decisions can be made by looking at the concrete context in which they arise: Person A is good at writing about cars, so she should do it. Person B is a friendly systemic thinker, a quick editor and good at building relationships, so maybe he should be in charge of content governance.

There is another, larger group of decisions: They are not about the content or the people, but about abstract structures, and more often than not about the structure of decision-making. And when a project is stalling, the decisions that must be made, those that really matter, are mostly from this group.

Then, it may be helpful to forget about content strategy and focus on decision strategy.