Turning, not Tinkering, Around

A colleague from Barcelona asks:

As a Psychologist and Psychotherapist, the Content Therapist title got all my attention. How would you define Content therapy?

I’ve been searching for replies to this question for about a year now, and until now I’ve come up with quite a few options.

When a client is seeing a therapist, it’s not because something is mildly wrong, it’s because the client is non-functional, or fearing to become non-functional. Similarly, when a client is seeing me or one of my Content Therapy colleagues, it’s not because his business is slightly worse than expected or his website is converting 1% less visitors than he’d like. Rather, it’s because his business, website, publication or other content-driven enterprise has turned non-functional or may do so if nothing happens.

In Content Therapy, I’m not trying to make slight improvements, I’m after massive turnarounds. And just like a good therapist can uncover deep structures of personality without being invasive or manipulative, Content Therapy is all about uncovering the structure of non-functionality in content-driven corporate contexts (whoa!), and make changes in those deep structures so that the system can grow into a new, more profitable direction.

(There’s a future post in the pipeline about several approaches to achieve this – analytical, observational, solution-focused, etc. –, so you might want to start following @contentshrinks.)