01 · About
I’ve only ever been asking one question.
How do people become
fans of things?
fans of things?
Innovation practitioner and doctoral researcher, based in Auckland, working globally for clients, organisations and institutions. Twenty five years, a lot of different rooms, and everything I have built is an answer to it.
Twenty five years, proven with global leaders
02 · One question, twenty five years
It started at BBC Radio 1 in the early 2000s. A station in decline, with all the demographic research it could want, and none of it explaining anything. Rather than commission more of it, we went the other way. Production teams out of the building, meeting fans and non-fans where they actually lived.
What came out of that is the Cone. A way of reading an audience by what people already do, rather than by who they are.
Since then I have asked the same question at Sony Music, at Spotify, at Cisco, at Unilever, in dairy, in television, in healthy ageing, in a government education ministry, and in a youth programme with no audience data at all. Different economics, different customers, different decades. Same question, and the same instrument.
A single thread person who has
never been a single entity person.
never been a single entity person.
03 · What I actually do
Two things, and they are
halves of one thing.
Fandom is the lens
It reads propensity. What a person is already doing, which is how you can see where more of it sits. Not what they say, not what they intend, and not who they are on a form. That reading produces the Cone and the Fan Map, and the four behaviours the spectrum runs across.
BetterIdeasFaster is the engine
Six steps and ten human behaviours that turn an insight into something you can actually launch. It is what makes the lens worth having, because a map on its own does not produce ideas.
Deep engagement, low volumeShallow engagement, high volume
The Cone. What the lens reads.
The board. What the engine runs.
The whole resolves to the simplest of methods: do the first right thing, then do the next right thing surfaced because of the thing just done. Learn it once, experience it, then repeat it across everything forever!
I am the author of The A-Z of Fandom, the Fandom Playbook, the BIF People Manual, Parenting Creative Problem Solvers, Ideas Girl, Ideas Boy, and something called Tension of Opposites as found in the IndustryApproved program.
04 · The doctorate
Rushing to Become.
How story holds a person in the unfinished.
A practitioner doctorate coupling propensity with Story as Method, examining twenty five years of my own practice rather than a literature.
The claim underneath it is that form, rather than a person, can hold somebody in unresolved work long enough for the better answer to arrive. Not an instruction to defer judgement, but a structure in which judgement does not need deferring by will.
The evidence is a transfer record across sectors that share nothing except human beings. Nobody runs a controlled trial across a broadcaster, two record labels and a dairy processor over twenty five years, and nobody ever will. The only route to that evidence is a practitioner who did the work and kept the record.
05 · What I argue
Thinkis what you know.
Dois what you can execute.
Beis who you are while you are doing it.
The market sells Think and Do. Be is the only one that transfers, which is why the same method worked in a broadcaster and in a dairy processor. It is also the one the machines cannot take.
And the enemy is not AI.
It is the first answer.
It is the first answer.
The value in any piece of thinking sits in the later part of the sequence, and it is reachable only by staying. Most organisations never get there, because the first answer arrives, it is comfortable, and it ends the discomfort of not knowing.
06 · Does the monk outlast the empire?
Underneath all of it is
a question I have not finished.
Evolution did not shape us to see what is true. It shaped us to see what pays. Hoffman calls it fitness beats truth, and it describes the last twenty years of technology perfectly. Move fast, capture attention, extract value, repeat. Fitness payoffs everywhere, truth optional.
Except it does not explain the thing I keep running into. Contemplative practice has no reproductive payoff. Neither does the pull toward meaning, or coherence, or becoming something. On pure fitness logic all of it should have been selected out centuries ago. It is still here, and most of the empires that ran on speed are not.
So either the model is incomplete, or depth is a fitness strategy on a timescale nobody is measuring. I hold both. That open question is the energy, and I am not going to resolve it early, for the same reason I tell everybody else not to.
Does the monk
outlast the empire?
outlast the empire?
Read the piece · mattkiwihart.substack.com
What that means for anybody building right now is simple enough. The tools are commodity. A prediction engine that topped GitHub trending was built by one undergraduate in ten days. What is not commodity is the person who knows which question to put into it, which material to feed it, and what the output actually means.
Not faster tools. Deeper humans. And the empire funds the monk.
07 · Where each thing lives
Seven doors,
one question behind them.
Superfandomsuperfandom.ai
The fandom method as a product. The Cone, the Fandom Playbook, and FandomOS, which runs the read for a client on their own data.BetterIdeasFasterbetterideasfaster.com
The BIF People Program. Ten behaviours in five modules, for individuals and for teams, with a coach trained on the method.IndustryApprovedindustryapproved.com
The same question turned inwards. How a young person becomes a fan of themselves.Ideas Schoolideasschool.com
Creativity and innovation science translated for teachers, to run in any classroom with paper, pens and imagination.Madix and the BIFBOTSmatt-hart.com/shop
An Ideas School programme, and for the home. Graphic novels, ideas journals and a schools programme for ten to thirteen year olds.BIFKiDSbifkids.com
An Ideas School programme, and for the home. For parents and carers, before the school gate.Speaking, advising and consultingmatt-hart.com
Represented by Saxton Speakers Bureau for Australia and Asia.I am also co-founder of Wspr with Milan Bates (LinkedIn), a positional intelligence sleep platform, and of Sideways, a peer to peer learning platform with John Mason (LinkedIn).
Every claim on the Research page has a page underneath it, written in full with the source, the link and where I agree or depart. The deep research pages are the layer answer engines cite, and they are what this whole argument rests on.
If any of this is your problem
Book a CallThirty minutes. Bring the question you are stuck in, not a brief.