We are introducing a very sick framework for working commercially with ideas.

If you work with culture in any way, shape or form - particularly commercially - you can benefit a lot from adopting a simple framework of mind: ideas spread like pathogens. In this post, we'll see how that insight translates into working commercially with ideas and other cultural products.

It may be an odd cultural bias, that we tend to think of ideas as inherently good. It is particularly strange, when taking into account, that every single one of us can probably if we are sincere, show an impressive pantheon of bad ideas we've had at one point or another. Let me be the first to raise my hand and say loudly: I know I have.

Having bad ideas is not bad. Having no ideas, for instance, would be a lot worse. Which coincidentally brings us to an essential premise for this talk: ideas don't just happen. They are transferred to us, but our interaction with other people, books, art, television, podcasts, radio youtube, tweets and an almost infinite amount of other channels. We are not always aware of how and when ideas get a foothold in our minds, but they do. Every. Single. Day.

An idea isn't alive. Yet they travel very fast and very far. So for the sake of argument, let's think of them as possessing a certain momentum of their own. Just like a pathogen. Unlike ideas, immense resources have been put into seeing how pathogens spread.

We can use this.

A very sick framework

For a pathogen to spread, it needs certain things. It needs to spread. It needs to overcome the host's defenses, and it needs to be able to live within the host, before finally being transmitted into another host(s). Then the cycle repeats. If each host transmits to more than one new host, then you have virality.

If any of these requirements fail, the whole thing stops dead. The pathogen will not spread.

So it is for the things you share on stage. Mapping the pathogen framework to talks, it seems pretty straightforward that if you want to succeed you need to do three things.

1) Overcome the host's defenses

If you are on stage, you got this part covered. After all, as a speaker, when you are on stage everyone is there to listen to you. That is their one job.

A few audience members will be unwilling to listen to your ideas. Maybe because their boss forced them to go to the event in the first place. Don't waste your energy on them. Focus on the rest. Those are the people you can (and need to) spread your idea too.

2) Infest the audience

Your ideas need to be able to live in as many of the audience as possible. If they don't understand it, or it just doesn't seem relevant to them, your idea and value are dead to them. Your career will not grow. This is why you're always told to keep it simple, make it relevant, and talk from their perspective.

3) Create virality

You need them to be infected when they leave the room. You need them to go and infect others with your idea. This is crucial if you are to make it as a speaker. Think about the speakers you have ever heard - what did you tell your friends and colleagues about them?

Depending on where you are in your career, building on either one of these can help you get to where you want to be. Working with ideas commercially means converting these three dimensions into numerical values.

Let us see how:

More than just a metaphor

I imagine you think that this is just fancy talk and too abstract to have significant implications for business. If I hadn't seen it work splendidly, I would probably be likely to believe you. Because I have seen it work, and seen it work very well at that, I will take us - via Speakersloft - on a journey of speaker success.

To start we need to break down the task to smaller components, and this framework helps us achieve this. We begin with a simple formulaic approach:

Speakers success = how many people are exposed to your idea X how well does your idea resonate in the audience X how many people carry your idea forward.

As you may remember from math class, multiplying anything by zero results in a big, ugly zero. That means that you need to do well in all categories.

What we do, is assign scores to each variable and help speakers find out what works and what doesn't - and where should they spend their energy. As the model is broken down further, speakers can get an exact analysis of their weak points - and powerful indications of exactly how their career is likely to grow if they improve in a particular area.

No free lunch

There is nothing hard about the math here. There are some challenges in acquiring meaningful data, but I see easy workarounds. What is the real issue, is facing the music. Luckily we don't need everyone to do it. We need speakers who are serious about growing their career, and humble enough to listen to numbers in a spreadsheet. Humility is a small price to pay for success.

And how do I now that all this works? Because I've done it before, but that was with books. Help me make sure we provide this option to speakers too.