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Then last week, Sharon Szmolyan finished six weeks inside our Thought Leadership for Humans program and sent us a definition I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:

“Thought leadership is not, ultimately, about having an interesting voice or sharing ideas. It is about consequence. It is about whether what you’re saying changes how something is seen, and therefore what becomes possible.”

Under that definition, thought leadership becomes a question of responsibility. What are you carrying that the world doesn’t yet see, and what does it cost when you keep it to yourself?

Today we are looking at:

• What changes when an unformed idea finally gets the structure it deserves

• A definition of thought leadership grounded in consequence rather than self-expression

• Sharon’s orphan-wells project and why it stayed invisible until she built a public architecture around it

• How First Nations participation became structural to the project’s design

🌊 Let’s dive in

But first: Who is Katie?

Katie is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor, and educator with over 20 years of experience and a longtime focus on climate and social impact. As a journalist, she’s covered sustainable finance for Institutional Investor and Responsible Investor, and her longform feature on an economic and political experiment in Jackson, Mississippi was one of Oxford American’s most-viral stories of the year. Her journalism has also been published in The Atlantic, Al Jazeera America, Psychology Today, and elsewhere.

She works with universities, brands, and mission-driven organizations to connect their people’s ideas to wider audiences. Current and past clients include Stanford Insights, Columbia Business Magazine, Yale School of Management’s Yale Insights, and impact investing nonprofit ImpactAssets.

Katie also teaches a writing course for visual art students at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and she previously taught journalism at Manhattanville College in New York.

Starting on June 1st, Katie will be running the second cohort of a six-week program inside Climate Drift called Thought Leadership for Humans.

Think of Thought Leadership for Humans as a classroom, lab, and community space rolled into one. The goal: equip would-be climate leaders with the structures, processes, inspiration, and feedback they need to finally step into their own voices.

Schedule a call with Katie

Each week of the program will include an audio lesson to kick off the theme of the week; two live calls; visits from guest experts (including investors, established thought leaders, and content-strategy experts); show-and-tell sessions where cohort members get feedback on projects-in-process; and weekly challenges to get participants sharing publicly, right away.

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Here’s the definition of thought leadership that Sharon Szmolyan arrived at after six weeks in Thought Leadership for Humans. It’s not one I’ve heard anyone else put quite this way:

Thought leadership is not, ultimately, about having an interesting voice or sharing ideas.

It is about consequence. It is about whether what you’re saying changes how something is seen, and therefore what becomes possible.

Considered this way, thought leadership becomes less about expression and more about responsibility. It’s about carrying something forward that isn’t yet fully seen.

Bring to mind the writers and speakers and makers who called you into the work that needs to be done for the climate. Maybe you haven’t lumped them into this motley category of “thought leaders,” but if we apply Sharon’s definition, maybe that’s exactly what they are. They’ve taken up the responsibility to make the unseen seen. I think of Rachel Caron’s “Silent Spring,” Paul Hawken’s Project Drawdown, and the insistent hope coursing through Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s “What if We Get it Right?” book, podcast, and newsletter

I want to dwell on the word responsibility, because it reframes the entire conversation.

Most of the people I work with arrive at thought leadership through something like obligation (at least at first). They’ve been told they should post more. And they sense their visibility gap is costing them something. That’s a real problem, and it’s worth solving.

But Sharon arrived at something harder and more clarifying: the recognition that the work she’s building (an initiative to purify and restore the vast volumes of water produced through oil and gas extraction in Alberta) is not yet fully visible to the people who need to encounter it. And that this is not just a personal cost. It is a cost to the work itself.

When serious people with serious solutions stay quiet, something fills the space they leave. Usually something shallower.

The real question Sharon was sitting with wasn’t “how do I promote myself?” It was: “what am I responsible for carrying forward? And what structure do I need to carry it at the level it deserves?”

Thought Leadership for Humans gave her that structure.

Over six weeks, a powerful but unformed idea became something with real architecture: she conceived a podcast and set it in motion, she hammered out a thematic framework for the initiative, she started fleshing out an op-ed targeted at a major publication.

Sharon entered the program asking “how do I do this?” and left with a method: one grounded in a clear sense of audience, consequence, and what she is specifically positioned to say.

What that process looked and felt like from the inside is what she describes below.

My career has not followed a straight line. I come from a place where oil and gas is the predominant economy. That’s a very particular domain, with a very particular set of values, many of which I never aligned with. So I left. What I moved toward wasn’t another industry so much as a different way of thinking. What’s driven me ever since I can remember is not the pursuit of a title, but pure curiosity.

That curiosity eventually led me to my current work: an initiative centered on the vast volumes of water produced through oil and gas extraction, water that is typically viewed and treated as waste, contained, or left unaddressed. I’m currently developing the infrastructure that will purify that water and return it to natural watersheds.

I’m launching my initiative in Alberta, where I’m from, and where the reality of orphan wells is not abstract but lived, on land, across communities, and over time.

And, these wells are not static. Across their life cycle, they continue to emit methane—sometimes as high-volume “super-emitters,” and in other cases as slower, persistent sources over time. Though largely invisible, the wastewater and methane emissions are evidence of a system that continues to operate long after responsibility has shifted, or disappeared entirely, leaving taxpayers burdened by the consequences.

The intention of this work is to begin where impact is most immediate, addressing those sites where emissions are highest, while developing a model that also reconsiders how processed water is held, treated, and ultimately reintegrated into broader watershed systems.

From there, the work extends outward. But the premise isn’t simply technical. It’s perceptual—because how we see a system determines whether we treat it as something to extract from, or something to be in relationship with. And that shift, from extraction to partnership, changes the trajectory of what comes next.

The ambition of my project is concrete: 500 water-restoration projects globally over 10 to 12 years, each one grounded in a specific site, each one contributing to a broader shift from extraction toward relationship, where responsibility, continuity, and care are re-established within the ecological systems we are already part of.

Before joining Thought Leadership for Humans, I didn’t have a clear definition of thought leadership, and I certainly didn’t apply the term to myself. In hindsight, that absence was useful. Without a fixed idea of what it should look like, I was able to arrive at a definition that actually fits the work.

What it means to me now is far more rigorous than I would have assumed. It’s not about having an interesting voice or sharing ideas. It is about consequence; it is about whether what you’re saying changes how something is seen, and therefore what becomes possible.

There are many people operating at a small scale, and that has value. But what became clear in the program is that there is another level, where ideas begin to shape how a society, or a generation, understands a system it previously took for granted.

At that level, thought leadership becomes less about expression and more about responsibility. It’s about carrying something forward that isn’t yet fully seen.

It also becomes about participating in a broader cultural shift, one that moves us away from an extractive/dominator mindset, where value is taken for granted, toward a partnership-based ethos grounded in relationship, continuity, and mutual responsibility.

One part of Thought Leadership for Humans that shifted my thinking significantly was the focus on audience.

If you don’t understand what your audience is seeing, needing, or missing, you are speaking into a vacuum. Your ideas may be important, but without a feedback loop, without a living conversation, you cannot know what’s actually landing, or how to refine it so that it does.

For me, that insight translated into a very concrete next step: launching a podcast.

The purpose isn’t to broadcast solutions. It’s to build a foundation of understanding, particularly around orphan wells and the risks they pose, which remain largely outside public awareness. I’m speaking to people who are already climate-aware, but who haven’t yet encountered this specific reality.

That audience-focused part of Thought Leadership for Humans also clarified something else: who needs to be in relationship to this work. First Nations communities are not just an audience; their participation is essential. In Canada nothing on Crown land occurs without their concurrence, part of the legacy of the Truth and Reconciliation mandate.

Finally, because this is about building a solutions-oriented systemic mindset, it is imperative to look at problems through the eyes of different stakeholders to understand their influence on the system and then to deconstruct problem-framing by turning obstacles into questions of ‘How.”

One of the most important outcomes of my time in Thought Leadership for Humans is that what began as a powerful but somewhat unformed idea became something with real architecture.

Over six weeks, I developed a sequence of practices that now underpin the podcast and the broader initiative. I began with the question “How do I do this?” and what was born is the method, one that looks at how we perceive, name, and relate to systems that are often invisible, but still active.

The clarity the program helped me gain around my audience and the work we did to define thematic pillars yielded, for me, a concrete publishing goal: an op-ed, framed as an open letter to Mark Carney, targeted for a major publication such as The New York Times.

All of this means that this initiative has real legs, and that it can become real-life, meaningful work.

I now recognize that moving from an idea to impact requires intention, structure, and a willingness to engage at the level where decisions are made.

What the program offered was not just guidance, but the conditions that made it possible for me to move from belief to execution.

If there’s one thing I would pass on to others, it’s this:

But it is the structure you build that allows your work to be seen, understood, and taken seriously.

There are those fortuitous moments in life when things align and you’re willing to take that life-transforming step into a new world. That is what Thought Leadership for Humans was, and is, for me.

We’re forming the second cohort now, and it’ll run inside Climate Drift.

Here’s what six weeks looks like:

Week 1: Tiny Experiments. You don’t wait until you’re ready. You design a small, specific, time-bound experiment, and then run it. Over the course of the program, we’ll design, run, and analyze two iterations of your tiny experiment. Comparing notes with other people in the cohort turns out to be one of the most educational elements.

Instead of goals with finish lines, we’ll build (and refine) hypotheses to learn from.

Week 2: Limiting Beliefs. The internal blocks that stop serious people from putting themselves out there don’t disappear when you ignore them. This week, you name them. Naming doesn’t automatically dissolve a block, but it means you can start working with it rather than around it.

Week 3: Three Core Themes. What are you actually trying to say? This week adapts a traditional marketing “perceptions” exercise and pushes you to get specific. Who are you speaking to, what threads connect everything you want to create, and what do you want to be consistently associated with over time?

Weeks 4–6: The outer architecture. Platforms, content strategy, audience research, metrics, workflow: All of this follows from what we unpack in Weeks 1-3, so we dig into it in the back half of the program. As one of our participants put it: “The outer architecture is only as useful as your inner clarity behind it.”

Running alongside the curriculum each week:

• an audio lesson to kick off the week’s theme,

• two live cohort calls,

• guest experts who have built real audiences and raised funding through their public thinking,

• show-and-tell sessions where cohort members share work-in-progress and get direct feedback from Katie and each other, and

• Async feedback on your writing and ideas-in-progress from Katie.

The community that forms inside TL4H is one of its most powerful features. First-cohort participants named their fellow cohort members as among the most generative creative aspects of the experience: “The diversity of perspectives in the room,” one participant wrote, “created a kind of creative momentum that’s hard to replicate.”

You’re doing important climate work and the people who need to hear about it don’t know you exist. You know that what you’re carrying deserves to travel further than it currently does, but you haven’t found the momentum or will to get in moving.

You don’t need to already see yourself as a thought leader. Sharon didn’t. She just needed to find what she was responsible for carrying, and the structure to carry it at the level it deserves.

Learn more

Applications for the second cohort are open now. Spots are limited and reviewed on a rolling basis.

If you’re ready to find out what becomes possible when your work finally has the architecture to travel, schedule a 30-minute call with Katie:

Schedule a call with Katie