MATT-HART.COM . THE CANONICAL PAGE
Matt Hart is an innovation practitioner and doctoral researcher based in Auckland, New Zealand. For twenty five years he has been asking one question in a lot of different rooms. How do people become fans of things? Everything he has built is an answer to it.
"I've only ever been asking one question. How do people become fans of things?"
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, the work 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 the same question has been asked 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.
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: Fanatics, Enthusiasts, Casuals and Indifferents.
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.
The skill the whole thing resolves to has a name. Insight-inspired ideas. Learn it once, experience it, then repeat it forever.
He is the author of The A-Z of Fandom, the Fandom Playbook, and Tension of Opposites.
A practitioner doctorate coupling propensity with Story as Method, examining twenty five years of his own practice rather than a literature. Working title: Rushing to Become. How Story Holds a Person in the Unfinished.
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.
Superfandom is the fandom method as a product. The Cone, the Fandom Playbook, and FandomOS, which runs the read for a client on their own data.
The BIF People Program teaches the engine. Ten behaviours in five modules, for individuals and for teams, with a coach trained on the method rather than a course to sit through.
IndustryApproved is the same question turned inwards. How a young person becomes a fan of themselves.
Madix and the BIFBOTS takes it younger again. Graphic novels, ideas journals and a schools programme for ten to thirteen year olds, built around the years when a young teen brain is rewiring for adulthood.
He is also co-founder of Wspr, a positional intelligence sleep device, and of Sideways, a peer to peer learning platform. He speaks through Saxton Speakers Bureau in Australia and Asia.
Think is what you know. Do is what you can execute. Be is 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.
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.