The most important thing on a content plan might be what you kill

I recently read Robert Rose arguing that marketing teams need a newsroom-style story budget upstream of the content calendar. The point that stayed with me was not really about calendars. I had already reached the conclusion that a calendar is an operations tool, not a strategy — it records what has been agreed, and a schedule of commitments tells you nothing about whether the commitments were worth making.

The part I had not properly solved was what sits immediately before it. If the calendar records commitments, where do the possibilities live? Where does an idea get challenged before somebody gives it a deadline, a format and an owner, and where can the answer still be don’t make this? The more I look at it, the more that gap seems to be where the actual editorial work should be happening.

A calendar makes an idea feel real too early

Once something becomes a row on a plan, it acquires momentum. There is now an article to write, a video to commission or a webinar to promote. Somebody owns it. Somebody else is waiting for it. Removing it starts to look like failure.

But the decision that deserves the most editorial judgement happened before any of that: whether the thing should exist.

This is where a lot of content work starts from surprisingly weak inputs. Somebody has a topic. A stakeholder requests an asset. A campaign needs a certain number of pieces. A channel has a gap. An event is happening, so naturally there should be an event article.

All of those can be legitimate triggers. None of them proves that the proposed content is worth making.

I think I have sometimes collapsed those two decisions myself. I have been good at taking a request and making the resulting piece better. The more interesting editorial move is sometimes to question the request before the production machinery starts.

The missing object is a candidate, not a commitment

A story budget gives an idea somewhere to exist before it becomes scheduled work. I like that distinction more than the terminology itself.

At that stage, an idea is only a candidate. It can be improved, combined with something else, redirected into research, answered with an existing asset or killed entirely.

For the kind of B2B work I do, I think five questions are enough to make that judgement useful.

Why this? What real audience question, customer signal, business decision or narrative need does it address?

Why us? What do we know, believe, observe or have access to that gives us a reason to make this rather than another competent summary of the topic?

Why now? What makes it worth spending resources on at this point rather than later?

What evidence? What research, customer example, data, expertise or first-hand material will make it defensible and distinctive?

What job? Is it supposed to create reach, provide practical utility, supply proof, help a buying decision, advance a narrative or do something else specific? Every piece needs one, and a piece that cannot name its job is usually a piece that exists because a slot did.

Only after those questions does format become interesting, and that order matters. Starting with “we need a blog post” has already made one of the biggest decisions before anybody understood the problem.

Killing an idea is an output of strategy

This is the part I find most useful. We usually describe content strategy by what it produces — the themes, pillars, campaigns and assets that made the cut — but a strategy should also be visible in what it refuses to produce. If every reasonable request eventually becomes content, the strategy is not doing much selecting. It is mostly organising demand.

A useful commissioning process should be able to produce at least four answers: make it now; research it first; reuse or refresh something that already exists; or don’t make it.

The third and fourth options are probably where a lot of value is hiding.

Content teams routinely recreate work because creating a new asset is administratively easier than discovering and adapting an old one — which is why asking whether a piece has a second life in it usually finds more value than commissioning another first draft. They also produce pieces about subjects they do not yet understand well enough, because production gets commissioned before anybody asks what evidence exists. The answer there is often to go and gather the evidence that is missing rather than to write around the gap.

In those situations, “research first” and “we already have this” are not delays. They are editorial decisions.

And “no” is not a failure to deliver. Sometimes it is the clearest proof that somebody is actually managing the portfolio rather than feeding the machine.

Saying no requires standing, not just a process

There is an obvious problem with everything I have just written. The five questions assume you are allowed to ask them, and most people in content roles receive requests from colleagues who are more senior, control the budget that funds the team, or have already told somebody else the thing is happening. Asked in that setting, “why us?” is not a neutral diagnostic. It reads as a refusal wearing a question mark.

So commissioning discipline is rare not because nobody thought of the questions, but because the person best placed to judge whether something should exist usually has the least standing to decide it. Editorial judgement without the authority to act on it produces a well-reasoned opinion and an asset that gets made anyway.

Demanding more authority is not much of an answer, since it is rarely available for the asking. Two things seem more realistic. Timing, because these questions are cheap early and expensive late: once somebody has promised a webinar to a partner, “why this?” attacks a commitment they have made in public, whereas three weeks earlier the same question is a conversation about what would work. Most of the aggression people detect in commissioning is really a symptom of asking too late.

And ownership, because the four answers work better belonging to a process than to a person. If “research it first” is a recognised outcome the system can produce, that is the discipline working. If it is one person’s verdict, it is an obstacle with a name attached, and it will be routed around within a quarter.

I should be straight that I write this as somebody who has usually not had the standing, rather than somebody who has exercised it well.

I would not use tension as the universal test

Rose’s version includes a strong test around whether an angle contains a live disagreement and whether the organisation has earned the right to take a side. That makes sense for thought leadership. It also appeals to the journalist in me because tension is often what turns a subject into a story.

But I would not make it the gate for all B2B content. A useful guide to a regulatory change might contain no meaningful disagreement. A customer story may exist mainly to provide proof. A product comparison page might be valuable because it reduces uncertainty for a buying committee. None of those needs to be provocative to deserve resources, and a test that fails them is testing for a genre rather than for value.

The broader question is whether the work has a defensible reason to exist. Tension can be one such reason; utility, evidence, proof and decision support are others.

This changes how I think about my own role

There is a personal reason this has clicked for me. I have spent a lot of my career being handed something after the important decision was already made — the campaign exists, the asset has been requested, the interview is booked, now make the article or the narrative work.

I am increasingly interested in moving one decision upstream, and not because I want to own a bigger process. Quite the opposite: I want fewer pieces of process that exist only to organise production.

The interesting question is whether editorial judgement can be applied before expensive work begins: what do we actually need to understand, what deserves investigation, what evidence is missing, what existing work can carry more weight, and what should never make it onto the calendar in the first place?

That fits much better with how I now understand Editorial Intelligence. The Evidence Engine asks what we know and what we still need to learn, Narrative Architecture asks what position that evidence is building, and Activation asks how the selected work should travel. What is missing is a decision between those layers and production: which possible intervention deserves resources now?

I do not think that needs another grand framework. It may only need a small commissioning discipline that earns its place through use.

Where this could go wrong

I have just spent a piece complaining about process and then proposed one, which deserves an answer rather than a shrug.

A commissioning stage is still a stage. It will acquire a template, a recurring meeting, a queue and eventually somebody to administer the queue, at which point it is another layer between having an idea and acting on it. Everything I dislike about content operations began as somebody’s sensible improvement. The only guard I can see is arithmetic: it has to remove more work than it adds, and if a quarter passes without it killing anything, it is not a filter but a ceremony, and should be dismantled rather than defended.

The five questions can be answered plausibly for almost anything. Give a competent marketer any topic and half an hour and they will produce a defensible “why us” and a credible “why now”, because constructing a rationale is precisely the skill the job selects for. The questions do not generate judgement; they only create a moment where judgement could be applied, and they work only insofar as somebody is willing to give an unpopular answer and able to make it stick. A gate that never closes is a corridor.

And this conclusion suits me. I am arguing that the valuable decision sits upstream of production, which describes the job I would rather do than the one I have often been given. Somebody whose expertise is in making things well would draw the line elsewhere, and could fairly point out that plenty of mediocre ideas have been rescued by good execution.

None of that persuades me the decision layer is wrong. It does suggest the discipline should stay small enough to abandon.

So the experiment I want to run is simple. Before I accept a content request as an asset, I want to ask five questions — why this, why us, why now, what evidence and what job — and then allow four answers: make it, research it, reuse something, or kill it. The calendar comes afterwards.

Because perhaps the clearest sign that a content strategy is working is not how confidently it can fill the plan. It is whether it knows what does not deserve a slot.