A colleague of mine, Bella Grabowski, has a great phrase for the ideas, projects, and concepts we fall in love with and have a hard time letting go of: pet rocks. I think about that more than I probably should.
I work in policy and persuasion—a tweedy little world, but the dynamics are the same as any sales job: find buyers, earn trust, compete for attention that no one owes you.
And the policy world has a Pet Rock problem.
Smart people fall in love with an idea—often a good one—and spend years carrying it around, writing about it, looking for someone who shares their vision. The product exists. The audience doesn’t—or doesn’t know it wants one yet. And when their idea doesn’t gain traction? Pet rock authors think it’s a distribution problem when, in reality, it’s a demand problem.
THE BRIEFCASE TEST AND THE DISAPPEARING GAP
The Heritage Foundation, the 800 lb. gorilla of conservative policy for decades, ran on something called “the briefcase test.” If their research was physically in a key decision-maker’s bag, they were doing their job. Elegant. But also: nearly impossible to replicate without Heritage’s institutional weight. Without it, you did what a whole generation of think tanks did: produce white papers and wander the halls of power hoping someone noticed.
The model worked because it rested on information asymmetry; the expert knew more than the legislator. The think tank had someone who’d spent a career on a problem the lawmaker might touch once. That gap was leverage. It got meetings and sold ideas. And along the way, it largely avoided the pet-rock problem because, once you’re in the briefcase, it’s a lot easier to slip your favorite idea into the flow.
But Google started closing that gap 20 years ago. And today, AI is finishing the job—not just access to expertise, but access to answers. Synthesized. Immediate. The author-interpreter? Increasingly optional.
That’s a large problem for everyone whose value rests on knowing things others don’t. And it’s getting larger. When expertise becomes abundant, expertise stops being the product.
Something else has to be.
WHAT REPLACES IT
The most promising shift I see: from publishing to responding. Instead of producing white papers or other policy outputs and hoping they land in the right briefcase, some organizations are building rapid-response capacity—answering the question a decision-maker faces in hours rather than weeks. This isn’t new; solving someone’s immediate problem has high value. Showing up with your pet rock? Much less so.
The white paper—however good—is often a product launched in search of demand that may not exist, or that has already moved on. And here’s the uncomfortable meta-layer: the white paper itself is a pet rock. Policy people would write them by choice even if they knew—really knew—it wasn’t the best way to move an idea. The format is the comfort object, not just the vehicle. Format-as-pet-rock compounds the problem.
And before anyone protests: yes, there needs to be room for novel thinking and breakthrough ideas. But there’s never been room for all of them, and each round of technological musical chairs probably shrinks that room rather than expands it.
What’s the new briefcase test? I don’t know exactly. But I’d bet it involves response speed, specificity to the real problem rather than the one you’ve decided matters, and demonstrated track record over institutional reputation.
Objects in the mirror, etc.
Greg W. Brooks. First published on LinkedIn, April 2026.