People Pursue Goals

Why Understanding What People Are Trying to Accomplish Changes How Organizations Serve Them

One of the ideas that has stayed with me throughout my work is actually quite simple.

People make decisions and choose behaviors in the pursuit of goals.

That idea was foundational when I first developed Buyer Personas twenty-five years ago. In fact, understanding people in the context of the goals they are trying to accomplish has been a core principle of personas since their origins. At the time, I was trying to help organizations move beyond what they knew about buyers and toward a deeper understanding of why buyers made the decisions they did.

Over the years, I’ve come to see that the principle reaches much further than buying.

Customers pursue goals. Employees pursue goals. Audiences pursue goals. Donors pursue goals. People participating in communities pursue goals.

We all do.

And if organizations want to understand people more deeply, one of the most important questions they can ask is also one of the most basic:

What is this person actually trying to accomplish?

We Have Become Very Good at Describing People

Organizations know more about people today than at any point I can remember.

We have demographics, behavioral data, customer histories, audience data, employee surveys, social media activity, digital analytics, purchase patterns, engagement metrics — and increasingly, artificial intelligence capable of finding patterns across enormous amounts of information.

All of this can be useful.

But there is a difference between being able to describe someone and understanding what that person is trying to accomplish.

This was one of the problems I was trying to address when I developed Buyer Personas. Traditional segmentation could tell us quite a bit about buyers — their industry, company size, role, age, income, geography, purchasing history, and any number of other characteristics.

Yet none of that necessarily told us why they were making a decision.

That required a different kind of question. What were they trying to accomplish? What had caused them to start looking for a solution? What problem were they trying to resolve, what change were they trying to make, what did they hope would be different once the decision was behind them?

Those questions took us beyond describing the buyer and closer to understanding the person.

The Organization Has Goals, Too

There is another side to this that I’ve come to appreciate more deeply over the years.

Organizations pursue goals just as people do. They want to grow revenue, increase market share, improve retention, attract talent, increase attendance, build membership, introduce new products, encourage adoption, strengthen communities.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. Organizations need goals. Goals give people direction and a way to decide where to invest limited time and resources.

The difficulty comes when the organization’s goals become the only lens through which it sees the people it serves.

A company wants someone to buy. An employer wants someone to stay. A nonprofit wants someone to donate. An arts organization wants someone to attend. A community initiative wants someone to participate.

Those are the organization’s goals.

They aren’t necessarily the person’s.

The customer isn’t waking up wondering how to help a company hit its revenue target. The employee isn’t lying awake thinking about the organization’s retention rate. The person deciding whether to attend a concert isn’t trying to help an arts organization reach its attendance numbers.

They’re trying to accomplish something in their own lives.

That distinction seems obvious once you say it out loud. And yet I’ve watched organizations lose sight of it again and again — not out of carelessness, but because their own goals are so close at hand, and the other person’s goals require real effort to see.

The Goal Changes the Way We Understand the Decision

Think about someone deciding whether to attend an arts or cultural event.

From the organization’s perspective, we might describe that person as a potential ticket buyer. We might know their age, where they live, which events they’ve attended before, how often they open an email, even which ads they’ve clicked.

All of that is useful information. None of it is the reason.

Suppose what that person is actually trying to accomplish is spending meaningful time with someone they care about. Or discovering something new. Or feeling connected to their city. Or simply escaping the routine of the week for a few hours.

The decision looks entirely different once you know that.

They’re not choosing whether to buy a ticket. They’re deciding whether the experience we’re offering helps them accomplish something that already matters to them.

The same is true in business. A buyer evaluating a technology platform isn’t necessarily trying to buy technology. They may be trying to reduce uncertainty, help their team work differently, protect themselves from a growing risk, demonstrate progress to leadership, or finally resolve a problem that has frustrated the organization for years.

The product is part of the decision. The goal is what gives the decision its meaning.

And that meaning is usually where real understanding begins.

Goals Help Explain Behavior That Otherwise Doesn’t Make Sense

One of the reasons I’ve stayed interested in goals for so long is that they explain behavior organizations often find confusing.

Why would someone choose the more expensive option? Why would an employee leave a seemingly good job? Why would someone drive across town for an experience nearly identical to one five minutes from home? Why would a longtime customer suddenly reconsider the relationship? Why would someone say they support a community initiative and then never show up?

Looking only at the behavior, we’re left guessing.

Looking at the goal someone is pursuing, we see the decision differently. A choice that seems irrational from the organization’s point of view can make complete sense from the person’s.

That distinction matters. Human Understanding isn’t about trying to explain people through the organization’s logic. It’s about understanding enough to see the decision from their point of view.

This Is Where Personas Go Wrong

I’ve written before about why so many Buyer Persona efforts fail to stick. One reason is that they often become collections of information about people rather than a way of truly understanding them.

A persona can have a name, a photograph, a job title, demographics, preferences, favorite websites, personality traits, even a memorable quote. It can look remarkably complete — and still tell us almost nothing about why someone makes the decision we’re trying to understand.

This is why goals mattered so much to the original intent behind Buyer Personas. The point was never to produce a better description of the buyer. It was to understand the buyer’s goals, the circumstances surrounding the decision, the obstacles in their way, and how they thought about the choices in front of them.

Without that depth, a persona becomes just another way of organizing information the organization already had.

And information alone doesn’t change anything. As I’ve written before, understanding should have the ability to change the decision. Understanding someone’s goals can do exactly that — it can change the product we build, the experience we create, the way we communicate, the audience we pursue, the problem we choose to solve, even the strategy itself.

Human Understanding Starts With Their Goals, Not Ours

This is one of the reasons I believe Human Understanding needs to become an organizational discipline and competency, not simply another research methodology.

The question isn’t whether an organization has information about people. It’s whether it has learned to see a situation from the perspective of the people it hopes to serve.

Goals give us a place to start.

Before asking how to increase sales, understand what customers are trying to accomplish. Before asking how to improve retention, understand what people are trying to accomplish through their work and their lives. Before asking how to increase attendance, understand what people are looking for when they decide how to spend their limited time. Before asking how to increase participation, understand what would make participation meaningful in someone’s life.

None of this makes the organization’s goals disappear. It means we get better at understanding the relationship between what the organization is trying to accomplish and what the people it serves are trying to accomplish.

When those two things come together, something important becomes possible: relevance.

Goals Are Only the Beginning

There is an important caution here.

Knowing someone’s goal doesn’t mean we fully understand them. Two people can pursue what looks like the same goal and arrive at very different decisions.

Someone trying to advance their career after twenty years in an industry sees the world differently than someone pursuing that same broad goal in their first year of work. Two people may both want meaningful time with friends, and still be making that decision under entirely different circumstances.

The goal matters. So does the scenario in which the person is pursuing it — their circumstances, their prior experiences, their assumptions, their constraints, the way they understand what’s happening around them.

This is where Human Understanding has to go deeper. We don’t simply want to know the goal. We want to understand the person pursuing that goal, in the circumstances where it actually matters.

That’s the idea I want to take up next, because I think it’s just as consequential as this one.

Begin With What People Are Trying to Accomplish

Organizations will always have goals. They should.

But the people those goals depend on have goals of their own. And perhaps the most consequential change an organization can make is learning to hold both perspectives at once.

What are we trying to accomplish?

What are the people we serve trying to accomplish?

The first question helps us understand the organization. The second helps us understand people. I’ve come to believe that organizations capable of holding both, clearly and at the same time, make better decisions about how the two can come together.

Because people aren’t simply buyers, employees, audience members, donors, or participants.

They are people, trying to accomplish something that matters to them.

Understanding begins there.