Tools
Understanding How People Understand
We don’t respond only to what happens around us. We respond to what we believe it means. I’ve spent a good part of my working life trying to understand why people make the decisions they do. You’d think that after enough years of doing this, people would get easier to understand. I’ve found almost the opposite to be true. The deeper you go, the more you realize how much of a decision is shaped by things that never show up in the behavior itself. Two ideas have been central to my work for a long time, and I come…
Understanding People in the Scenarios That Matter
Knowing what someone is trying to accomplish is the beginning of understanding them. It isn’t the end of it. I wrote recently about an idea that has sat at the center of my work for a long time, which is that people make decisions and choose behaviors in pursuit of goals. I still believe that’s the right place to start. What I’ve also learned, mostly by being wrong about it early on, is that it gets you less far than you’d expect. Two people can be trying to accomplish essentially the same thing and make opposite decisions. More unsettling,…
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…
Understanding Precedes Strategy
Why Understanding People Should Shape Strategy, Not Defend It Over the years, I’ve participated in a lot of conversations about strategy. Organizations spend considerable time trying to determine where they want to go, what they want to accomplish, and how they intend to get there. That’s as it should be. Strategy matters. It gives organizations direction, helps leaders decide what to say yes and no to, and provides a way to think about where to invest time, people, and resources. But I’ve noticed something along the way. Organizations often begin building strategy on assumptions about the very people upon…
What Is Human Understanding?
For more than three decades, I’ve been interested in one fundamental question: How can organizations better understand the people they serve? That question began with buyers. It expanded to audiences and communities. Over time, it led me to something broader: Human Understanding. In my previous essay, I made the case that Human Understanding should be developed as an emerging organizational discipline and competency. But that raises an obvious question. What exactly is Human Understanding? At its simplest, Human Understanding is an organization’s ability to deeply understand the people it serves—and to apply that understanding to make better decisions, build…
Why Organizations Need Human Understanding
Every successful organization intentionally develops capabilities. Some invest in Strategic Planning. Others strengthen Organizational Development. Many embrace Design Thinking, Systems Thinking, Leadership Development, or Organizational Learning. These disciplines exist for a reason. They help organizations think better, plan better, innovate better, and lead better. But over the past several years, I’ve found myself asking a different question. What organizational discipline and competency helps an organization better understand the people it serves? The more I’ve explored that question, the more I’ve come to believe something important is missing. Organizations have intentionally developed competencies for planning, designing, managing, innovating, and learning….