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, the same person pursuing the same goal will decide one way in March and the other way in September. When that happens, the temptation inside an organization is to call the person inconsistent. Usually, nothing fundamental about the person has changed. What changed is the situation they were in when the decision came due.

That’s what I mean by a scenario, and I’ve come to think it does more work than we sometimes realize.

Consider two people who tell you they want to advance their careers. One is in the second year of a first real job, eager to prove something, and would move to Denver in a month for the right offer. The other is twenty-five years in, with a mortgage, two kids, and a reputation in a field where everyone knows everyone. Ask them both what they want and you may get the same sentence. Ask what a wrong move would cost them and you’re looking at two entirely different human beings. The goal may be identical. The goal is also of limited use on its own.

I saw a version of this constantly in my buyer work. A technology executive evaluating a platform during an ordinary planning cycle, weighing it against four other budget priorities, is a fundamentally different buyer than the same executive evaluating the same platform three weeks after an outage took the business offline for a day and a half. Same person, same company, same product, same stated objective. The urgency has changed, the tolerance for risk has changed, the cost of doing nothing has changed, and the internal politics have almost certainly changed. Anyone who has been involved in a significant buying decision knows those two conversations have very little in common.

The scenario changes what the goal feels like from the inside. And what the goal feels like from the inside can have a great deal to do with the decision that follows.

A Decision Doesn’t Happen Inside a Profile

This sounds obvious written down. Most useful ideas do. The trouble is that organizations are structurally inclined to pull people out of their circumstances because circumstances are messy and don’t aggregate well.

So we build segments, profiles, audience categories, and personas. We study behavior, preferences, demographics, and patterns. We now have artificial intelligence capable of surfacing relationships in the data that no analyst would have found on their own, and some of what it finds is genuinely valuable. All of it helps us know more about people.

But nobody has ever made a decision inside a customer segment. Decisions happen on a particular afternoon, under a particular set of pressures, when something has become important enough that the person can no longer put it off.

And there’s almost always a something. A system failed. A competitor moved. A boss left. A number came in worse than expected. A friend mentioned an experience that made the current situation feel a little shabby by comparison. A constraint appeared, or one that had been there for years finally lifted. In my experience, many of the decisions worth understanding have some identifiable event or change sitting behind them, and organizations spend remarkably little effort trying to find it.

That event is often where the goal acquired its urgency. Without understanding it, we may know what someone wants. We know much less about why it matters now.

What Audiences Taught Me That Buyers Hadn’t

For most of my career, I studied people buying things. In recent years, through my work with JazzBuffalo and ArtsBuffalo, I’ve found myself asking many of the same questions about audiences and communities, and it has changed how I think about all of this.

Why does someone decide to come to a concert? Why do they come back? Why does one evening become something a person talks about for a month while another, by every objective measure just as good, doesn’t?

The convenient answer is that they came because they like jazz. Sometimes that’s even true. But it explains very little about why they came that night, which is the question that matters if you’re trying to understand what brings people into a room.

The actual reasons can run elsewhere. Someone needed something to do with a person they care about. Someone has family in town and is quietly trying to show off the city. Someone has been feeling disconnected from Buffalo and wants to feel like they live somewhere. Someone heard a name they didn’t recognize and got curious. Someone got to Friday and simply wanted to be in a room where things were happening.

Even where the goal looks the same, the scenario can split it open. Two people both want an evening with friends. One is deciding what to do on a Saturday with people they see every week, where the stakes are low and the default might be somebody’s kitchen. The other has a college friend in town for the first time in ten years and gets one shot at making the visit feel like something. “Spend meaningful time with friends” covers both. They are not remotely the same decision.

This has had a practical effect on how I think about audience development. Attendance tells you what happened. Ticketing tells you who came and how often. Surveys tell you what people are willing to say about what they liked, which is useful but incomplete. None of it necessarily tells you what was going on in someone’s week that made a Tuesday evening with us worth the effort. If you want people to come back, that’s something worth understanding, and it isn’t readily apparent in the data.

Why Scenarios Have Always Mattered

I have a particular stake in this because it’s one of the pieces of the work that has always separated a persona that changes decisions from one that simply decorates a wall.

When I developed Buyer Personas twenty-five years ago, a name, a photograph, and a set of demographics were never the point. They were the least interesting part of the exercise. What made the work hold up, in company after company, was the discipline of scenario development—sitting with real buyers and reconstructing the actual situation that led to an actual decision, event by event, rather than asking people to summarize themselves in the abstract.

Companies that did that work honestly could walk away with something they could act on. They could begin to see what buyers were trying to accomplish, what was happening when a decision became necessary, what obstacles they encountered, what alternatives they considered, and how they understood the choices in front of them. In some cases, what they learned was significant enough to challenge assumptions and change decisions inside the organization. Companies that skipped that work and kept the name, the photograph, and the profile often ended up with a document.

That distinction matters even more to me now because people are not static, and a persona built primarily from stable traits has a difficult time accounting for that. The executive who wouldn’t consider replacing a platform in the spring may be running the replacement project by the fall. The employee who had no interest in leaving last year is taking calls now. The person who ignored an invitation in March accepts it in April. The person hasn’t necessarily changed. Something about the circumstances has.

An organization can treat those shifts as noise, or it can get curious about what changed. I’ve come to believe that is one of the most valuable questions an organization can ask. When behavior shifts, something in the person’s circumstances may have moved, and the scenario is often where we find it.

That’s precisely why I’ve never been particularly interested in a persona that tells me only who someone is. I want to understand what was happening when they had to make a decision.

Context Isn’t Background

Most organizations tend to treat context as additional information. Identify the person, establish the goal, then add some situational detail around it.

I’ve come to think that’s backwards. The scenario isn’t surrounding the decision. It’s inside it.

A goal pursued under financial strain is experienced differently than the same goal pursued with money in the bank. A career move made after a bruising year isn’t the move made after a promotion. A decision about how to spend an evening changes depending on whether someone is alone, with a spouse, entertaining a client, reconnecting with an old friend, or taking a child to something for the first time. Those may look like five people making the same decision about where to spend an evening. In reality, they’re making five very different decisions.

Which brings me to something I’ve learned from doing this work for a long time: I’ve rarely gotten a useful answer by simply asking someone what their goals are.

People don’t experience their lives as a list of objectives. Ask directly and you often get something broad, aspirational, or worse, phrased in the vocabulary your own industry taught them. What has worked consistently for me over the years is asking about the situation instead. What happened? What were you trying to do? Why did it become important then rather than six months earlier? What got in the way? What else did you look at? What were you worried might go wrong?

Tell me the story of the situation and I’ll usually find the goal in it. Ask me for the goal and I may get a slogan.

That distinction has become increasingly important to how I think about Human Understanding. Goals are not something we assign to people. They’re something we learn to uncover. And one of the best places to uncover them is in the circumstances where decisions actually happened.

And Even the Scenario Isn’t the Whole of It

There’s one more layer, and it’s the one I’m most interested in right now.

Two people can pursue similar goals under nearly identical circumstances and still read the situation in completely different ways. One sees risk where the other sees an opening. One treats uncertainty as a reason to wait; the other treats the same uncertainty as the reason to move now, before things settle. One person walks into a new experience genuinely open to it. Another walks in carrying an assumption formed by something that happened a decade ago and has been quietly governing choices ever since.

The goal can be similar. The scenario can be similar. Yet the understanding of what’s happening can be entirely different.

We don’t respond only to our circumstances. We respond to what we believe our circumstances mean. And if Human Understanding is going to hold up as an organizational competency rather than another research method, then understanding how people make sense of their situations may matter as much as knowing what they’re trying to accomplish.

That’s where I want to go next.

For now, the practical idea is straightforward enough. Knowing who someone is helps. Knowing what they’re trying to accomplish helps considerably more. But understanding the circumstances in which they’re trying to accomplish it is where we begin to stop describing a person and start recognizing one.

It requires a different kind of curiosity than most organizations currently practice, and it can’t simply be bought as a data product. It requires talking to people about what was actually going on in their lives and being willing to hear that it may have had very little to do with us.

That’s usually where the useful part is.