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 whom that strategy ultimately depends.

We make assumptions about what customers want and why they buy. We make assumptions about why employees stay or leave, what will cause an audience to participate, or what will motivate a community to engage. Increasingly, we’re making assumptions about how people will respond to Artificial Intelligence as it enters their work and their lives.

Sometimes those assumptions are well informed and grounded in real experience. Sometimes they’re simply what everyone in the room happens to believe.

Which gets at a question I keep coming back to as I’ve developed the idea of Human Understanding: should we understand people before we develop the strategy, or after?

I believe before.

Every Strategy Is Built on Assumptions About People

Whether we say it out loud or not, almost every strategy carries assumptions about people underneath it.

A growth strategy assumes something about why people will buy. A talent strategy assumes something about why people will join an organization, stay, and contribute. An audience strategy assumes something about why people will participate. A community strategy assumes something about what will cause people to engage. Even an AI strategy ultimately contains assumptions about whether people will trust, use, or accept what the technology makes possible.

None of that is inherently a problem. Leaders don’t get to make decisions with perfect information. Every strategy involves assumptions and some degree of uncertainty.

The problem comes when assumptions begin to pass themselves off as understanding.

We have more information about people today than we’ve ever had. We know what people buy, where they go, what they click, how they engage, and what patterns emerge across all of that behavior.

But knowing more about people isn’t the same as understanding them. I’ve returned to that distinction several times in this series because I believe it matters that much.

Strategy is only as good as the understanding upon which it is built.

We’re Better at Knowing What Happened Than Why

One thing I’ve learned from decades of trying to understand buyers, audiences, and communities is that organizations are generally pretty good at identifying what happened. They’re not nearly as good at understanding why.

We can see when sales decline or when customers don’t buy something we expected them to. We know when employees leave. Arts organizations know when audiences don’t show up. Community organizations know when people don’t participate.

The data tells us something happened. Sometimes it can tell us exactly when and where it happened.

The harder question is why.

The answer usually isn’t sitting neatly in a dashboard. It resides beneath the behavior we can observe—in what people are trying to accomplish, what concerns them, what they’ve experienced before, and how they’re making sense of the choices in front of them.

This gets at something that has shaped my work since I began developing Buyer Personas twenty-five years ago:

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

Buyer Personas were never simply about building better profiles of buyers. The deeper objective was understanding why people made the buying decisions they did. What were they trying to accomplish? What goals were influencing their decisions? What stood in their way? How were they thinking about the decision and the choices available to them?

Those questions haven’t become less useful over twenty-five years. If anything, I now see them applying much more broadly than I did then.

Organizations naturally build strategy around what they’re trying to accomplish—growth, revenue, retention, participation, productivity, efficiency, or whatever the objective may be. Human Understanding asks us to consider the other half of that equation:

What are the people we serve trying to accomplish?

Those two answers can sometimes be a long way apart.

When Strategy Starts With the Organization

It makes sense that strategy usually begins from the organization’s side of the table. Leaders are responsible for determining what their organizations need to accomplish.

So the questions naturally begin as organizational questions. Where should we grow? What should we offer? How can we increase participation? How can we improve retention? What technology should we adopt?

Eventually, many of those questions become questions about people. But by the time that happens, the strategy can already be quite far along.

I’ve watched this happen more times than I can count, including in my work with some of the world’s largest corporations. Somewhere in the process, someone develops a persona, commissions research, or gathers customer insights. But by then, the work is often being used to support decisions that have already begun to take shape rather than to help shape them in the first place.

That’s the point where understanding people can stop informing the strategy and start defending it instead.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen many organizations invest considerable time and money in Buyer Personas that ultimately do little more than defend a strategy already taking shape. I’ve also seen consulting and analyst firms position Buyer Personas as an area of expertise while producing work that bears little resemblance to the original intent of the concept—deeply understanding why buyers make the decisions they do.

The result is often an impressive-looking set of profiles filled with demographics, preferences, behaviors, quotes, and other information about buyers, but very little understanding of what those buyers are actually trying to accomplish, the situations they are facing, or why they make the decisions they do.

I believe this is one of the primary reasons so many Buyer Persona efforts fail to stick. Organizations invest in them, use them for a while, and eventually they disappear because they haven’t revealed anything meaningful enough to influence a decision, challenge an assumption, or change the direction of a strategy.

The most valuable Buyer Personas I’ve seen do something very different. They help leaders see buyers in ways they hadn’t seen them before. They reveal goals, motivations, circumstances, and ways of thinking that weren’t fully understood inside the organization. Sometimes, what is learned causes the organization to reconsider what it had planned to do.

Understanding should have the ability to change the decision.

I believe that’s an important principle, not only for Buyer Personas but for Human Understanding more broadly. If deeper understanding can’t challenge what we believe, influence what we decide, or change how we serve people, we have to ask how much understanding we’ve actually gained.

The strategy itself can still be internally coherent. It may be supported by considerable analysis. It might even succeed in the marketplace for a while. But it may have been developed largely to answer the organization’s question—What should we do?—without ever deeply answering the human question underneath it:

What are these people actually trying to accomplish, and does what we’re proposing genuinely matter to them?

That difference has stayed with me.

A persona developed after the strategic direction has been established can still help refine execution. Research conducted after a decision has largely been made can still confirm or challenge assumptions. Both have value.

But neither is the same as allowing a deep understanding of people to help shape the strategy from the beginning.

I’ve seen this play out in many different settings. A product gets developed, and then the question becomes how to get people to buy it. A program is created, and then the question becomes how to get people to participate. A new initiative is introduced, and leadership begins wondering why employees aren’t embracing it.

At that point, marketing, communications, or engagement is often handed the job of generating a response to a decision people had very little role in informing.

What if we reversed the sequence?

What if we started by understanding what people are trying to accomplish, what matters to them, what concerns them, what they’ve experienced before, and how they’re interpreting the choices in front of them—and allowed the strategy to emerge from that understanding?

The resulting strategy might look very different.

This is what I mean when I say understanding precedes strategy. It doesn’t mean we get to understand everything about people before we act. We can’t. People are complex and circumstances change.

It means understanding people becomes an intentional part of how strategy is developed, not something we go looking for after the strategy has already been decided.

Bringing Another Perspective Into the Room

One of the most valuable things Human Understanding can do for strategy is bring another perspective into the room.

Organizations naturally see the world from the organization’s point of view. Customers, employees, audiences, and communities see that same world from theirs. Those perspectives don’t always align.

Something that appears to be an obvious value proposition to an organization may not feel particularly valuable to the person receiving it. A change that makes perfect sense to leadership may be experienced very differently by the employees who have to live with it. An event an arts organization believes should attract an audience may not connect with what people actually want to do with their limited time. A community initiative designed to encourage participation may overlook the very reasons people don’t feel it was created with them in mind.

That’s not necessarily because the strategy was poorly conceived. It may simply be because the organization and the people it serves are looking at the same situation through different mental models.

Bringing that second perspective into the room earlier can change the questions we ask. And when we change the questions, we often change the decisions that follow.

That’s one of the roles I see for Human Understanding.

Human Understanding Doesn’t Replace Strategy

I don’t think of Human Understanding as competing with Strategic Planning. Quite the opposite. I believe it makes strategy better.

The same applies to Design Thinking, Organizational Development, leadership, innovation, customer experience, audience development, and other disciplines involving people. Each becomes stronger when it’s informed by a deeper understanding of the people involved.

That’s also why I believe Human Understanding needs to become an organizational discipline and competency rather than remain confined to research, marketing, or insights teams.

Research can teach us important things about people. Data can reveal patterns. Analytics can identify changes in behavior. Artificial Intelligence is going to make our ability to process all of this information faster and more powerful.

All of that is useful.

But Human Understanding is about what an organization does with what it learns. Does that understanding get shared across the organization? Does it reach the people making consequential decisions? Does it influence strategy, experiences, relationships, and how the organization serves people?

That’s where it stops being simply research and begins becoming an organizational competency.

Two Questions Worth Asking

I don’t believe leaders need another complicated framework to begin thinking this way. Before the next important strategy or decision, two questions can take us a long way.

What do we actually understand about the people this decision is going to affect?

And then the harder question:

How do we know?

I find that second question particularly important. It’s easy for an organization to say it knows its customers, its employees, its audiences, or its community. It’s harder to examine whether that knowledge comes from meaningful conversations, observation, research, and a genuine understanding of people’s goals—or whether we’re relying on assumptions that no one has questioned in years.

Either answer is worth knowing.

Human Understanding asks us to remain curious enough to find out and open enough to recognize when something we thought we understood about people may no longer be true.

Understanding Comes First

Organizations are going to continue investing considerable time, talent, and resources in strategy. They should. Good strategy remains essential to good leadership.

But perhaps we need to pay just as much attention to what comes before it.

Before deciding what we want people to buy, we should understand what they’re actually trying to accomplish. Before deciding how to increase participation, we should understand what makes participation meaningful to people. Before introducing change, we should understand how the people affected by that change are likely to experience and interpret it.

And before asking what our strategy should be, perhaps the first question is simpler:

How deeply do we actually understand the people this strategy is intended to serve?

I’ve come to believe better strategy starts there.

Understanding precedes strategy.

And like much of what I’ve been exploring through Human Understanding, it brings me back to the same place.

Everything begins with understanding people.

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.(image: Idea by Gilbert Bages (CC BY 3.0))