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 stronger relationships, create richer experiences, and strengthen communities.

The important word is understand. Because understanding people is very different from simply knowing more about them.

Knowing More Is Not the Same as Understanding More

Organizations know an extraordinary amount about people. They know what people buy, where they go, what they attend, what they click, what they search, what they watch, and what they say in surveys.

Increasingly, Artificial Intelligence can process all of that information, identify patterns, summarize behaviors, and make predictions at extraordinary speed. All of this can be useful.

But information about people is not necessarily understanding of people.

Human Understanding goes deeper. It seeks to understand people’s goals and motivations, their aspirations and concerns, their experiences and assumptions, and the mental models through which they interpret the world around them. It seeks to understand the meaning people attach to decisions, relationships, organizations, and communities.

Knowing that someone made a decision tells us something. Understanding why they made it tells us much more.

That distinction sits at the heart of Human Understanding.

An Organizational Competency, Not Simply Research

Research is important to Human Understanding. So are data, analytics, observation, conversation, and increasingly Artificial Intelligence.

But none of these alone constitutes Human Understanding. They are ways of learning.

Human Understanding is the organizational competency that develops when organizations become capable of turning what they learn about people into deeper understanding—and then applying that understanding to how they think, decide, lead, design, communicate, and serve.

That distinction is important. A company can conduct customer research without deeply understanding its customers. A cultural organization can collect audience data without understanding why people choose to participate—or why they don’t. A community can survey residents without understanding what makes people feel connected to a place.

An organization can have enormous amounts of information about people and still misunderstand them.

Human Understanding asks organizations to go further. Not simply to ask, What do we know about people? but to ask a more fundamental question:

Do we understand them?

People Pursue Goals

One principle has influenced my work since the earliest development of Buyer Personas:

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

This idea is foundational to Human Understanding.

People don’t simply buy products. They are trying to accomplish something. People don’t simply attend an arts event. They may be pursuing an experience, a connection, an interest, a feeling, or something meaningful to them. People don’t simply join organizations or communities. They are pursuing goals that matter in their lives.

The behavior we observe is often only the visible expression of something deeper. If we understand only the behavior, we understand only part of the person.

Human Understanding asks us to look beneath behavior and understand the goals, motivations, and circumstances shaping the choices people make. It also requires us to understand how people make sense of those choices.

People rarely encounter a decision or a new idea with a blank slate. They interpret the world through their experiences, assumptions, beliefs, and existing mental models.

So understanding people also means understanding how people understand.

Goals help us understand what people are trying to accomplish. Mental models help us understand how they interpret the world in which they are trying to accomplish it.

Together, they begin to move us from information toward understanding.

From Understanding to Belonging

There is another dimension to Human Understanding that I believe is important.

Understanding should lead somewhere.

Organizations don’t develop Human Understanding simply to know people better. They develop it so they can become more relevant to the people they serve.

I see this as a continuum:

Understanding → Relevance → Attention → Participation → Belonging → Advocacy

Understanding creates the possibility of relevance. When organizations understand what people are trying to accomplish and what matters to them, they can become more relevant to their lives.

Relevance earns attention. Attention creates the opportunity for participation. Meaningful participation, repeated over time, can create relationships and a sense of belonging. And people who genuinely feel they belong often become the strongest advocates for an organization, experience, or community.

This is why Human Understanding isn’t simply a research function. It influences relationships, experiences, participation, and community. Ultimately, it influences whether people believe an organization understands them at all.

The Enduring Question

Perhaps the simplest way to understand Human Understanding is through one question:

Do you understand me?

Every buyer and customer asks it. So does every employee, audience member, patient, student, donor, citizen, and community member.

They may never say those words.

But the question is there.

It is reflected in the decisions people make about what they buy and why they buy it, where they work, what they support, what they participate in, whom they trust, and where they choose to belong.

Organizations that can answer that question well will be better positioned to make decisions that matter to people.

That is why I believe Human Understanding deserves to be developed intentionally as an organizational discipline and competency. Not as another methodology, another source of data, or another organizational initiative, but as an enduring capability to deeply understand the people an organization exists to serve.

Artificial Intelligence will continue to give organizations extraordinary new capabilities for processing information. Human Understanding asks us to develop the complementary capability of understanding people.

No matter how sophisticated our technologies become, organizations will still ultimately succeed or fail through the decisions, relationships, experiences, and communities they create with people.

And that brings me back to where this work has always begun.

Everything begins with understanding people.

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(Image: understanding by Sugiman)