Context is king

Welcome to Ryan’s Rant, my weekly newsletter aimed at helping companies drive customer-centric growth.

One thing that I’m regularly frustrated with in business is how often I see people assert understanding based on their own past experiences — rather than the situation at hand.?

I see this a lot with executives who assume they understand what’s going on without bothering to get the real story and data.?

And I see it a lot with new people who come into an organization and assume they can leverage all they’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t from their past roles.?

But I also see it with people who have worked somewhere for a long time and assume they can rely exclusively on their past experience to judge a new situation.?

I think this can be a dangerous way to act. And honestly, it wastes a lot of time.?

You can’t rely completely on past experiences

I see many people come into a new situation overly confident that they fully understand it. That they have the answers based on their past experience. That they don’t need to spend any time learning the new context in front of them.?

But the reality is that every business is different — operating within a different context. And even within a business, circumstances change. What worked for an early-stage start-up won’t work for that same business a few years later when it’s much larger. The consumer’s context today isn’t the same as it was a few years ago, and it won’t be the same a few years from now.?

We can learn a lot from our past experiences, but what worked in one set of circumstances in the past is never guaranteed to work in new circumstances today. We can rely on what we’ve learned in the past to teach us how to approach a new problem and which alternatives to consider.?

But if we jump into something without knowing the real context, we can end up making costly mistakes that could have been avoided. We can end up having to backtrack later to learn information we should have known from the beginning.?

You need to know what’s going on in the business and the world?

I believe it’s essential that we do all we can to understand the context of the situation we’re in now before we blindly attempt to apply past learnings. That means we need to know what’s going on within the business — its current problems/opportunities, its key metrics, its internal politics — as well as what’s going on with the consumer in the world.?

That means we need to spend time getting up to speed on new businesses when we join them, rather than assuming that what worked in the last job will work in the new one. It means we need to take the time to understand what’s changed in our current business and recognize that what worked in the past might not work today. And that what didn’t work in the past could work now.?

This is why I think it’s important to have all your data in one place, connected in a way that allows the organization to fully understand the consumer today and get all their questions answered.

It’s up to insights teams to make it easy for their organizations to get the context they need on the consumer so they can make the right decisions day to day.?

If you missed it

I shared my tips to help diverse, remote teams move fast — from problem definition to contracting to dependency mapping and more — on this episode of Inside Insights .