Knowing Where to Cast

Two people can fish the same lake with the same rod, the same line, and the same lure, and have very different days.

One knows how to use the equipment. The other also knows something about the lake: where the fish might be, what they’re feeding on, how the season changes their behavior, when to wait, and when to move.

From a distance, you see two people casting. Up close, there may be a whole sequence of decisions separating them.

That’s what interests me about the comparison. We can watch someone do something successfully, copy the action, and still miss much of what made it work. The equipment is easy to identify. Their understanding of the situation is harder to observe.

Even asking which lure they used only gets us so far. Why that lure? What were they noticing when they chose it? Under what conditions would they use something else?

The answer is somewhere in the relationship between the tool, the person using it, and the conditions they’re responding to.

I think business works this way more often than we acknowledge.

We ask which software someone uses, how they structure their offer, what their marketing looks like. Those are useful questions. But their answers belong to a particular situation. A company serves particular customers, has a particular reputation, and operates with resources and constraints that another company may not share.

When we borrow the approach, those conditions don’t automatically come with it.

A launch strategy that works for someone with years of customer trust may depend heavily on that trust. A sales process may work because the customer already recognizes the problem and has the authority to spend money solving it. Another customer might need help understanding the problem before the same conversation can even begin.

The action makes more sense when you can see what it is responding to.

As someone who develops products, I find this uncomfortable in a useful way. I can know how to build something and still have important gaps in my understanding of whether it belongs in someone’s life.

Who is it for? What are they trying to accomplish? What do they do today? How frustrating is that experience, really? Would solving it matter enough for them to spend money, change a habit, or persuade someone else to adopt it?

Those questions shape what a good product would be. Sometimes they change whether the product should exist at all.

That means my ability to build is only part of the work. I also need to understand the situation well enough to decide what to build and how it should fit.

The difficulty is that execution gives us something tangible to improve. We can polish the design, add functionality, make the system faster. Understanding the customer can ask us to reconsider decisions we’ve already invested in.

It is possible to become very efficient at carrying an incomplete understanding further.

And this applies beyond product development. A marketer needs to understand what would make this audience care. A manager needs to understand why this team is struggling before choosing an intervention. Advice that helps someone begin may create problems for someone operating at a different stage.

Experience becomes valuable when it helps us recognize those distinctions. It gives us more than a collection of things that have worked before. It helps us judge which parts of a previous situation resemble the one in front of us, which parts differ, and whether those differences matter.

Even then, understanding doesn’t guarantee a result. Conditions change. We miss things. A good decision can have a disappointing outcome, and a poor decision can get lucky. Part of learning is being willing to examine the reasoning as carefully as the result.

So when an approach works, I want to ask what made it appropriate. When it fails, I want to understand which assumption failed with it.

Was the problem misunderstood? Was the approach poorly executed? Had the situation changed? What would give me a reason to try again, and what would give me a reason to adjust?

Those questions take us beyond collecting techniques. They help us develop judgment.

I want to become better at making things. But that also means becoming more attentive to the people, circumstances, and needs that give those things a purpose.

The fisherman’s knowledge shows up in the cast. Much of it was already at work when they decided where to stand.

Trent Jackson

Trenton Jackson builds and writes at the intersection of human systems, business architecture, and design.