The View From the Other Side

My working life probably looks slightly ridiculous from the outside.

I currently have two businesses. In one of them, I spend a considerable amount of time in leggings, teaching Pilates, choosing music, choreographing things and occasionally persuading rooms full of grown adults to behave as though they're headlining Wembley. In the other, I sit at a laptop pulling businesses apart in my head. I look at websites, customer journeys, language, what they're trying to sell, what a customer actually experiences and why those two things aren't always remotely the same.

They don't exactly scream obvious career progression.

Then again, very little about my career does.

I've worked in performance, dance, choreography and fitness. I've taught rooms full of people and stood on stages in front of considerably more. I've worked in business development and marketing. I've sat in offices, written strategies, sold things, built things, promoted things and asked awkward questions about why we're doing things the way we're doing them. These days I've somehow arrived at a point where all of those things coexist, although thankfully not usually at the same time.

There is no neat career ladder here. It's more of a career climbing frame.

For years, I've thought of the different bits as exactly that: different bits. Sometimes one has been the job and another has been squeezed around the edges. Sometimes I've changed direction entirely. Occasionally I've tried to be terribly sensible and concentrate on one thing.

That generally goes well for approximately seventeen minutes.

My brain does not appear to want one lane. My brain would like the entire motorway, several B-roads and, if possible, a suspicious little track marked NO THROUGH ROAD just to see where it goes.

But I was thinking about all of this recently and realised that, despite changing industries, jobs and occasionally my entire professional identity, one thing has been remarkably consistent.

The way I look at things.

I am almost incapable of experiencing something only from the side I'm standing on.

Take teaching. If I'm at the front of a room, of course I'm thinking about what I'm teaching. I'm listening to the music, watching bodies, cueing the next move and trying not to launch myself into a speaker. But another part of my brain is somewhere else entirely.

It's at the back of the room with the person who has never been before.

Do they know what to do? Did that cue make sense? Do they feel as though everybody else knows something they don't? Have I given them enough information to follow me without drowning them in so much explanation that we've all forgotten we're supposed to be enjoying ourselves?

I know what's coming next. I made the bloody thing.

They don't.

And that distinction matters.

If I turn left and half the room turns right, I can either conclude that 20 people have simultaneously become idiots, or I can accept the considerably more useful possibility that something about the way I communicated it didn't work.

It doesn't particularly matter what I meant them to understand. I'm standing in front of fairly compelling evidence of what they actually understood.

Performance taught me a version of the same lesson long before I had any reason to think about customer journeys. You can have an intention for a moment, a piece of choreography, a joke, a character or an entire show, but once you put it in front of an audience, you don't get to climb into every seat and personally explain what you were going for.

You put something out.

They experience it.

And somewhere between those two things is the truth of whether it worked.

Years later, when I moved into business development and marketing, apparently the same bit of my brain came with me.

I didn't realise that was what was happening at the time. I just knew I had an irritating habit of looking at things everybody else seemed perfectly comfortable with and asking, “But why?”

Why do we do it like that?

Why does the customer have to know that?

How are they supposed to find this?

What happens if they don't understand what we mean?

Why are we asking them to do three things when we actually only need them to do one?

And my personal favourite:

Are we doing this because it works, or because we've been doing it for so long that nobody can remember whose idea it was?

It turns out that “we've always done it this way” is catnip to a brain that sees a sign marked NO THROUGH ROAD and immediately wants to investigate.

Which brings me to what I do now.

When I look at a business, I find myself doing exactly what I've done in all those other rooms. I mentally move.

I stop standing next to the person who built it and wander over to the other side.

I don't know what the owner knows. I don't know that Service A is actually perfect for me even though its name tells me absolutely nothing. I don't know that the button I'm looking for is hiding under a menu heading I wouldn't think to click. I don't know what happens after I fill in the form. I don't know that everybody normally messages Susan on Facebook because Susan sorts it.

I'm just the customer.

I arrive with whatever intention brought me there and think, right, I quite fancy buying this. Can I?

And then I follow what the business puts in front of me.

Sometimes it's beautifully easy. Sometimes I find things I personally might have done differently but which aren't actually getting in anybody's way. Sometimes I end up six pages deep, knowing a surprising amount about the founder's childhood, yet somehow less certain about how to give them money than I was when I arrived.

That last one happens more often than you'd hope.

But the interesting bit isn't finding fault. Give anybody long enough and they can find something they'd change about almost anything.

The interesting bit is noticing the difference between what something looks like from the inside and what it feels like from the other side.

Because expertise is useful, but it comes with a peculiar problem: the more you know, the harder it becomes to remember what it was like not to know it.

You know why your services are organised that way. You know what your terminology means. You know which information matters and which doesn't. You know the history behind the slightly strange process everybody in the business takes for granted.

Your customer arrives without any of that.

And I don't think this is only a website problem, or a marketing problem, or even particularly a business problem. It's a human one.

We naturally experience the world from where we're standing.

Learning to move - even temporarily - is a skill.

Looking back, I don't think I've spent my career repeatedly starting again quite as often as it might appear. I've changed industries, changed roles, changed what I wear to work fairly dramatically, and collected a frankly ridiculous mixture of experience along the way. None of it was part of some clever masterplan. I wasn't standing backstage in a musical twenty-something years ago thinking, “Excellent, this will be useful when I'm analysing customer journeys in my forties.”

That would be a much tidier story. It just wouldn't be true.

But I can see the thread now.

Performance taught me that what you intend to communicate and what somebody receives aren't necessarily the same thing. Teaching taught me to notice when people are lost before they have to tell me. Business development taught me to question processes that make perfect sense to the people inside them. Marketing taught me that what a business wants to say and what somebody needs to hear can be two very different things.

And consultancy, apparently, has given that slightly annoying lifelong habit somewhere useful to live.

Perhaps that's why having two businesses that look completely unrelated doesn't actually feel particularly strange to me.

One has me standing at the front of a room, reading people in real time.

The other has me sitting behind a laptop doing much the same thing to a business.

Different work. Same brain.

Although only one of them generally requires a sports bra.