Your email marketing works great - until one customer actually reads it and decides to ignore it. Your ‘data’ says that ‘people in your demographic’ will behave a certain way. Then someone chooses not to.

The challenge is that your campaigns target ‘segments’ - an abstract marketing concept designed to find prospects and sell to them. But you’re actually trying to reach individual humans who don’t fit those segments.

We’ve long understood that our theories around ‘population behaviour’ work fine - for populations. But as you segment down to the ultimate ‘Market of One’1 - it all falls apart.

This isn’t a new problem. Physics hit it first.

But before Physics could develop the theories, the artists - as usual - were way ahead of their time.

Dostoevsky, James, and Kafka wrote about shattered determinism;
Yeats, Eliot, and Whitman wrote about fragmented truth;
Picasso and the Cubists painted superposition.
They were all describing aspects of the quantum world decades before Einstein had the physics.

And then came the science.

For 300 years, Newton’s rules explained everything we could see. They worked perfectly. The theory was so good that nobody could break it. Until they did. In the early 1900s, Einstein and quantum mechanics arrived. Suddenly we had two completely different sets of rules. One worked for big objects moving through space. The other worked for tiny atoms and particles moving through the ‘Quantum Realm’. Both were right. Neither could explain the other.

At the time - most scientists couldn’t understand what Einstein was hypothesising. But over time we learnt that we had two parallel theories that could co-exist. They didn’t need to merge.

Or do they?2 The search for a Universal Theory to describe both the physical world and the quantum realm became the dream.

Organization Development, Marketing and Business is in the same spot.

By this timeline, business finds itself squarely in the equivalent of the 1900s. The artists have been sensing it. The thinkers have been describing it. But we still have two completely different - and incompatible - theories about how people behave:

Population theory: Everyone acts predictably in groups. We can forecast trends, segment markets, predict behaviour through statistics and demographics. This is the theory that built marketing, sales strategy, and organisational management. It works brilliantly… until it doesn’t.

Individual theory: People have psychology, values, identity, choice. They act from conviction, not from probabilities. A single person can ignore every rule. We have no framework for understanding them - so we build our systems to ignore them entirely.

And given this, there is certainly no unified theory to bridge them.

If there is a parallel - where are the artists?

Plath wrote of ‘the self’ that won’t conform to prediction;
Ginsberg .. an individual consumed by a system that can’t contain him;
Bacon painted distorted figures that refused to stay rational;
Arendt theorised the unpredictable human act as the moment when genuine freedom breaks the system.
They were all describing the same dichotomy: the individual whose conviction shatters every model designed to predict them.

And yet.

My clearest example: Isaac Asimov, who imagined Psychohistory through science fiction. In Foundation, he described the exact moment when individual conviction collapses a population model. He wrote it 70 years ago. We’re still living it.

That’s what’s happening now. For 50 years we built systems based on ‘population’ thinking - marketing segmentation, CRM systems, HR bands, organisational charts, analytics dashboards. All of it assumes people behave predictably in groups. And all that information is stored in ‘Systems of Record’.

And yet, the moment you need to engage with an individual - not as a segment, not as a data point - the system breaks. You can’t apply population rules to a person. And you can’t scale individual rules to a population.

We need a completely different way of thinking about this.

In my models - ‘Systems of Engagement’ are the systems that we need to design , develop and build for this brave new world. Not to replace SoRs - not to cull ‘population’ thinking, but a parallel system that acknowledges individuals operating with agency and conviction.

As to the ‘Unified Theory’? Well, you can’t have that until you have more than one theory to combine.

In my ‘Structured Thought’ models, ‘The Business Equation’/‘People First’ frameworks … the ‘Systems of Engagement’ work in what I call the Age of Experience - where organisations must engage not with segments and data points, but with people. Where conviction and choice matter as much as probability and pattern.

We are building these systems.

Early days. Building on SOR systems but with SOE thinking. Not entirely unlike what Aurea is trying to do - but I wonder if we are on the cusp of the Einstein breakthrough. I really do.

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1. The ‘Market of One’ concept emerged in the 1990s through the work of Don Peppers and Martha Rogers and it wasn’t all theoretical. Broadvision, founded by Pehong Chen, attempted to codify their thinking in their software. Too early, perhaps. Broadvision persisted until 2020, when ‘Aurea’ acquired it. (Aurea is on a similar track - look at their acquisitions over time - it’s all hiding in plain sight. Who’s Aurea? Remember Joe Liemandt’s Trilogy software back in the day? Yeah - that Joe Liemandt. Alive and well and still working to join the dots. ↩

2. The Universal Theory hunt has been physics' dream for over a century. But the real insight isn’t that we need one grand theory. It’s that the moment you stop trying to force incompatible systems together, you can actually work with both. Einstein didn’t disprove Newton. He showed us they operate at different scales. Business is still trying to prove Newton works everywhere. ↩