We tend to think reality is something “out there,” fixed and shared.
But imagine this:
Two people stand at the same intersection when the light turns red.
One sees order, safety, and cooperation.
The other sees control, restriction — a tiny reminder of all the rules pressing down on them.
Same light.
Same moment.
Two realities.
Which one is real?
This question matters more than ever — in business, in politics, in relationships.
Because we are not living in one world.
We are living in billions of private ones, stitched together through fragile, partial but often shared, understanding.
And that is both the problem and the opportunity we face as a society.
Imagination
Each of us walks around with an internal “decoder” — an imagination — that turns raw experience into meaning.
It doesn’t feel like imagination.
It feels like truth.
We take in information, filter it, assign meaning, and project that meaning outward as if it were objective.
We believe we “get” reality. But we mostly get ours. We believe we “get” others. But we mostly get what our imagination tells us about them.
It’s important to note that by “imagination,” here, we’re not talking about a common use of the word to mean creativity or out of the box thinking; we’re talking about imagination as the boundaries of what we can perceive and interpret, and the limits of our ability to assign meaning to what we observe in our environment or to concepts others explain to us.
Often we look to outside guides to help us with the meaning of things: scripture, science, statistics, our education, authorities, influencers. But the extent to which we internalize these sources is also a product of our imagination as we make room for them based on what our imagination allows and values.
What we’re really doing every day to make meaning is projecting our own imagination on the world and rejecting that which either conflicts with, or lives outside of, our imagination.
A quick story illustrates how this works. A friend of mine relates how she, a blonde, blue-eyed, white American female was traveling in China with her husband, a male American of Chinese descent who appears Chinese. She speaks fluent Mandarin and was conversing regularly with locals in Mandarin. Her husband does not speak Mandarin. On several occasions, despite that she was actively speaking Mandarin with them, and her husband was not conversing, the locals she was speaking with continually asked if he, referring to her husband, was her interpreter.
The imagination has contours and boundaries we are not conscious of. It interprets what our senses detect in a way that fits a story we tell ourselves about the world.
Empathy helps — but even empathy is still our imagination trying on someone else’s life like a coat that never fully fits; that is, we try to imagine how they see the world.
Once we grasp this phenomenon of projection and rejection that takes place as a result of our imagination’s activity and limits, we realize that communication, marketing, leadership, relationship building all hinge on how well we acknowledge and understand the operating system inside another person’s mind.
Why This Matters
Think about business:
We ask customers what they want.
They tell us what they think they want.
We study their behavior.
We infer what we think they want.
We take notes, collect “data,” make observations, and then build products or services. We craft a story in our own minds about what others tell us they believe and what they value, based on all these pieces of what seems like “objective” information.
Same in politics. Same in relationships. Same at work.
We focus on observed “data” when what really determines values and behavior is individual meaning making.
And meaning lives not in so many survey responses, or purchase decisions, or browsing patterns, but rather in our individual imaginations. When it comes to customers, employees, or others with whom we have relationships, bringing them value comes down to grasping the meaning created by their imagination.
Coca Cola’s misadventure with “New Coke” is an example of where the imagination of marketers, company executives, and/or market researchers projected that, based on data, taste preference was the key driver for soda purchase and, therefore, Coke would offer a sweeter tasting alternative to their venerable product. There was a significant, detrimental backlash from customers not only that the product was not desirable, but that it was patently undesirable in that it diluted the attractiveness of the Coke brand. What the decision makers got wrong was that the driver for the purchase of Coca Cola was tradition, stability, familiarity, and nostalgia — concepts in the customer’s imagination. Taste profile was interesting, but secondary.
In the company’s imagination, the marketplace valued newness, change, and keeping up with innovation from competitors. In the customer base imagination, value was something quite different, and the Coca Cola represented that to them. Ironically, prior Coca Cola advertising campaigns promoted the idea of being “the real thing,” and “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” — ideas that tie into familiarity and tradition.
The “data,” interpreted within the bounds of the company’s and the researcher’s imagination at the time, “concluded” that the taste profile would drive sales. But data doesn’t conclude anything; people, or even AI, draw inferences and create conclusions based on the limits of their imagination. In this case, the collective imagination of the decision makers (maybe someone at a lower pay grade had a more expansive imagination) eclipsed them from a view that would have resonated with their customer base.
At the end of the day, the reality of the customer and that of the company’s executives, differed.
The Breakthrough: Guiding Narrative®
Over the last two decades, the work conducted by The Good People Research Company has centered on a simple question:
Can we step into someone else’s imaginative world —not through empathy, but through reconstruction of the story their imagination tells them — and decipher reality as they do?
The answer is yes.
We call this inner story a Guiding Narrative® — the blueprint that tells each of us how to interpret experience, opportunity, threat, hope. The Guiding Narrative® is both the source of our values and an on-board survival manual, explaining to us how the world works and our role in the world.
We have found through ethnographic field research involving rapport building, open conversation, curiosity, active listening, observation, and reflection, we can allow that internal narrative to surface naturally. We can then validate it along with the person who lives it, and map their meaning system. We then segment the audience based on the dominant themes that characterize their Guiding Narratives® in relation to what our clients are trying to accomplish.
This validation process is amazing; it’s often the first time individuals and groups come to realize the particular Guiding Narrative® that drives much of their values and behavior.
When we do this, something remarkable happens:
People feel seen.
Our clients feel clarity.
And connection becomes possible — not as approximation, but as alignment of lived meaning.
This isn’t a set up for persuasion. It’s translation between worlds that illustrates a clear path for providing value and building lasting, mutually supportive, relationships.
The people relationship skill you can have
Imagine designing products, workplaces, cities, healthcare, and institutions . . .
Not based on assumptions about demographics, psychographics, or behavior, but based on how people actually make meaning.
Imagine leaders who don’t try to categorize people based on a convenient framework, but instead understand the narrative they live in and meet them inside it.
That’s not soft.
That is strategic.
It’s how trust is built.
And it is how community trust and validation scales — from individuals to organizations, to society.
Parting thoughts
The red light is not just a red light.
A brand is not just a brand.
A person is not just a person.
A preference is not just a preference.
Each one is an experience, lived through imagination. And it is imagination that makes something mean what it means.
We don’t share one reality.
We co-build one, constantly.
Beware that “facts” are notions we individually define and decide to agree or not agree on. (Often there’s good reason to agree.)
When we recognize that, we begin building connection and mutual respect.
Not by asking others to think like us — but by learning to see as they see.
That is how we build understanding.
That is how we learn how to create value for others and ourselves.
And that is how we build businesses, relationships, community and a future that works — not for one imagined world, but for all of them, individually and collectively.
Think of everything you accept and reject as reality in your life, and consider where that comes from. How do you make your inferences? Why don’t we all accept, project, and reject the same things?
We differ in the contours of our imagination and, in turn, in the Guiding Narrative® that defines our values and directs our behavior.
We live in a world produced and negotiated by Guiding Narratives®.
Postscript
The idea that our imagination is what we use to experience reality is not something I made up.
Philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and all manner of thinkers over at least the past 2400 years have evolved the idea that our sense of reality is indeed a product of our imagination, or at least what our imagination allows us to believe.
For those interested in learning more, I’ve provided a lineage of how this idea has evolved over the past 2400 years, with links to works associated with respective thinkers.
