Contextual Intelligence

Ironically (or maybe not), these are also the challenges of building anything that matters — and of living a courageous life.

Below is an overview of the design, methodology, sampling, and synthesis processes that I use in my research. Before I jump in, I want to acknowledge Rob Fitzpatrick for The Mom Test, which fundamentally changed the way I conduct interviews. His central insight — that people will lie to you about what they want, not out of malice but out of politeness, and that it is your job to design conversations where the truth can survive — literally changed the way I see the world. And to my uncle, who showed up with a dumbbell set when everyone else was showing up with advice: you taught me that the smallest intervention, delivered at the right moment, can save a life.

As someone building products for human wellbeing, the clean lines of feature specs and user stories appealed to me, but I fell in love with the richness and depth of qualitative research. Storytelling is my DNA, and I couldn’t resist the idea of research as storycatching. Stories are data with a soul, and no methodology honors that more than sitting across from someone and asking them to tell you what their life actually looks like — not what they think you want to hear. The mandate of my approach is to develop products based on people’s lived experiences rather than proving or disproving existing assumptions.

In qualitative research grounded in real behavior, we don’t start with a solution or a feature set or a competitive analysis. We start with a topic. We let the participants define the problem or their main concern about the topic, we develop a theory, and then we see how and where it fits in the landscape.

I didn’t sign on to study the space between intention and action — one of the most (if not the most) complex and elusive gaps in human behavior. A gap that not only took me years to understand, but a phenomenon so universal that the mere mention of it triggers recognition and discomfort in almost everyone. I innocently started with an interest in keeping college students alive.

After my uncle died by suicide — the one person who had shown up for me when my identity as an athlete shattered — I was sure of one thing: small, timely interventions are why some people make it and others don’t. The power that a single well-timed nudge holds was confirmed when the main concern about support emerged not as a lack of resources, but as a fear of irrelevance — the fear that the help being offered wasn’t actually for them. That it was generic, institutional, and disconnected from who they actually were. I learned that we resolve this concern through personalization that makes people feel specifically seen, through tone that feels like a peer rather than an authority, and through timing that meets people in the gap between meaningful interactions — what I call the 6-day gap.

After developing a theory on what makes nudges land — and getting clear about the effect of generic, institutional wellness content on student disengagement — I wanted to dig deeper. I wanted to know more. The problem is that there’s only so much you can understand about behavior change by studying behavior change directly. I needed another approach to get under the experiences.

That’s when I had the idea to study what exists in the absence of support. Not the crisis moment, but the 144 hours between coaching sessions. Not the app feature, but the feeling of being understood. Not the nudge itself, but the silence that precedes it.

I know how people experience and respond to well-designed nudges, but what are people feeling, doing, and thinking when there’s nothing in that gap? When intention fades and momentum dies and the thing they committed to on Monday is unrecognizable by Thursday? How are some people navigating a culture engineered for distraction and still holding on to who they said they wanted to be?

Before I dove back into the data, I named this study “Journey.” I was looking for the women and men who were actively trying to live with intention despite the forces working against them. I wanted to know what they had in common. What were their main concerns, and what were the patterns and themes that defined their experience? I reported the findings from that work in our pilot at the University of New Haven.

But vulnerability — the willingness to act on something that matters without a guaranteed outcome — kept emerging as a core category. It was a critical component in both my study on nudge effectiveness and my study on what makes people actually follow through. I understood the relationships between vulnerability and the other emotions I’d been tracking, but after years of dropping deeper into this work, I wanted to know more about the context surrounding those moments — the thoughts, memories, and past conversations that shape how someone shows up in the present. The product that emerged from this investigation is Serein.