Experience Maths: The New Language for Human Understanding
Traditional metrics often miss the profound "why" behind customer and colleague behaviour. Experience Maths provides a revolutionary framework to quantify subjective emotional intensity and its impact, finally making human experience truly measurable.
At a Glance: Experience Maths is the universal scoring structure turning subjective views into objective metrics. It's a way of building a picture of any "thing"—be it an experience, a culture, a mood, or a complex situation—by connecting its underlying "strands" and "waves" to measurable insights that you can put straight into Excel. It helps uncover the rough pattern of "why" in a way systems can understand.
The Complexity Paradox: Beyond Words to Understanding Intensity
The human mind is complex. When asked to explain *why* they feel a certain way, individuals often struggle to articulate nuanced emotions, leading to simplified or biased responses. This is the **Complexity Paradox**: organisations, armed with advanced tools, often miss the basic emotional states a child instinctively grasps. We try to force subjective, dynamic feelings into static, simplistic categories.
But here's the insight: it's more important to measure the **intensity** of a feeling than its precise name. "Frustrated," "angry," "disappointed" – these words are subjective. Yet, the *degree* of that feeling ("a little," "a lot," "out of control") is universally recognisable and, crucially, actionable. Our memories are often tied to intensity and importance, not exhaustive detail.
Experience Maths: The Descriptive Hole Filler Metric
E-Maths is a way of saying that there is a thing and it's important and it is going to cost or save or make a certain amount of money or make everyone hate us...a way to note the importance of things in calculations. It is a way of expressing unknowns in business cases and other models. You can reduce any complex model to a single line item in a spreadsheet or connect to live systems.
Experience Maths offers a "new math language" that allows for the creation of a widget, description of "softer," non-linear elements such as emotions, behaviours, and cultural shifts with mathematical values like "a little," "a lot," or "out of control." This recognises the profound truth that human qualities matter in everything, providing a powerful way to monitor and report on change (e.g., "Less angry people but more really angry people," allowing for targeted interventions).
At its core, Experience Maths is a way of building a picture of any "thing"—be it a customer's specific journey, the mood of an entire team, a prevailing company culture, or the dynamics of a market. It bridges the gap between the physical sciences and human experience: connecting quantifiable elements, much like "physical science molecules," with "molecules of experience" that are dynamic and multi-layered.
Every "thing" is made up of multiple strands or elements—distinct events, specific feelings, subtle interactions, and contextual factors. The simplicity of Experience Maths is that we don't try to name or weigh every single strand. Instead, we focus on identifying and scoring the most important and influential ones within each unique "thing." This means that seemingly disparate events, like a late delivery for a parent of small children, can be recognised as having the same profound financial and human importance as a significant currency rate change, if both generate similar levels of 'out of control' tension in the 'Self' (the customer's or stakeholder's core values). The methodology is about the fact that anything is made up of multiple strands of differing importance at different moments.
This "quantum metric" is precisely the scoring structure at the heart of Experience Maths. It posits that in any "thing"—be it an individual experience, a cultural dynamic, a societal shift or my relationship with this cheese sandwich — there are countless strands (the individual elements or "nails" on the board), which, through their interactions, form waves (the emergent, observable patterns of emotional response and behavioural impact). Just as one can measure a wave's amplitude and velocity without counting its individual water molecules, Experience Maths focuses on quantifying these emergent properties. The resulting data provides a rough description of "why" in a pattern a system can easily understand, moving beyond verbose explanations to actionable insights.
The "quantum metric" measures the degree of stretch in the "rubber band" – the manifest impact on the "Self." This captures how profoundly the experience is affecting the individual's or collective's Core Values (Trust, Morality, Intent, Relational Strength), which are themselves powerful strands. A high degree of tension (intense emotional response) signifies a significant impact on the "Self's" configuration around its "nails." Crucially, in any given "thing" or experience, some elements (the "strands") will be more influential or active than others, creating specific tensions that manifest as clear, measurable "waves" of impact.
These strands, waves, and particles (the fundamental units and their collective manifestations) represent the very structure of understanding experience. In essence, most things have human elements, and these should be named and weighed according to their impact on the 'Self', allowing you to quantify these insights and put them straight into Excel.
Understanding Intensity and Outcome:
Experience Maths guides us to assess the intensity of an experience and its outcome on the "Self," using clear, actionable questions:
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⚪ "Did the 'Self' even notice this interaction/event?" (Low Intensity – minimal stretch of the rubber band)
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🔵 "Did the 'Self' care about it?" (Medium Intensity – it registered, causing some stretch)
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🟢 "Did the 'Self' do something as a result?" (Higher Intensity – action taken, a significant stretch or release)
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🟡 "Did it change an hour, a day, a week, or their life?" (Impact/Outcome Intensity - from fleeting to transformative impact on the 'Self')
The Intensity-Impact Scale: Quantifying the stretch on the "Self's" rubber band.
Science Behind the "Quantum Metric": Quantifying Complexity
The principles behind Experience Maths—simplifying complexity, focusing on patterns and intensity, and dealing with obscured or non-linear data—are rooted in established scientific approaches used across diverse fields:
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Psychometrics: The science of measuring psychological attributes (like intelligence or happiness) that cannot be directly observed. Experience Maths infers internal states from observable manifestations.
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Emergent Properties: In complex systems, patterns like happiness or anger "emerge" from the interaction of many simpler elements. Experience Maths quantifies these emergent "waves."
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Complexity Science: Focuses on understanding how large numbers of simple entities (the "strands") self-organise into complex systems with emergent behaviours. It embraces that the exact prediction of every micro-state is impossible, but macro-level patterns are measurable.
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Neurophenomenology: Integrates subjective, first-person accounts of experience with objective neural (and behavioural) measures, seeking rigorous ways to quantify and correlate internal states.
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Meteorology & Climate Science: These fields quantify chaotic, non-linear systems using simplified intensity descriptions (e.g., "light rain" vs. "severe storm") and focus on patterns and change, not predicting every molecule.
Experience Maths empowers you to truly understand the dynamic impact on the "Self," moving beyond superficial metrics to a profound and actionable level of human insight.