People. Behaviour. And what's really going on underneath.

The longer we spend inside businesses and categories, the more things quietly become facts. We know our customer. We know what they want. We know why they choose us. We know how our category works.

Until something changes.

This talk is about what happens when we get too close to see what's actually going on, why understanding people requires more than data points and personas, and what businesses can find when they start questioning the things everyone else has stopped questioning.

Drawing on my work with brands and businesses, alongside original research from The Underneath, I explore the gap between knowing people and actually understanding them, the danger of simplifying messy humans into neat answers, and why some of the biggest opportunities are hiding inside assumptions nobody realised they were making.

As businesses grow, they get better at knowing things. They build processes, gather data, hire experts and develop very good reasons for why things are done the way they are.

The problem is that knowing can slowly replace questioning.

Start-ups don't have that luxury. They have to stay close to people, test things, change their minds, notice what isn't working and keep asking questions they don't know the answer to yet.

This isn't a talk about beanbags, disruption or telling established businesses to behave like a bunch of twenty-somethings in a garage. It's about the behaviours worth protecting as businesses grow: curiosity, proximity, experimentation, intelligent naivety and the willingness to admit that what got you here might not get you where you want to go next.