In this edition of the Business Insights Series, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Louise Ward from 42courses, a platform that turns learning into a joyful, bite-sized experience. Louise brings a unique mix of marketing expertise, behavioural design insights, and a passion for understanding what makes people tick. She’s also a film buff who sees storytelling and human emotion as core to how we learn, connect, and even shop.
Our conversation was part curiosity, part nostalgia, and part future-thinking. We dug into the hidden psychology behind consumer decisions, the quirks of human behaviour that foil even the smartest designs, and the growing tension between digital acceleration and human inclusion. Louise’s sharp insights into package design, AI, and generational divides reveal how much modern life is shaped by things we barely notice.
She made me think harder about how business and technology can, and must, stay grounded in empathy. Here’s what we uncovered: from why people make the choices they do, to how technology often misses the point, to a future where creativity and circular economies might just be our salvation.
We Don’t Know Why We Do Things (But We Sure Have a Story)
Louise dropped an insight early in our chat that really stuck with me: humans don’t understand their own motivations as clearly as they think. We act quickly, often on impulse or ingrained patterns, and only afterwards do we build a story around our behavior to make it make sense. It’s why traditional market research can feel like astrology with pie charts, because it assumes that people know why they do what they do.
The reality is, we are creatures of habit, emotion, and subconscious influence. From the brand of toothpaste we buy to the job we accept or reject, our choices are filtered through layers of upbringing, social context, emotional state, and internalized values. Then we dress them up in logical explanations to feel in control.
It’s not just about groceries or gadgets. Louise illustrated this with a striking everyday example. Imagine someone growing up in a household where buying brand-name cookies was seen as extravagant. Now, even decades later, that person might skip the chocolate digestives for the cheaper, plain biscuits, without even realizing why. That’s the unseen psychology quietly steering the shopping cart.
The Harvard Business Review’s research on customer emotions reveals that companies connecting with customers’ emotions see substantial payoffs: a major bank’s credit card designed for emotional connection saw 70% increased use among Millennials and 40% new account growth. This emotional connection happens largely below conscious awareness, supporting your point about the gap between what people think motivates them and what actually drives their behaviour.
“You can’t ask somebody why they bought something… we create a story to explain our behavior.”
This isn’t limited to consumer habits. The same logic applies to hiring decisions, product usage, or even why someone subscribes to a newsletter or leaves a website after two seconds. We tell stories that make us feel coherent, even if they aren’t accurate. This quirk of human psychology isn’t a flaw but a part of what makes us uniquely adaptable. We create meaning through narrative, even when we don’t fully grasp our motivations. And it’s one that businesses need to understand if they want to genuinely connect with people.
For businesses, this is huge. Louise’s insights point to a deeper need for understanding unconscious behavior, not just listening to what customers say but observing what they do. That’s where the real gold lies for improving marketing, service design, and product positioning. It’s where behavioral data and human empathy must intersect.
Understanding that people are unreliable narrators of their own decisions might seem like a limitation. But for brands willing to dig deeper, it’s actually an opportunity to connect in more meaningful ways, through emotion, intuition, and behavioral cues that lie beneath the surface. And when companies do this well, they create a sense of alignment with their customers’ lives, building authentic, lasting relationships that go beyond transactions.
Great Design Doesn’t Matter If People Take the Shortcut
This section of our conversation brought a surprisingly rich insight: designing a journey doesn’t mean people will follow it. Louise brought up package design as her favorite example, a field she calls boring but endlessly fascinating. Why? Because it’s a microcosm of how human behavior consistently overrides corporate logic. You can design the perfect shelf layout, the most beautifully researched label, and yet, if the item ends up sideways on the shelf or outside of a shopper’s habitual line of sight, it may go unnoticed. What’s elegant in theory can break down entirely in practice.
“When you set up a route for somebody to walk down and then everybody takes the shortcut, they don’t go down the path. you know what mean?”
That line, half observation and half lament, sums up the paradox of modern design: we create with intent, but people move with instinct. Whether it’s the layout of a grocery store or the navigation of an app, users behave in ways that are hard to predict and even harder to control.
I shared an observation from digital product design: we assume our users will read the labels, click the big shiny button, follow the carefully laid path. But they don’t. Users often respond unpredictably: skipping steps, making assumptions, or inventing their own ways forward. They act more like real humans shaped by habit and instinct than like controlled subjects in a test environment.
“We make assumptions… but it’s always a great surprise to find that they don’t realize how to use it.”
This disconnect between what designers expect and how users actually behave is one of the most common points of failure in any experience, physical or digital. And it’s where a smart business agency can truly shine. Because the magic isn’t just in good design; it’s in adaptive design. Observing, iterating, and adjusting until the journey makes sense to the people taking it.
Louise’s insight reminds us that human behavior doesn’t always fit neatly into business logic. So next time your product isn’t performing like the prototype said it would, ask yourself: are your users walking the path, or have they beaten their own trail? And more importantly: what can you learn from the trail they chose?
Behind the Screen: A Digital World Without an Outside Equivalent
The digital world has gradually evolved into something more than a convenient extension of our lives, it’s now an immersive environment with its own tempo, logic, and emotional undertones. What was once a tool has become a terrain, subtly reshaping how we relate to time, space, and even each other. The convenience of the digital space is tempting. It removes friction, no weather delays, no transportation woes, no physical fatigue. But in doing so, it also strips away a lot of the tactile, human elements that define real-world experience, like eye contact, spontaneous conversation, or the physical energy of a room.
“There is an entire world behind this screen that does not really have an equivalence outside of the screen.”
What we’re witnessing now is a growing disconnect between the screen and the street, between what we simulate online and what we live offline. That divide has implications not just for how we work and shop, but for how we connect, learn, and find meaning. It’s changing how we understand relationships, attention spans, and even our own identities. The way we present ourselves online, curated, filtered, optimized, can feel vastly different from who we are in a room with others. And that psychological stretch is tiring. It’s no wonder that digital fatigue is real, even as we become more immersed in tech.
Louise’s role at 42courses, a digital learning platform, is right at this intersection. Her work underscores a central challenge: how can we build digital tools that respect human nature rather than override it? There’s a big opportunity here to use AI and behavioral design not to deepen the divide, but to humanize it, to create learning experiences that feel more like conversations and less like isolated clicks. Blending interactivity with empathy, structure with spontaneity, could be the key to ensuring that even in a screen-saturated world, we don’t lose touch with what makes us human.
Who’s Being Left Behind and What That Costs Us
There’s a quiet, persistent challenge facing our modern world: a widening sense of exclusion among those who can’t (or don’t want to) keep up with the breakneck pace of digital change. Louise shared how her own parents sometimes express this disconnect, a sentiment echoed by many in older generations. This feeling isn’t rooted in nostalgia but it stems from the need for relevance, a sense of belonging, and the ability to function in today’s rapidly evolving world without feeling left behind.
“They feel like they’re not part of the world, which is very sad.”
Consider how many everyday tasks have moved online: banking, booking appointments, even accessing a restaurant menu now demands digital literacy. What used to be intuitive, talking to a person, reading a sign, is now often hidden behind touchscreens, QR codes, or app downloads. For those unfamiliar with this shift, it’s not just inconvenient. It’s disorienting.
Even those who are technically proficient can feel the exhaustion. The constant learning curve, the updates, the redesigned interfaces, the endless notifications; it can wear anyone down. And in this rush toward the future, it’s easy to forget that not everyone has the same footing.
We laughed about smart devices offering to dim the lights or schedule meetings by voice command, but beneath that humor lies a deeper reality: “We’re living in the future… and yet so many people aren’t part of it.” It’s a future that’s unevenly distributed, by age, education, income, and geography.
What appears to be a technology issue often reflects deeper human challenges, emotional, social, and psychological dynamics that shape how we adapt to change. The growing technology gap speaks to something much larger than infrastructure. It raises fundamental questions about dignity, inclusion, and how we define participation in modern society.
This moment calls for leadership from those who understand behavior, leaders like Louise. It’s an opportunity to design with generosity, to include by default, and to ensure that technology serves people, not the other way around. When we build systems with empathy and accessibility in mind, we don’t just make things work better, we make more people feel like they belong.
Automation Is Coming. Are We Ready to Be More Human?
As AI and automation continue to transform the workplace, the fundamental structure of employment is also shifting beneath our feet. Jobs are undergoing a deeper transformation, shifting in purpose, structure, and expectations in ways that challenge our old frameworks. We’re seeing early signs that traditional nine-to-five employment models are giving way to more agile, decentralized, and often project-based systems. The very notion of a “career path” may need a rethink.
“We’re heading toward a future where employees may need to think more like entrepreneurs, and where circular economies become vital frameworks for sustainability and community-driven value.”
Rather than being a mere forecast, this was an invitation to reimagine our systems with resilience and adaptability at their core, systems where individuals don’t just participate, but actively shape outcomes as both contributors and creators. Louise’s view aligned completely: in a world driven by data and algorithms, it’s human ingenuity, creative, lateral, and emotional, that will stand out.
“New ideas, innovative and creative, surely have to become the things that are valued above all else.”
This implies a deeper investment in skills that no machine can replicate: empathy, narrative thinking, moral judgment, interdisciplinary synthesis. Louise has already started to explore this new frontier by leveraging AI tools for brainstorming and evaluation. But she’s doing it with intent, understanding that AI is a means to elevate human creativity, not to replace it.
Thriving in this shifting terrain will require new ecosystems, ones that support micro-entrepreneurs, encourage collaborative networks, and foster local resilience. Think of these as modern guilds or knowledge cooperatives, where knowledge, support, and opportunity are shared laterally rather than funneled top-down.
As we automate more of the predictable and scalable, it will be the uniquely human, unpredictable, and relational that gains value. Building toward this future means more than just staying afloat, it means crafting environments where work resonates with purpose, communities foster mutual support, and systems align with the way we truly live and contribute value.
Conclusion: We’re All Storytellers in a Rapidly Shifting World
Across our entire conversation, from the unconscious choices we make in a supermarket to the uncertain future of work, one theme kept resurfacing: understanding human behavior is essential if we want to design systems, products, or experiences that actually work. It’s not enough to build with logic. We must build with empathy.
Louise’s unique perspective, shaped by her experience in marketing, online learning, and her deep love of cinema, shows us that storytelling plays a critical role in helping people interpret their experiences and navigate uncertainty. Whether we’re decoding how customers respond to package design or imagining how our children will thrive in an AI-powered world, we’re all using stories to make sense of it.
These stories go beyond bedtime tales or Hollywood scripts. They serve as practical frameworks for how we act, learn, and respond to change. Louise’s ability to blend curiosity with analysis, emotion with insight, makes her a model for how businesses can engage with complexity without losing their human touch. Her way of looking at the world, from both the granular details of user behavior to the broad sweep of societal shifts, offers a roadmap for any business leader asking, “What do we do now?”
So, what’s next for your business?
About the Author
Vlad writes about automation, operations, and the little tweaks that make a big difference in how businesses run. A former game designer turned founder, he now helps teams fix broken workflows and spot the revenue leaks hiding in plain sight.
About Serenichron
Helping businesses grow by simplifying strategy, streamlining systems, and making tech actually work for people. We bring clarity to chaos with practical tools, honest guidance, and just enough curiosity to question the default way of doing things.