The Trajectory Effect
"Participants improving from 60 to 70 reported higher satisfaction than participants sitting statically at 75."
Good morning. Let’s start this Tuesday together. Because, as always, “It is perfectly possible to be both rational and wrong.”
Most organizations measure experience as a score, which compresses a sequence into a single number. That number cannot capture the direction in which the experience moved, and the direction turns out to matter more than where it arrived.
A hotel renovates its lobby first, because that is what photographs well on booking platforms. A guest walks through the redesigned atrium, opens the door to a room unchanged since 2009, and writes a worse review than the hotel would have received before the renovation, because the experience arrived as a descending sequence, and the entire stay was graded against the fall. The same rooms, the same beds, the same breakfast. A different trajectory, and therefore a different reality.
How Does It Work?
In 1991, Christopher Hsee and Robert Abelson showed that participants improving from 60 to 70 reported higher satisfaction than participants sitting statically at 75. The dopamine system does not measure absolute value; it registers prediction error, the gap between what was expected and what arrived. A continuous improvement generates a continuous series of small positive surprises. A stable high value generates none, because it keeps confirming what the brain already predicted, and prediction confirmed produces no signal at all.
Why This Is Important?
Most customer experience investment is optimized for the average. NPS, CSAT, and satisfaction scores compress a sequence into a single number and then manage the number. Churn rarely comes from one bad moment; it comes from a slow recognition that the direction reversed, a recognition that formed over months before it became a cancellation. Managing average scores treats the symptom. Managing trajectory addresses the cause.
And Now?
A CBO audits the sequence before the score. In subscription products, that means staging feature discovery rather than granting full access at signup, so each period of use produces a small positive surprise. In consulting engagements, it means placing deliberate insight moments in the middle phases, so the enthusiasm of the sales process gets exceeded somewhere during the work, not just remembered. The goal is not to lower the beginning. It is to design a sequence in which the end is reliably better than the start.
Core knowledge: An ascending sequence from a lower starting point can produce higher satisfaction than a static high value, because the brain is calibrated to reward directional change, not absolute position.
Map the emotional direction of your customer journey, not just the individual touchpoints
If your highest investment sits at the beginning of an experience, the trajectory runs downward from there
In subscription products, stage feature discovery rather than granting full access at onboarding
Ask whether the final stage of any multi-step experience is better than the first, not just whether both are adequate
Replace average satisfaction tracking with trend tracking: whether the score is moving up or down is more predictive than where it sits
Where are management decisions made every day that are still based on people acting logically? Where can you be a Chief Behavioral Officer yourself this week?
See you next Tuesday.
If you would like to send us any tips or feedback, please email us at redaktion@cbo.news. Thank you very much.