Organisational Gravity

Organisational gravity is the structural force that pulls every decision and commercial message away from buyer truth and toward internal consensus. It operates on every piece of content, in every organisation, at every approval stage. It does not distinguish between good teams and bad ones. It acts on everything.

It is the central concept of The Buyer in the Loop by Matt Wilkinson, Founder and CEO of Strivenn.

How it works

A marketer researches the buyer well. Interviews, coded transcripts, a brief written in the buyer's own language. Then the approval process takes hold. Legal softens the claim. The product team adds a feature that was not in the brief. A senior leader wants the company's heritage in the headline. Each edit is individually reasonable. Each person is managing something real: risk, accuracy, brand consistency.

The message that reaches the market reflects the organisation's priorities more faithfully than the buyer's reality. No single decision caused it. The cumulative pull did.

Three mechanisms drive it

Organisational gravity is not mysterious. It is the predictable output of three well-documented behaviours, none of which were discovered in a marketing department.

Imagining a buyer feels like knowing one. Eyal, Steffel and Epley ran twenty-five experiments testing whether instructing someone to take another person's perspective improves accuracy about that person's mind. It did not. Perspective taking reduced accuracy overall while occasionally increasing confidence.

Groups converge on what everyone already holds. Stasser and Titus demonstrated in 1985 that decision-making groups spend most of their discussion on information all members share, and systematically underweight information held by only one person. The finding has survived twenty-five years of replication. In a launch review, the shared information is the internal narrative and the unshared information sits with whoever ran the customer interviews.

Bad buyer news travels slowly upward. Research on the MUM effect has documented a reliable reluctance to transmit bad news, sharpening when the recipient holds more power. The buyer information most likely to change a message is bad news by definition, so it is the least likely to reach the person who can approve a change.

Why it is hard to see

Organisational gravity does its damage quietly, and the symptoms are usually blamed on other causes. Deal cycles that slow without obvious reason. Campaigns that generate engagement but do not move pipeline. Sales feedback that buyers "just don't get it". At root that is a message-alignment problem almost every time. Each symptom is treated in isolation. Few teams connect them to a common force.

Why the obvious fixes fail

More research does not fix it, because the problem is not a lack of buyer understanding. More stakeholders make it worse, because each one adds their own internal language and their own distance from the buyer. Better copywriting narrows the starting gap, then the same approval process closes it again. Scaling content with AI speeds the drift up. A process already built to remove the buyer simply removes the buyer faster.

Teams produce buyer understanding well. The gap opens in sustaining it through the process that follows.

The structural fix

Organisational gravity is structural, so the response has to be structural too. Individual effort cannot overcome it, because it acts on every team regardless of talent or intent.

The countermeasure Matt Wilkinson proposes is the grounded synthetic customer: an AI representation of a buyer, built from a company's own interviews, sales calls, and primary evidence, that stays present at every stage of the commercial process and pushes back in the language real buyers use. It is set out in full in The Buyer in the Loop.

Where the term comes from

Matt Wilkinson uses organisational gravity to describe the pull of commercial messaging away from buyer truth, and develops it in full in The Buyer in the Loop. The metaphor has an earlier lineage. Mike Cohn was using organisational gravity, paired with escape velocity, in 2009 to describe how organisations get pulled back to their prior state after adopting a new way of working. Tony Kubica and Sara LaForest published a book titled Organizational Gravity in 2012, using gravity in the opposite sense, as the attractive force that draws talent and customers toward a business.

Wilkinson's application is narrower than either. The object being pulled is the commercial message. The reference point it is pulled away from is the buyer.

Read the full treatment

The Buyer in the Loop develops organisational gravity in full, alongside the synthetic customer method, the failure modes, and a first move for every commercial role. Buy The Buyer in the Loop on strivenn.com.