The problem is not that user journeys are messy; it is that our tools are too simple. We have been designing for lines when people live in (messy/overlapping) spirals. To understand that, we need to bring time, complexity, and new methods, including AI, into the heart of strategy.
When I first entered the digital industry, a colleague told me,
“The internet is like architecture, you have to think three-dimensionally.”
It sounded like wisdom. I love architecture, so headfirst I dove into a new emerging field.
We were not just designing static screens; we were shaping experiences, flows, and interactions. I carried that advice with me for years, convinced that “thinking in 3D” was what separated surface-level strategy from the work that actually understood people.
However, over time, I came to realise something uncomfortable.
Most of us, myself included, were not thinking three-dimensionally at all.
We were thinking in straight lines. As in architecture, curves add cost.
The Comfort of Straight Lines
Linear models have been the foundation of digital strategy for decades. We trace neat arcs across whiteboards: awareness leads to consideration, consideration to conversion, conversion to loyalty.
It is a seductive idea. Linearity gives us the illusion of clarity. We can map, schedule, and measure it. We can create personas that act exactly as intended, frozen in time like carefully designed characters. It makes an unpredictable world seem manageable.
However, strategy is only as good as the reality it reflects — and people do not live on rails.
In my own work, I run campaigns and observe everyday digital behaviour through an anthropological lens. Those clean, linear journeys have never held up. People drop in and out. They take detours. They change their minds. They come back years later. They are shaped by things far beyond the neat borders of a funnel.
The line has always been a comforting fiction.
Why Spirals Make More Sense
If journeys are not lines, what are they?
For me, the image that best captures it is the spiral.
A spiral has structure, but it allows for movement: loops, returns, pauses, accelerations. It makes room for people to revisit a touchpoint, not as they were before, but as they have become since. It acknowledges that engagement is not static; it happens across time.
Think of how someone’s digital engagement shifts after a life event, a change in work rhythm, or even an algorithm tweak. A commuter checking their phone between stations does not inhabit the same temporality as an influencer tied to posting windows or a night-shift nurse seeking connection after midnight.
A spiral holds these realities. A line erases them.
Time: The Missing Dimension
For too long, we have treated time as a scheduling tool. It sits at the margins of our strategies, such as campaign calendars, drip sequences, and remarketing windows. We talk about timing, but not about time itself as something that shapes human behaviour.
Time is not a variable to be managed. It is the frame inside which everything happens.
The rhythms of work, care, fatigue, place, and platform structure, when and how people can engage. No campaign calendar can smooth those rhythms into a single, universal timeline. However, that is precisely what linear models try to do.
They fail because they are not built to hold what is real.
Anthropology Helped Me See It
My newly found experience in anthropology taught me to pay attention to how lives unfold across time and space. I recently discovered the literary concept of chronotopes. Chronotope is not a buzzword; it is a neat way of seeing how temporal and spatial rhythms shape meaning.
When I began applying this lens to digital strategy, things shifted. Engagement stopped looking like a funnel and started looking like an ecosystem of overlapping temporalities.
An influencer, a factory worker, a parent, and a wildlife carer may all use the same platform, but they live in different temporal worlds. Their experiences cannot be reduced to the same line.
A spiral recognises that complexity. It says: people do not simply arrive, convert, and leave. They loop. They return. They reconfigure. Moreover, they carry their temporal worlds with them.
Rethinking Strategy Through Spirals
Embracing spirals means letting go of the illusion of control that lines provide. It demands various types of strategic work. It means:
- Recognising that personas must evolve as people’s lives and contexts change.
- Journey maps must account for loops and pauses, not just forward movement.
- Measuring patterns over time, not just single conversion points.
Moreover, most importantly, it means building adaptive systems — strategies capable of responding to shifting temporal realities rather than forcing people into our schedules.
This is not a minor adjustment. It is a structural rethinking of how digital engagement works.
Towards More Complex Methods — And Why AI Might Help
Acknowledging spirals is only the first step. If we want to work with them, not just talk about them, we need better tools.
Traditional strategy methods struggle with complexity. They are built to map flows, not temporal worlds. However, we now have technologies that can help us model fluidity, variation, and recursion: systems that can learn, adapt, and respond to change in real time.
This is where AI could be beneficial, not as a shiny add-on, but as a way to build models that can work with non-linear, intersectional, temporal complexity. AI can detect and respond to emergent patterns humans might miss. It can reveal rhythms and loops that are invisible to the static journey map.
However, this cannot just be technical. Anthropology still matters because AI without critical, contextual insight automates the same flawed linear assumptions.
We need methods that combine human interpretive depth with machine capacity for pattern detection. Not to predict people perfectly, but to understand their temporal worlds better. Add a little Chaos Theory to our planning and goals.
Spirals Are Harder, Yet More Honest
Spirals do not give us the clean satisfaction of a straight line. They are complex, adaptive, and recursive. They require us to design strategies that consider time constraints rather than simply scheduling them.
However, spirals are honest. They reflect how people actually live, engage, and change.
If we are serious about understanding users, not as fixed personas but as beings moving through layered temporalities, then we need new conceptual frameworks and new tools to match.
Anthropology gives us the lens.
AI may give us the means.
The challenge (and opportunity) is to build a strategy that reflects life as it is, not as a line on a whiteboard.
