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The Linear Trap

Why most of your engagement spending buys nothing — and four moves that actually do

There’s a quiet assumption underneath most of what we do operationally. Improve on-boarding by ten percent, get ten percent more retention. Reduce checkout friction a notch, lift conversion a notch. Run a slightly better one-on-one, get slightly more engagement. Effort and outcome scale together. That’s the linear trap. And the data says it’s wrong.

The hockey stick

In the May–June 2026 Harvard Business Review, Marcus Buckingham — the StrengthsFinder co-creator — published “What Companies Can Learn from Their Biggest Fans.” His central claim, supported by Gallup’s HumanSigma analysis of 1.8 million employees and tens of millions of customers, is that the relationship between experience and outcome is not linear. It’s a hockey stick. Below a critical threshold, incremental improvements produce minimal change in behavior. Above it, the curve bends sharply upward.

Someone who rates an experience a five out of five is not a little more satisfied than a four. They are categorically different, and they behave differently. The Net Promoter Score, which uses a 0–10 scale and collapses nines and tens into a single “promoter” bucket, makes this distinction invisible by design..

The dead zone

Translate the curve to a $5M business with twenty-five employees and a few thousand customers. Most of what we do operationally — engagement surveys, manager training, customer success motions designed to keep accounts from churning — is engineered to lift people from a three to a four. Buckingham’s data says that work lands in the dead zone of the curve. We are spending real money to produce compliance, not loyalty.

The inversion: most founders study who leaves. Win-loss analyses. Detractor calls. Exit interviews. The work with actual leverage is the opposite — study who stays, who advocates, who turns down a recruiter to keep working with us. At our scale, that’s twenty to two hundred customers and a handful of key employees. Too few for statistics. Plenty for systematic interviews.

Three conditions

What produces a 5-out-of-5 experience — one above the curve’s threshold? Buckingham identifies five conditions. I think five is too many, and collapse them to three feelings a customer or employee walks away with.

Recognition. “They know me.” The customer or employee feels seen as a specific individual — by name, by story, by what they’re actually trying to do. Not as a segment. Not as a ticket. Founders are still on customer calls. Engineers know which customer uses which feature. Managers remember which project lit each report up. The instinct to “professionalize” past this stage is usually a downgrade disguised as a process upgrade.

Support. “I’m in good hands.” The customer or employee senses that someone is actually on their side in this specific situation — not theoretically available, not “open a ticket.” Present. Engaged. Accountable. This is the condition that compounds: every time we deliver on it, the willingness to trust us with the next thing grows.

Growth. “I’m better off.” The customer or employee leaves more capable than they arrived. They learned something. They got unstuck. They got better at their job.

Sequence, not moment

One more Buckingham point worth taking: these experiences are sequences, not moments. Kroger didn’t generate its customer-love spike with one initiative. It did groceries-to-the-car, cleaning ambassadors, new uniforms, new training — a sequence customers assembled into one experience over time. Stop hunting for the one heroic moment. Design the sequence.

Four moves for Monday

1. Audit the spend. List every engagement, loyalty, and customer-experience initiative currently funded. Mark which are designed to lift threes to fours (most of them) versus which are designed to create fives. The first category is the dead zone. The second is where the curve bends.

2. Interview the top 10%. Identify the ten to twenty customers and three to five employees who would honestly rate the relationship a five. Ask each one, in their own words, to describe a moment they could put their armor down with us. Don’t survey. Talk.

3. Name the pattern. What shows up repeatedly in those interviews will map to one of the three conditions. That’s the mechanism you engineered without knowing it. Name it explicitly so the team can repeat it.

4. Design the next sequence. Build the next ten customers’ (or employees’) experience to include that mechanism by design, across three to five touch-points. Not one heroic moment. A sequence.

The hard part is funding it. The honest answer is that most of the engagement and loyalty work currently in play has to go. Four-to-five work is not additive to three-to-four work. It’s a different category, with a different return profile.

Here’s My Take

The linear trap is comfortable because it means everything we’re doing matters at least a little. The harder truth is that most of it doesn’t matter at all, and a small concentrated set of moves matters more than we think. The leaders who figure this out first will look, to everyone else, like they got lucky with their customer love. They didn’t. They engineered it.