For Deeper Insight, Think Like a Casting Director
Photo by adrian cadena on Unsplash
We should think more like casting directors, and less like researchers.
It’s one of those sentences that performs well on Linkedin, but what does it actually mean?
There’s a very real tension in commercial research between the need to follow a predictable, time-boxed process, and the desire to explore the world in a way that leaves room for emergence. You can only fit so much fieldwork into any given time period and research budget. Having strong hypotheses at the outset is the most common way of managing this tension. It gives your work direction. An action-oriented middle ground between ‘hope and a prayer’ exploration and a rigid structure that misses the forest for the trees.
But it still doesn’t leave much room for the unexpected. And if you’re doing exploratory research, there’s a good chance the hypothetico-deductive method we all learned from Bill Nye the Science Guy is the wrong framework to be operating from.
Social systems are complex systems. They have properties and behaviors that their parts don’t have on their own - things that only emerge when people, environments, histories, and institutions interact. A city’s identity, for instance, doesn’t come from any one neighbourhood or resident. It emerges from the interplay between policies, subcultures, migration patterns, power dynamics, and a million small choices made every day.
So when you’re exploring messy topics—like youth and their finances, what it looks like to date in 2025, or how identity is shifting in the American heartland—your hypotheses and sampling frame can easily push you toward confirming what you’ve already deemed important. That’s the trap of hypothesis-led research in exploratory work. It directs your attention to what you already think matters. You end up confirming what’s already visible, and not uncovering the undercurrents and systemic leverage points that help you understand what’s happening, or how to influence change.
Casting Directors & Grounded Theory
Casting directors are a useful analogy because they’re engaged in the same kind of inductive reasoning that researchers are. They get a vision from a director, many of whom are "I'll know it when I see it” type people. Then they assemble a cast, based on their experience and instincts, that can help bring that vision into focus.
It looks a lot like grounded theory: a qualitative methodology where you don’t start with a hypothesis. You build theory directly from the data - through iteration, comparison, and pattern recognition. It’s what really skilled researchers are likely doing when they say they don’t need, or like to use, a discussion guide. What they mean is: They’ve got a high-level question, and they’re listening for the story that emerges - building a theory and evolving their inquiry as they go.
Thinking like a Casting Director
It starts with who you recruit and how you design your study. Instead of sampling to represent a population, you sample to illuminate tensions, contradictions, and dimensions of the problem. And you leave space to expand your frame as new ones emerge.
The simplest way to do this is a “cast of characters” model: intentionally selecting participants who embody different relationships to the topic.
Take youth and their finances, for example. There’s a lot happening all at at once there:
Gen Z are reportedly investing more than previous generations
For some, it mirrors traditional approaches; for others, it’s pure “casino economy”
They’re poised to inherit record-breaking generational wealth
And yet many feel locked out of the financial system
Others are anti-work, anti-capitalist, and want to rewrite the rules entirely
Thinking like a casting director means resisting the urge to chase a representative sample, and instead assembling a cast that holds the contradictions of the culture you’re trying to understand.
In the case of Gen Z finances, that might include:
A crypto day-trader who treats finance like sport
A trust fund kid trying to downplay their wealth
A minimum-wage worker teaching frugality on TikTok
A financial nihilist reluctantly playing the game
A FIRE devotee aiming to retire by 35, tracking every cent
I’m dramatizing a bit. But each of these people reveals a different truth about how money is felt, used, and rejected by youth. The casting director approach resists the temptation to average them out. It puts them in the same frame and sees what themes emerge. What stories repeat? What tensions appear? Where does the system start to show its seams?
We all know that research is just a means to an end. It's not about creating a perfect representation of the world.
You don’t need representative research to make smart, strategic decisions. You just need the right inputs to see the system more clearly, and to act with conviction.