The shape of a signal: what its strength will not show

“Something just snapped.” “It came over me in waves.” Both descriptions can refer to the same hard period in someone’s life. The first draws a sharp jump. The second draws a smooth alternation of rise and fall. The content is almost identical, the shape is not, and it is the shape that tells you what you are really dealing with.

When I analyse how people describe their experience through metaphor, the first layer is the signal itself: its amplitude, its boundaries, its contrast with the background. This article is about the next layer. Once you know how loud a signal is, the question becomes how it moves through time.

That layer matters for anyone who listens to people for a living: a psychologist, a researcher, a salesperson, a founder reading customer interviews. And for a company that studies Russian buyers from another country, it carries a specific risk, which I will come to after the basics.

What shapes a signal can take

The shape of a signal is its dynamics: the pattern it draws as it changes over time. It is not a fixed quantity. Two signals of the same strength can move in completely different ways.

A sine shape moves smoothly. It builds up and fades away in waves, with a rhythm you can sense.

A triangle shape rises sharply, almost in a straight line, and falls just as sharply. The slopes are steep but they are still slopes: there is a short climb and a short descent.

A square shape has no slopes at all. It jumps from one state straight into another with no intermediate stage, like a light switch.

There is a second dimension on top of this. A signal can be single: one impulse, one event. Or it can be multiple: a repeating series of similar spikes.

None of this describes what is happening. It describes how it happens in time. That distinction is often more useful than the content itself, because two people with the same complaint and the same intensity can need entirely different responses depending on the shape.

What shape tells you when someone describes anxiety

Take three people describing their anxiety.

The first says: “It shakes me in waves, it lets go, then it comes back.” That is a sine shape. There is a regular alternation of rise and fall and a predictable rhythm.

The second says: “It’s as if someone switches me off and on.” That is a square shape. There is an abrupt transition from one state to another with no zone in between.

The third says: “It shoots up and cuts off just as suddenly.” That is closer to a triangle: steep sides, but not instantaneous ones.

Each shape asks for a different kind of work. With a sine shape you can work through the rhythm itself. You can anticipate the next peak, prepare for the descent, and use the regularity as something to lean on. With a square shape, rhythm is useless. There are no intermediate stages to hold on to, only two states and an instant jump between them. The work has to go to the switching mechanism itself, not to what happens “in between”, because nothing happens in between.

Shape also tells you whether you are looking at a single event or a recurring series. A one-off impulse, a sharp reaction to a specific event, calls for one strategy: get through it and let the signal fade on its own. A repeating shape, a series of similar spikes at roughly equal intervals, points to a stable pattern built into the person’s life rather than an isolated incident. Here the work is not about the individual episode. It is about the regularity with which such episodes appear.

Noticing shape in yourself and in others

The practical skill is simple to state: listen to what a person is going through, and also to the form in which it moves through time. The question “does it come in waves or cut off suddenly?” sounds unusual, but it gives you information that “what do you feel?” never will. The answer tells you whether to prepare for a predictable next round or to expect a sudden switch without warning.

The same applies to watching yourself. Noticing the shape of your own state, moving from “I feel bad” to “this comes in waves” or “this flips on abruptly, with no transition”, gives you something to act on. A wave-like state lets you plan: prepare in advance for the next dip, use the pauses between waves to recover. An abrupt, square switch demands something else. Preparing for the next round will not help much; what helps is work on the trigger that sets off the instant transition. Predicting the moment is harder here than with a smooth, rhythmic shape.

It is also worth telling a single spike from a repeating series in other people’s behaviour, especially in close relationships. One sharp outburst after an exceptionally hard day is a single shape, and treating it as a system would be a mistake. The same outburst repeating once a week, with roughly the same trigger, is a multiple shape. It calls for a different conversation: not “what happened today” but “what keeps happening every week”.

Why this matters more when you study Russian buyers from abroad

Everything above is about how people describe experience, and buyers are people. A customer describing their relationship with a supplier, a service or a brand reaches for the same metaphors they use for everything else. “Every time we renew the contract it starts again” is a repeating series. “One call and we were done with them” is a square switch. “It sort of wore us down over time” is a slow wave that never came back up. The strength of dissatisfaction in these three sentences may be the same. The fix is not.

Here is the part that is specific to Russia. Much of the shape in Russian speech is carried by grammar rather than by vocabulary. Russian verbs come in aspect pairs. The perfective form usually describes a single completed event: накатило, it came over me once. The imperfective form often describes a process or a repeated action: накатывало, it kept coming over me. Prefixes do more work on top of that. A Russian speaker can move a story from a single impulse to a series by changing a few letters, and they will not stop to explain it, because to them the difference is obvious.

English expresses the same distinction with extra words, “kept”, “used to”, “every time”, or leaves it implied. When interviews are transcribed in Russian and pushed through machine translation for analysis in English, those extra words are not always added. The topic survives. The shape often does not. A research team in another country then reads a series as a one-off, or a one-off as a pattern, and draws conclusions about the wrong problem.

There is a second difference, and it is about the tools Western teams bring with them. Most standard customer research instruments measure strength: rating scales, satisfaction scores, likelihood to recommend. They tell you how much a customer is bothered. They say very little about how the irritation moves over time, whether it builds up, flips or repeats. That gap exists in any market. It grows when a team studies buyers in a language it does not speak: qualitative conversations become rare, and the numbers that can be read without a translator start to carry the whole picture.

What a foreign company selling into Russia should do

If you are studying Russian customers from outside the country, a few habits keep the shape of what they say intact.

1. Run interviews in Russian, with a native speaker who knows what to listen for. Interviewing in English narrows the circle to buyers who are comfortable in English and changes how they talk.
2. Keep the original wording for the passages that matter. Translate for overview, but code the key quotes from the Russian text. Look at the verb aspect and the prefixes before you decide whether something is a single event or a pattern.
3. Ask about time directly. Does it build up gradually or hit all at once? Has it happened once or does it keep coming back? Is there a pattern to when? These questions sound ordinary in Russian and give you the shape without any special method.
4. Separate single spikes from series in your findings. One furious complaint after a failed delivery and the same complaint every quarter at renewal belong to different work streams. Tag them differently.
5. Pair every strength score with a shape question. If your survey asks how satisfied someone is, add one open question about how that changed over time. It costs a line and saves you from fixing the wrong thing.

If you are planning research before or during entry, the same logic shapes the brief: what you need to learn first is usually how buyers’ doubts move over time, and only then how strong they are. That is the starting point I use in Russian market entry work, and the core of customer research for foreign clients.

Why shape and strength have to be read together

The strength of a signal, its amplitude, tells you how much something matters. The shape tells you what to expect next and how to handle it. Confuse the two and you start reacting to every sharp jump as if it were a smooth wave, or waiting for a familiar rhythm where in fact a switch is flipping without warning.

Before asking what to do with a signal, it helps to understand what pattern it draws in time. In a Russian interview, that pattern is often sitting in a single verb.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Что показывает форма сигнала, чего не покажет сила