In a behavioral sense, a need is a desire that one is devoted to. Devotion in this sense is the willingness to discover and maintain mechanisms for satisfying the desire.

A devotion need not be voluntary. For example, your body needs to breath. If you decide to hold your breath until you die, your body uses the mechanism of passing out to begin breathing again. Your body is devoted to breathing.

Need and mechanism may not be known or understood. The body has an established mechanism for involuntary breathing, meaning that to a certain extent, higher brain functions are not necessary to successfully operate the lungs. In this case, the breather has no awareness of the need or the mechanism. More likely, unknown needs go unsatisfied. Less well engineered systems, such as corporations, often have needs they don't understand and therefore can't address.