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- [00:04]
A
Services are all about time well saved. Experiences are all about time well spent, and transformations are about time well invested. But within any type of engagement that you have with your customer, you may have elements where you're basically trying to save them time. You should have things where you actually get them to want to spend more time with you. And then there are on occasion, things where they feel like it was an investment in their future that they engaged with you. And that works in banking, it works in all different categories. You may be designing a physical thing, you may be designing something that is just a screen, but it's always about time.
- [00:53]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. Most organizations think about the design of work in terms of products or services, or maybe customer journeys. But Dave Norton has spent his career arguing that experience design goes much deeper. It's about shaping how people spend their time and in some cases, their lives. In the late 90s, Dave and Joe Pine pioneered many of the experience design practices while creating the experience of Royal Caribbean's private island. And since then, Dave has helped organizations design everything from healthcare to home buying to casual dining. And for our purposes, of course, work. Along the way, Dave has developed one of the most clear headed approaches I have ever encountered for thinking about how to design time that is well saved, well spent and well invested, and for making sure that the whole job the customer wants to get done is done. In our conversation, Dave and I talk about the evolution of experience design. He's been there since the very beginning, the rising demand for transformational experiences, and why the customer situation matters a lot more than psychology. We explore his framework of modes, what it means to design whole offerings, and how AI may finally make transformational design scalable. All right, be sure to follow Work for Humans wherever you listen to podcasts, so episodes like this one find their way to you. Now here's my conversation with Dave Norton. Dave Norton, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:39]
A
Thank you.
- [02:41]
B
This episode is a part of a series. I did a big series early on about the design of immersive experiences, but I just felt like I needed to open it up again and talk to more people who are involved in the world of experience design and especially as it touches upon work. Some of the stuff we did early on could be quite abstract, which was like ritual design or how to design walking into a restaurant as an experience, which I think are relevant. But I felt like I needed to reopen it because there's more to talk about. And you have been talking about experience design. In other words, you've been involved with it a very long time. You used the word experience design in an article in a conference paper in 2002.
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A
That's right.
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B
Now, Joe Pine published the experience economy in what, 98.
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A
Yep.
- [03:37]
B
So here you are two years later using that word, and strangely, using that word in relation to your degree in rhetoric. So let's start there. Let's start there. What was going on right then that you started looking into the concept?
- [03:56]
A
Well, like you said, My PhD is in rhetoric. And rhetoric is the study of what an audience expects from a discourse and what a speaker can do to persuade that particular audience. And I was very attracted to the idea of how context affects. So if you're in a particular forum, that context affects both the speaker and the listener. Right. And when I got access to Joe's work, I'd already decided at that point that I wasn't going to go academic. And I thought about what he was talking about and said, hey, experience is kind of the layman's term for context. It's the environment, it's the situation, it's the surroundings, it's the wrapping that goes on to so many different things. That's what got me interested and allowed me to kind of transition from thinking about discourse and contextual persuasion to experiences and how to design those experiences. It also helped that the first project that Joe and I did together was to design Royal Caribbean's private island, Cococay. So that helped me transition some of my tools and skills away from classical rhetoric to focus on design.
- [05:27]
B
That's fascinating. What did you find in that original work around how context affected how people receive content?
- [05:38]
A
Well, context matters hugely. In my mind at that time, there were two bodies of work and one was far larger than the other. There was the argument that you needed to study the mind, the brain, the personality, what was going on inside of the customer. And if you could understand what was going on, then you could target the customer. And that's what all of marketing was about. That's what most of selling was about. That's kind of what product design was about in some way, shape or form. And there was a smaller body of research that said, no, the context really matters. What you smell, what you see, how you do things will influence and persuade and bring up certain things that you really, really want the customer to do, and the customer will behave differently based on the situation that they find themselves in. There wasn't nearly as much literature on that, but that's what I was steeped in. And I still believe that that is the stronger, more Important influence in people's lives.
- [06:49]
B
Well, and there's a problem with the psychology approach. There's a couple of problems, it seems to me, and I want to see if you agree. One is that big psychological models, for instance, are not very good at predicting the detail of design. So there's no psychological model that's going to tell me that my car needs a cup holder in it, or much less that that cup holder needs diameter of between 3 and 4 inches, because that's an attribute of Starbucks, not an attribute of me. And it's invisible. But you're saying something that I don't completely. So there's a study of the mind. Then there's the study of, I'm going to say, the good that somebody is receiving, which is, how do we design the good or the service? Then there's the context. And the context, is it separate from the good of the service? When you say the context, are you just saying things outside of people's psychology, or are you saying the situation in which we receive the good of the service?
- [07:46]
A
So the transition that I was making historically in my life was taking what I had learned in rhetoric and applying it to what would become experience, design. And so context was that transition. Clearly, I still believe what Joe believed originally, which is that the experience is the product, it is the offering. And that the consumer expects something very different from an experience. The worker expects something very different from an experience. And while it's important to understand their psychology and maybe their personality when it comes to employee engagement and so forth, it is just as important to understand the environment. And you think about what's gone on with remote work in the last few years. It's all a great big, huge argument about the role of context. And some things I can actually do better remotely than I can do with a group of people around me. But other things I really have to do with a group of people around me. It's oftentimes misunderstood and not paid attention to by the product designers, by senior executives. They don't think about it in terms of, hey, this environment really matters.
- [09:12]
B
What was the project? What a great project, by the way. First of all, there's two great things about that project with Joe, your first project with Joe. One is, we're going to go improve a tropical island, and that's where we're going to do the work. The second thing is what a beautiful little sort of like an experimental organism, right? Which is there's no city surrounding it. You've got complete control over the context that people are going to Experience, maybe not weather. So what was that project and what did you learn doing it?
- [09:43]
A
Yeah, at the time, Royal Caribbean had bought CocoCay. They'd done a few small things with it, but it had been hit by. To talk about starting from scratch, it had been hit by a hurricane and so literally the plumbing didn't work anymore. So they were building it from the ground up. And the company that I was working with at the time was purely a design firm, more of a graphic design firm. And they'd done a lot of work for Royal Caribbean already. They brought me and I brought Joe in to work on thinking about what the customer wanted from this private island. I was steeped in design thinking what would become design thinking. So this is 99. At that time, they called it participatory action research, a lot of other things. I believed in observational research and wanted to do as much of that as I possibly could. So we flew in on a little prop plane to this little island and we'd go back and forth on this little prop plane and every day we would observe people coming to this island. Only a few people were allowed. Royal Caribbean couldn't bring in any of their larger ships, just really small ships at that time. And we talked to them and observed them. And the key insight that I got from that work was that if you call it a private island, what people want, obviously, is privacy. And so we made recommendations that included things like the type of cabanas that they would create, the way that they would situate the chairs, what part was the city part, and where along the island we could allow people to spread out and do things where it felt like they had just a little piece of that island to themselves. And it was a great opportunity for me to apply all of the tools. I was just a young kid back then myself, so was Joe. He was fairly young himself. And we audited the island. We used a lot of the principles from the experience economy, and a lot of the concepts are still included in the CocoCay experience today.
- [12:04]
B
This is a question I ask a lot about things like experience of design, which is, when you swing the hammer to make an experience better, what do you hit? And to some extent, one of the most natural things to say is, I hit architecture, I hit space design. And so it's physical, what else?
- [12:23]
A
That's a great question. That was a question that I would ask myself on a regular basis. Is it all about physical design? Our consultancy does very little today, actual physical design work. We mostly do digital, employee engagement, other types of things. I Think the hammer always hits when it comes to experience the time that the customer expends with the company. That's what it always hits. Now, you may be designing a physical thing, you may be designing something that is just a screen, but it's always about time. Joe and I worked on a framework early on, and this is in 2002, 2003, where I said to him, what is the basic element of experience? And I like to use the word strategy, experience strategy. And he thought it was a couple of things. And I said, I think it's time. I, I think it's how we design time. And then together over the years, we came up with this model where services are all about time well saved, experiences are all about time well spent, and transformations are about time well invested. But within any type of engagement that you have with your customer, you may have elements where you're basically trying to save them time. You should have things where you actually get them to want to spend more time with you. And then there are on occasion things where they feel like it was an investment in their future that they engaged with you. And that works in banking. It works in all different categories. So that's where I tend to focus.
- [14:11]
B
I'm just now reading the book Experience designed by Matt Duarden. His PhD is in leisure studies. Yeah. And I'm sort of like, come on. My degree was in literature, so I call that a degree in unemployment studies.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But what he said that I thought was really interesting. He said leisure is the gold standard of experience design because it's something that people actively participate in voluntarily. Not only do they actively participate in it, they often pay you for it. And so, and so I can totally understand that with leisure. I am buying time well spent.
- [14:52]
A
Well, sometimes you're buying time well invested.
- [14:55]
B
I'd like to know about that because my understanding of transformation offerings is that it's often invested in myself. In other words, I'm the thing that's changing through this transaction. So what's an example of, of a leisure based transformation?
- [15:13]
A
Oh, there's so many. There's actually a group called the Transformational Travel Council and all they do is go around and train companies on how to think about taking their experience based travel offering, where it's basically like an excursion of some sort or another, and turning it into something where the customer feels like they have become something new. I think Canyon Ranch really put this idea of transformational leisure experiences on the map. Not always do you get a full transformation, but a lot of people do walk away from those Types of all inclusive, holistic well being, types of offerings, feeling transformed. And I think that this is going to be something that's going to be impacted even more by artificial intelligence as companies are able to understand the very personal needs of the individual that go beyond just relaxing and are able to support them through the time that they spend with the company. So lots of opportunity for transformational type things. Whenever you go into a financial services organization, you have transformation in mind. I want to go from not having as much money to having more money. And they should be taking you down a path that will help you. Whether it's trying to help you save money or trying to help you invest money. They should be taking taking you down a path where you move from less affluent to more affluent, from poor to healthy. Those types of things are very much, I think, where we need to be headed.
- [17:07]
B
What is the role of comfort and discomfort in experience versus transformation? Because a lot of times you think, well, leisure, it's going to be comfy. But transformation, real transformation is not.
- [17:21]
A
Well, let's back it up even further. The role of comfort and discomfort in services is basically eliminate all of the discomfort and try to make it as convenient and as simple as you possibly can. That's what a service really is. With an experience, discomfort is an important element. The classic model of what an experience is all about is the Freytag diagram. I don't know if you're familiar with Gustav Freytag, the theater critic.
- [17:57]
B
I think I'm familiar with it, but I just read it for the first time in something Joe wrote. What is it?
- [18:02]
A
It's drama theory. And you think about the best movies that you like to go see. There are elements of discomfort as you make your way up to the climactic moment. And then there's catharsis on the other end. You don't want to take away every element of discomfort. When you're designing an experience. You actually get people to want to spend more time with you if they feel like there's a progression that they have to go through in order to be successful. Now, I wouldn't take it as far as what IKEA is doing. I think they make you walk around this incredibly long retail experience. There's certainly elements of discomfort in that. I don't think that that's exactly what we're talking about. But story and narrative and any element where there's a human factor you want designed in just a little bit of discomfort, that's what creates that climactic moment. When it comes to transformations, well, there's multiple Opportunities for discomfort along the way because you're actually changing yourself. Before this podcast, I was actually doing a voice lesson with my voice instructor. I like to take singing lessons, and this guy is a highly accomplished opera singer. I am not. I am just trying my hardest to learn from him, and it's uncomfortable. I spend a lot of time wondering whether or not I'll ever be able to do what it is that I'd really like to do with my voice. And that's what transformation is all about. So I think the amount of discomfort actually goes up as you move up the progression of economic value.
- [19:53]
B
This is actually something that I think a lot of people misunderstand about the experience of work, which is the way I've said the sentence, which I'm going to have to change, I think, is people don't want work to be leisure, right? They want work to be hard, but not impossible. They want to have a detectable result in what they do. There's a bunch of different things that people want from it, but it's not a comfy chair that people are looking for to a large extent. But when we invest in it, in the experience of work, we often act as though that is what people want, which is we're going to put in restaurants on the campus. And so let's talk about narrative structure, because it is one of the things, because experiences happen in time. This product, my cup right here, I experience it in time, but it's a static object. The design of it is static, but my experience of it happens in time. And so each step in the narration can be affected by the preceding one. So what's an example of a narrative arc of an experience that you've designed or researched that we can use as an example?
- [21:06]
A
Oh, man, there have been so many. I mean, I gave you the example of a private island. That's an easy example. The further you walk away from where you step off of the ship, the more you feel like you've found something that is really significant, a place where you can stake your claim. That's a great example. But you can do the same thing with just going to a Denny's restaurant. You walk in, there's kind of a protocol for how you're seated, what you're trying to accomplish, and so forth. You can do the same thing with technology. And I think some companies drive themselves crazy trying to track browser interactions because they're trying to figure out what the narrative structure is that the customer is expecting. I think there's two sides to narrative structure. First of all, there's what the company wants to do to create that climactic experience, to have the peak end value be the best that it possibly can for the customer. And then there's what the customer experiences in their life. Oftentimes when I'm watching football in the fall, I'm not watching under the most ideal circumstances, I may be literally on my phone while I'm doing something else in the yard. And so clearly that narrative structure is going to be different for me. Yeah, I'm still going to pay attention whenever my team scores, but I'm going to be distracted. There's going to be other things that are going on. I think one of the things that companies have struggled with is that they've tried to, through their journey mapping exercises, through the types of things that they do, they've tried to force the customer to always go down the same path because they're hoping for that peak experience. And what we're seeing from most consumers is, no, let me control that path. Let me control the way I receive the experience. Let me control my preferences. Don't just tell me what my preferences are. Let me do these things. Not necessarily because I'm never going to adjust them. Just the opposite, because I need to adjust them to the circumstances that I find myself in.
- [23:35]
B
I interviewed the director of Vitsu, which is a furniture maker that descended from Dieter Rams, the epic demigod of design. One of them, and one of their main techniques is modularity, which is that they only have a very small handful of products. And the lineup of products that they have hasn't changed since the 50s. But you can rearrange them. Even the couches can be disassembled and made longer or shorter. And so this idea of creating a design that can be assembled by the customer to craft around their own experience puts a lot more agency on the customer. On work for humans, we've been exploring the principles of multi sided management, which is the belief that work is a product that every company designs, builds and delivers to employees. Along the way, people started asking how they could put these ideas into practice. So I founded the work design firm Elevenfold to help your company create the kind of work that makes teams feel alive and engaged instead of dead and dull. So you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more@elevenfold.com that's 11fold.com.
- [25:03]
A
It does, it does. And I'm glad that you brought up modularity. I think this is one of the things that I've spent a lot of time studying because I do think that time is the basic element that we need to pay attention to. I think that most people today in their work lives and in their personal lives, approach their activities by getting into modes. And modes are actually a type of modularity that allows them to control their circumstances a little bit more, focus their mind in the proper way that they need to focus it, eliminate distractions, set up the experience the way that they want to. We talked earlier about the amount of discomfort that people often experience. You're probably familiar with Mihaly Shikamahalyi's work on flow. Flow is a mode that you get into so that you can handle that level of work challenge or that level of play challenge. It's just one mode. We get into all kinds of different modes. And I think one of the things that company leaders could do a better job of is trying to support their employees modes so that when they're in crisis mode, you've got a way of supporting them. When they're in productivity mode, you've got a way of supporting them as well. That would go a long way to making their experience a better experience.
- [26:41]
B
What are some of the modes that you might identify?
- [26:46]
A
Let's talk about the work situation for a second here. Because a team can be in a mode, right? A company can be in a mode. Yesterday, Cracker Barrel was in crisis mode. The world did not like their new logo, I guarantee you. The entire company was in crisis mode. So everyone was responding in a very, very different way. Now when they came up with that idea for their new logo, they were in strategy mode. Everybody was thinking strategically. They were trying to imagine what the future looks like. Teams do the same thing, Individuals do the same thing as well. And when you're in strategy mode, there are certain things that you want to be able to, to have access to. You need fast access to research. You need to be able to diagram. Strategy mode is much more successful when a small group is together. It's not as easy to do that in a remote type of setting. But then when you have to go and tease out what the new strategy is going to mean, some of that activity can actually be done more effectively. If people have a quiet space that they're comfortable in, that they know where they have access to their own refrigerator. And that's a different mode. So support it. Allow them to work remote.
- [28:14]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that a great design creates value for the customer and creates value for the designer, so achieves the objectives of the designer. And a lot of times when we talk about productivity we're talking about what the designer wants from the design of work as opposed to what the people at work want from the design of work. But the truth is, my experience is that people want productivity from the design of work, that this is something that is shared in common. So this just happens to be a case where this is a mutual thing that both the designer and the recipient of the design want in common.
- [28:52]
A
One of the advantages of having a team that's in the same mode is, is that they're aligned around intent and objective. And literally you can say, hey, we're going to switch modes. What a wonderful thing to be able to say. And then you've got alignment pretty effectively. You know, we used to, a long time ago, I don't know if anybody ever does it anymore, but we used to talk about the different hats that people wear. And literally we would do exercises, facilitated exercises, where we would bring in different hats for the purposes of playing different roles. But that idea of putting on a different hat is kind of a mode idea as well. So as a team, right now we're having our off site. So the hat that we're going to wear is baseball cap. Right. Because at an off site, we're in the same mode. And I think that it solves a lot of different problems, one of which is that leadership has the same intent and purpose that the team does when they agree on the mode that they're going to be in. And modes are temporary. It's not like personality, where it's kind of a permanent type of thing. We can be in a certain mode for a while and then we switch. It's understood that it will end. There's some big advantages to that.
- [30:16]
B
I remember facing a challenge which was creating products that have very general use and not knowing what mode people were going to arrive to that product in. And I was always wondering, how can I discern what mode they are in so that I can meet that changing mode? And ultimately this is where we come back to modularity, which is creating an environment in which users in this case can go to the thing that satisfies their mode that they're in.
- [30:49]
A
Yeah, that's exactly right. So there are other times where you don't have to have everybody being in the same mode at the same time. And you want that modularity in your design so that they can do what it is that they need to do based on the mode that they're in. I guess another way to think about what you were describing is everybody may show up for a group session in different modes. But if you need to get them to a place where they're all aligned, then you design into the facilitated experience a transition mode. And we do warm up exercises all the time. One of the funniest things, I run a program called the Collaboratives, and one of the people that work with me on the Collaboratives, she introduced in the morning, basically having one individual come up and teach everyone an exercise. So they had to do the exercise and it was breathing exercises or stretching exercises, something along that line. And it served two purposes. One was their body got in alignment with what they needed to do, but it also made that wonderful transition for us so that they were ready to learn when we started introducing the topics that we were going to introduce. That's a transitional mode, and you design it right into your program. I think most people who design sessions think about those types of things and it's very, very advantageous.
- [32:26]
B
Let's talk for a minute about the business of experience design. So essentially, the business you've been in for a long time, how has receptivity to what you sell changed over time? So how have you seen essentially the experience business evolve?
- [32:46]
A
That's a great question. And I do have the advantage of. I did the Royal Caribbean work in 1999, so that was a long time ago. And so I've been through a lot of different things through 2008, through actually through the dot coms first and then 2008. The receptivity to design goes up and down. It really does. And there's always a belief when it's going down that it's going away and then it cycles through and comes out on the other side and it's in even more demand. But there are new things that are added to the way that we need to think. I don't personally see myself as a designer per se. I see myself as a researcher and a strategist. And the type of work that I'm doing is always around strategy. But I was trained in the same techniques that most designers have been trained in. Right. And I can tell you that right now we're going through a period where everybody's like saying, oh, AI is going to do everything. I think that bubble is going to pop and we're going to cycle through again, through a period where they're going to want designers, but they're not going to necessarily want the same types of designs that they wanted 10 years before for. And so we need to be always working toward what it is that they're going to need us for in the future.
- [34:22]
B
I want to part a few of those things out, which is that you said that there's fluctuation in the need for design. Have you seen a change in the receptivity to the idea of experience or transformation as a type of design?
- [34:36]
A
If you've been in experience design for any time period, or if you're passionate about that particular discipline, it is fascinating to me that Joe Pine's book came out at the same time that design thinking was taking off. It was kind of a crazy confluence of things because you had these new techniques that were being used by businesses and then you had this framework for how to think about the economic value of that these new techniques could bring to the table. So in one way, receptivity to experience design far out exceeded my expectations ever. I thought it was going to be a niche type thing. It's not. Most organizations have at least a customer experience role in their organizations. Now we can argue whether or not they're actually doing experience design or if they're doing service design. And I think a lot of them are doing service design, but that's beside the point. It's far exceeded what I thought. And yet at the same time, I don't think that it has met its ideal purpose, its real reason for existing. The original intent was to create value for the company and for the customer. And I think experience design took a weird turn and became kind of a loyalty kind of mindset where it's like, we can just make this experience better. We're going to increase our loyalty. That's not a value creation argument.
- [36:16]
B
That's what the designer wants. It's one of those things. It's like, do you like companies who you feel that their main objective is to do good for you, or do you feel like they're grabbing for your wallet and designing an experience that makes people feel like you're mugging them, which we experience all the time in companies that have incremental fees and things like that.
- [36:40]
A
Well, I'm willing to pay for a good experience, so there is an economic value that's associated with it. What frustrates me is when the only thing you're trying to do really is is survey me at the end to find out if I'm more likely to recommend you to somebody else, because I know that that's not where innovation actually happens. You're not actually trying to make the experience better, you're trying to monetize the current offering that you have and you're trying to get me to come back repeat business. And that doesn't feel right to the customer. It doesn't feel right to me as a strategist. I think instead some of the things that we early on did need to be reinstituted where experience design was more about innovation. What is the future need that the customer has? How do we support that? What's our vision for the future? Not maintenance of a certain level of an NPS score. That to me is a killer.
- [37:46]
B
What are the components of an experience strategy? So this starts to go into that question, which is, I know what an experience design looks like. I know what experience research looks like. But an experienced strategy, what are the table of contents? What's its purpose?
- [38:00]
A
The table of contents is on my substack, so you can go to my substack. It's called the experiencestrategist.substack.com and you can go through the table of contents. I think it's experience strategy. First question you ask is, how will you grow? The second question is, how will you become compelling to the customer? The third question is, what represents the need of the customer? And the fourth question that you ask is, how do you create time value? And when you can answer those four questions, then you're successful. Growth through experiences, not growth through brand differentiation. It's a different thing. Compelling not through, again, differentiation, but compelling through having a point of view on what it is that customers are going to want in the future and needs is about jobs to be done, not demographics. It's about jobs to be done. It's about understanding from an experience standpoint the whole job the customer is trying to get done. So I think some of those questions are similar to what other strategists ask. But the way we go about it in an experience strategy is different.
- [39:21]
B
There's a word you used, love the word time value. Love that. I was already starting to take notes on this, which is what we pay for work as workers and what it costs us. I love jobs to be done theory. I don't think it's complete because there's the cost of products, not what we pay for the product, but the cost, the total cost of that product. And if there's one thing that we pay for work, it's time.
- [39:55]
A
Yeah.
- [39:56]
B
And what we would use that time for otherwise is an opportunity cost. And I even go farther. It's not just time, it's attention, which is I can do things with my hands. But a lot of it's, where's my brain? And so I just think it's a really powerful concept there. What's the value of the Next minute of what I'm doing. Part of what I'm paying for that next minute is time or attention. A part of what I'm paying of what it's costing me. That next minute might be time with my family, it might be sleeping, it might be, you know, a lot of other things. So I love that. And I think it's the fulcrum point for so much of the right way to think. It's great.
- [40:36]
A
Yeah. I really do think it boils down to time value. That's one of the key things for the customer.
- [40:42]
B
For the customer. Time value for the customer.
- [40:44]
A
For the business model, time value is one element. It's not the only element. But for the customer it is time value.
- [40:54]
B
You mentioned customer a couple of times in the strategy recently. I had Peter Feder on the show who talks about customer centricity and it's all about segmenting the customer base. For which customer do you really want to attract? Is there a part of an experience strategy that has a customer segmentation consideration? I don't mean necessarily Personas.
- [41:16]
A
I don't either.
- [41:18]
B
Okay. Yeah.
- [41:19]
A
I'm not actually a big fan of Personas, even though we do them for our customers because they want them. Look, here's the truth. We've talked about customer centricity for a long time, but what that means is very, very different for different people. Some people think customer centricity is understanding the demographics, the psychographics and the need states that are associated with that. That's going into the mind like we talked about before. You can imagine that my point of view is different, that needs actually arise from situations. So if you and I both have a car accident on the same day, we could be very different people, but we have the same need in that moment. It's the situation. So I talk about situational markets. I talk about how often does a situation arise and how many situations can a company support. The more situations that they can support, the more people that they're going to be successful with. And they frankly don't have to worry about trying to tailor to the preferences of every single person every single time. If they can do a really good job of supporting this situation, they'll be successful. There's more to it than that, but you get the idea. I'm always concerned when people talk about customer centricity that they think it's all preferences, it's all mind.
- [42:51]
B
Yeah. I think if I'm going to probably do violence to Peter Feder's ideas, he would say it's about understand which customer has the highest net lifetime value to your company now, then after that, how you then attract that specific person. But it doesn't have to be a type of person. It could be a type of situation.
- [43:16]
A
That's my point. I fundamentally disagree that it's a type of person.
- [43:19]
B
I don't think he would say it's a type of person necessarily.
- [43:22]
A
I think it's a situation. What made Google so successful? Research the ability to search. And what they realized is that situation arises incredibly often. I mean, they could have targeted academics, they could have said the lifetime customer is people who do research, but they didn't. Instead, they targeted anybody that had that situation arise, and therefore everyone became their customer. And this is the big reason why I push back on this idea of finding that target customer. I really do think that if you find the ideal situation, the customers become infinite and you can support them so much more effectively.
- [44:12]
B
I've argued against Personas. I don't like them. And part of the reason I don't like them is that they put people into categories and we assume that they're static. It feels very limiting. But I do believe in product lines, and I'd like to test that. I'd like to test the idea that maybe product lines are a way to produce a very robust offering for people facing specific situations.
- [44:39]
A
Exactly.
- [44:40]
B
What's the relationship between modes and situations? I think certain situations demand different modes. Potentially.
- [44:48]
A
That's exactly it. When you're listening to music on Apple Music or whatever, you will change the music to support the mode that you're in. And it's the same with whatever technology that you're using. So technologies that don't support modes don't support the situation that you find yourselves in, and you get kind of annoyed. We just did a podcast on SAC's new personalization strategy that they're rolling out and it looks really bad. And I think it's because a lot of it has to do with the fact that they really focused on a particular demographic and said that demographic is going to be static, stable, and they have a Persona that they've associated with it. I think they're in trouble.
- [45:36]
B
Just to emphasize your point on the music, there's a collection of music that I listen to that does not fit together in any way. But it's my playlist for work. It is Space Westerns music, Bach and the Ventures, so surf music. So there's no demographic that unifies those things. That's a mode.
- [45:57]
A
It totally is.
- [45:59]
B
It has no lyrics is the main thing. And it's very Instrumental.
- [46:03]
A
And it works for you. It's very personalized. But the reason why you do it is not because you only like those three types of music. The reason why you do it is because when you find yourself in a work situation, you need acoustics.
- [46:20]
B
Need acoustics. But driving. I want lyrics. And so it's different. It's totally different.
- [46:26]
A
Yeah.
- [46:28]
B
So I want to talk about how you approach your clients needs. It's interesting. On your website you describe a whole lot of individual tools that you have the ability to apply. And I assume that there's a lot of people who says, look, I just need a very narrow kind of research. I always already have in mind what I need, or something like that. But I also would imagine that they're not loose tools for you, that they fit into a methodology. When somebody comes to you with a big enough question, you apply them consciously in a sequence. So, imaginary client, what are the sorts of things that you have to know about them and then what are some of the paths that you would take?
- [47:06]
A
We oftentimes have to sell what the customer knows and understands and then help them on a journey to where we think that they need to go in order for them to be successful. And we compete in a space where there are consulting firms out there that they have one framework and that's what they're known for. Bain has their framework and the Boston Consulting Group has their framework. IDO has their, their methodology and that's what they're known for. Although I think IDO's radically changed in the last couple of years. But we're not. What we're known for is our thought leadership. So we invest heavily in trying to understand what the future needs of customers are going to be. We do primary research on our own on a regular basis around topics that maybe our clients can't afford to go after now, but they will need to go after in the future. We develop methodologies that help us to look at the near future needs of customers. And then we develop frameworks that articulate what those needs are that customers are going to have. I've shared one framework already, which is modes. And then what we do is when they come to us with a challenge, we say, sounds like a modes problem. That's one tool in our tool kit. So when we go out to do our discovery work, our co creation work, the other methodological things that we do on a regular basis, we bring that lens to the table.
- [48:49]
B
And when you're looking at future needs, I can imagine going down two paths. One would be kind of a Positive divergence path, which is, who's doing this great. Who's leading the way toward the future. And I can also see who's having a horrible, horrible experience. Who's the leading edge of future bad situations that people need to get out of. I think the future is always hard to predict. So where do you look for a signal?
- [49:16]
A
My signals, even though I'm looking at the future, come from foundational questions. In 2002, you mentioned the idea of experience design. I talked about that. What I was studying at the time was what makes an experience meaningful. It's a great, great question. It's a foundational kind of question. So I asked lots of questions around to customers around meaningful experiences. Today, I'm still asking that question. What has changed tells me the trajectory for where people are going. So in 2002, when I asked people what makes a meaningful experience, they would have said, oh, they pamper me, they give me extra discounts, that type of a thing. When I asked that question in 2018, they said, for me, it's about balance, it's about relationships, it's about connection. It's not so much about whether or not they pamper me. That tells me that there's a trajectory that's going on. And I look at that language, because that's my background. Right, yours too. I looked at that language and realized that a lot of that language was systemic language, balance. Got to keep all of these balls in the air, coordination, trying to understanding their lives holistically. They're all very much about that. And so then I extract that insight and I say systems. In the future, we need to be paying attention to systems. How do systems apply to banking experiences? How do systems apply to work experiences? And until I see a change in the direction that the consumer is going, I'm going to focus on systems. Who's doing systems? Right? Who's not doing systems right?
- [51:08]
B
So earlier I asked, when you swing the hammer, what do you hit? One thing you hit is systems.
- [51:15]
A
That's one thing. And then it has to align with things that I know that are already true. Systems are a way of managing time. If I have a good personal system for how I do my work, you have a good personal system for how you do your work. It's because it supports my ability to get more time value. And so to me, there's a relationship there. But if I had introduced the idea of Systems to a 2002 audience, they wouldn't have gotten it. They would have said, pamper. I don't want systems. That's what happens at work, I'm not interested in that today. They're interested in it.
- [51:54]
B
Let me get more clarity on what you mean as examples of systems, any system. Because to some extent what you were just talking about is the systems we use to work. But let's say banking, or let's say. It sounds like you're saying that there's a system on the banking side that's going to create an experience for me, or I experience myself in a connected system. I see my situation differently. So.
- [52:20]
A
So let's use banking here for a second, because it's perfect. In 2002, I had customers who were banks, and I went out and talked to their consumers. And if you ask them what they wanted from banking, they wanted pampering, okay? And they also wanted convenience. You go to those same customers today and you ask them what they want from banking, and they will talk to you about money management systems. Banking is only a small part of their money management system. It's an account, but they got PayPal, they've got Venmo, they've got crypto, they've got all kinds of things that they're managing, and they still have inputs and outputs. They don't have a checking account where they're trying to update things. They've got cash that's flowing through their family life, and they need to be able to manage that. That's a system problem.
- [53:18]
B
You wrote about whole offerings, whole jobs to be done.
- [53:22]
A
Yeah.
- [53:23]
B
What does that mean?
- [53:24]
A
I came to that later. I really liked Clayton Christensen's work, and he and Joe Pine were kind of my two mentors. So I liked the idea of jobs to be done. But I realized that what the consumer was asking, what people were asking for, was more and more holistic solutions, systemic solutions, oftentimes where they wanted you to be able to control the entire ecosphere of their money management. And I'm sure AI will play a role in that, that I'm sure that there's going to be a role for them to play. Life has become complex. There's a lot of tools out there, a lot of things that are going on. The consumer is trying to maintain their time value, preserve time for things that really matter, and automate things that don't really matter. If you can only do part of the job. Think about healthcare for a second. I've got to go talk to one doctor to get a blood test. I've got to go talk to another doctor to get another type of test. I'd like the whole job done. The healthcare system is designed to not allow one organization to actually do the whole thing. There are reasons for that, but it frustrates me and it's not good time value for me. So the whole job, getting the whole job done is an important part of what the customer expects from solutions today.
- [54:55]
B
One of the things that that makes me think is I've often disparaged snacks at work as being not what people come to work for. On the other hand, or food or gyms or something like that. There is a degree to which that is a whole offering, which is I need to be in a work mode. And a part of that means I don't need to figure out how to get food. My mode is to be concentrated on something. Can you just take that off of my plate? And so that makes that a much more reasonable. It may not be the core thing I want, but it's the context that makes me more able to be successful in the mode given my situation.
- [55:34]
A
Look at what you just did there. Instead of describing the food, the snacks as a benefit, we give you these benefits and so you're going to stay with us. What you're doing instead is saying the snack is a tool that works within a system that allows you to accomplish. Be more successful at what you're trying to accomplish changes the purpose completely and it's less demeaning because I don't like to be told as a worker that the only reason that I'm working here is because they are great snacks.
- [56:05]
B
Yeah, I used to call them Scooby snacks. In the organizations you work with, who catches your strategy? The reason I bring that up is that some of the most forward thinking organizations I know in the design of the experience of work don't really have anybody who can own it, like a product owner. And so I'm wondering who catches it and who's your ideal catcher?
- [56:34]
A
It's a great question. We run this year long program called the Collaboratives where this is one of the things that we do. It's not the only thing, but we bring 10 companies. Typically it's about 10 companies together and they go through this year long process with quarterly summits and then we're doing primary research in between. It's interesting to see who signs up for that. We always are surprised to see who signs up for the type of work that we do because they come from all walks. Sometimes it's the chief marketing officer, sometimes it's the chief experience officer, sometimes it's a director of customer service. I wish there was. To your point, to the point made earlier, I Wish there was one ideal customer that I could go after because it would make it so much easier. But what more often than not happens is that a company has a situation that comes up and they're like, hey, this is the perfect thing. And then they send the team that has to accomplish a particular objective. And that team is almost always cross functional, always at least a director's level or above. But it makes it very hard for me to target that next customer because it was situationally driven. So, you know, that's the problem, that's the challenge. Really?
- [57:56]
B
Yeah. I ask a few questions at the end of every show. The first one is, what job do you hire your work to do for you?
- [58:04]
A
I hire my work to push my thinking. I love to think. That's why I got a PhD. I love to apply frameworks. It's what makes me happy. So being able to focus on thought leadership on a regular basis is very valuable to me.
- [58:24]
B
What proportion of the reward that you receive is from the discovery of the unknown versus the application of the known, but something you invented?
- [58:36]
A
It goes in waves. When I first latched onto this idea of modes, it was in 2014, and then it was all about, oh, this is exciting. This is all I can really see. But since then, now I'm all about the application of modes. When I first identified this change in meaningful experiences towards systems, there was so much positive stuff going on. Just, oh, my goodness, this explains this. This explains that. This, you know, that's very enjoyable. I think most workers have gone through that kind of an experience. And then there is the, okay, let's start applying this. And so the ratio changes.
- [59:24]
B
That's good. It's good. You've got both sides and so you can find reward in both. So, like, let's take Joe. I don't know. I'm making up for Joe. But Joe might be on the edge of discovery all the time. More than application, I'm making that up anyway. I'm on the discovery more than I am on the application end of that discovery first, invention second, building third.
- [59:49]
A
I think my team would say that I'm much more on the discovery side and it's their job to apply. But I love application. I really do.
- [59:58]
B
What is your intellectual frontier right now? Where do your toes hang off the edge of the known?
- [60:03]
A
You know, we started working on what will be the impact of artificial intelligence in 2018. We're about seven years into a body of research on that. So that's not surprising me. Not at all. What's surprising me, honestly, I think the technology is doing far better than I thought it was going to do. So that's amazing. But framework wise, I know how to think about AI. Generative AI, agentic, generalized, intelligent. I think we've got an approach. What I get excited about in part because I believe strongly in what Joe Pine, who is my partner and colleague in a lot of things. I feel my toes hanging off the edge when it comes to transformation. And I do think that AI is going to enable companies who weren't previously able to support transformation to be able to do it. He doesn't really talk about that in his forthcoming book, but that's something that I'm very interested in.
- [61:05]
B
I think as you go out the progression of economic value, the offerings become more and more bespoke. They're more co created and they're more bespoke and it's hard to scale bespoke, but AI really helps.
- [61:18]
A
That was exactly my point. With that kind of a tool, it's almost like experience design supported the experience economy. And AI is going to be really, really important for scaling transformation.
- [61:34]
B
What does your work cost you?
- [61:36]
A
It costs me certainty because I am a thought leader and thought leaders go in and out of demand. And a lot of the things that I'm working on, most companies won't be dealing with for about 10 years, five to 10 years. So I have to deal with a lot of up and down risk that can be anxiety causing. I mean I've got a pretty good track record of predicting where things are going to go. But my customers aren't always focused on where things will go.
- [62:15]
B
Yeah, they're often responding to very local events. Their situation is now.
- [62:22]
A
Yeah. When you have new tariffs that are changing in an economy, you've got AI, you're going to be focused on now.
- [62:29]
B
Yeah. But also this is like a perfect example of the trade off that you get with any offering which is that you like discovery and research. A lot of that discovery is where we're going and the cost of that is your clients may not be there yet and so that creates uncertainty. That's the cost of buying that product. One of the costs of buying that.
- [62:54]
A
Offering, doing that type of work.
- [62:57]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. This has been a total blast. I've taken away so many ideas that I'm going to be able to use immediately. So where can people learn more about you and the work you do?
- [63:11]
A
Our website is Stonemantle with an E. L, not an L E, that's a different thing. Stonemantle Co. I spend a lot of time on the experienced strategist Substack co. So sign up there if you'd like. We have a podcast. Joe Pine and I and my colleague Aransas Savvis to a podcast as well. We'd love to meet new people and.
- [63:39]
B
I want to clarify that's stonemantle co.co very tempting. Your index finger wants to put the M on there.
- [63:47]
A
Yeah.
- [63:48]
B
So great. Thank you very much for your time today.
- [63:51]
A
Thank you.
- [63:54]
B
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.