Category Archives: Innovation

Neuroplastic Entrepreneurs

The surprising power of reframing as an innovation tool

Neuroplastic Entrepreneurs

GUEST POST from John Bessant

Neuroplasticity. Not some weird creation of a mad 3D sculptor intent on creating a strange new species with which to threaten the world in another zombie apocalypse story but instead a wonderful feature of our brains. Research increasingly confirms our ability, in the face of unexpected shock or challenge, to rewire ourselves, make new neural connections. Defined as ‘the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization’ it’s visible in the ways in which people can recover speech or movement after traumatic brain injury and it’s now understood to be critical in the process of early cognitive development in babies. It’s even offered as one explanation for the impossible and unpredictable lifestyls of teenagers; their penchant for lying in bed all day and mooching aorund may be down to their working hard at the synaptic level to reconstruct their brains!

It’s also a good description of a key capability which entrepreneurs have. Being able to reframe, seeing the world in a new way opens up significant new possibilities. Provided, of course, that you are then able to follow through, solving problems and enabling the new connections necessary to bring about that state.

Think about Malcolm Maclean, sitting on the dock of the bay one afternoon and imagining an alternative approach to shipping. Instead of the laborious loading and unloading with all its costs, its wasted time, the security challenges and so on – why not use containers? The vision involved a stretch of the imagination; the actual realisation of it considerably more but in the end you have a game changer. Reframing and then realising the possibilities.

It’s an old story; the challenge of transportation and logistics was one which engaged James Brindley 200 years earlier as the Industrial Revolution began to reshape the British economy and the landscape in which it took place. You can’t get a manufacturing-led transformation off the ground unless you can move tings around – raw materials in and finsihed products out of your factories. Which, given the worn-out and primitive state of many of the roads and tracks criss-crossing the country at the time was a big problem. Brindley was one of the pioneers of the idea of creating waterways – canals – as an alternative, providing fast and straight connections between factories, cities and ports.

Image: Watercolour of Barton aqueduct by G.F. Yates 1793, public domain

Just like Malcolm Maclean, this was an inspirational idea which required a deal of systems thinking. Not just one which could imagine an alternative world built on waterways but also one which would need a lot of practical problem solving to bring it into being. Dealing with multiple questions around how to enable the different elements of the system to come together and deliver ‘emergent properties’ where the whole has an impact much greater than the sum of its parts.

His efforts extended well beyond the map making and route planning through to the detailed construction, involving tunnels, cuttings and viaducts. He also had to think through the big challenge of hydraulics, how to fill the canals with water and keep them full – which meant, amongst other things, solving the problem of lining the canal with a water- saving clay. He also reduced the water demand by cutting narrower canals and then designing narrow-boats to navigate them. And since the country is not level means that in places vessels using the canal have to climb up or down slopes which necessitated development of intricately engineered locks and sluices.

Brindley’s work on connecting up the dots of his system into something which changed the transportation world of its time even extended to thinking in the same direction as Malcolm Mclean came to do much later. Faced with the problem of loading and unloading coal as a key bulk item Brindley devised a system involving specially built wooden containers which could be prefilled and transhipped quickly from specially-designed boats!

Above all Brindley was a systems thinker, seeing connections and working on how to best join up the dots to deliver major change. Which his legacy over 350 miles of canals criss-crossing the country and powering the Industrial Revolution seems to have done.

There’s still plenty of scope for such system rethinking today – giving opportunities even in the face of crisis. Take the example of Gridless, founded in 2022 and already a successful and growing business in the energy sector of Africa.

First the vision. Africa is the coming continent, with a huge population of around a billion largely young people and rapidly accelerating development. This creates an engine for growth through both domestic demand and – with sufficient investment – the possibility of increasing exports, not just of raw materials but of finished goods and services.

It has enormous potential – and it has a track record as a place where radical innovations can emerge and scale. Take the example of M-PESA. Where the idea of mobile money still seems fresh and exciting for citizens of the industrialised world learning to use cashless payments by phone it’s actually rather old hat to many people in East Africa. M-PESA (the word means mobile money in Swahili) is coming up towards celebrating its 20th birthday and has moved a long way from being an experiment to try and improve access to basic financial services for the largely unbanked population of Kenya. Now the M-PESA network carries 60% of GDP and delivers a growing range of services across the economy.

But Africa is also unevenly developed; not least in the case of energy. Whilst much of the population is now connected this is not the case everywhere. Over two thirds of the population – 600 million people – have no access to electricity. Mini-grids (relatively small local power stations and networks) can help solve this energy access problem, not least by tapping into the huge potential which renewable energy – solar, wind, hydro and biomass – has for the region.

There’s no shortage of technology to help construct mini and even micro-grids, and there are plenty of power sources which could potentially be tapped. The problem is economic; in order to finance the construction of such a micro-grid a lot of capital is needed up front. That needs a reasonable return to cover operating costs and recoup the investment costs – but in the short term the market to pay for this isn’t there.

When the power starts to flow there is relatively little demand to hook it up to; people who’ve survived without electricity don’t suddenly become active consumers. As Eric Hersman, one of the founders of Gridless points out, ‘ … if you’re a smallholder farmer in a rural village in Africa you’ll likely buy an LED light bulb and charge your phone at first. These don’t draw a lot of electricity, but they do change your life considerably. It might be a few years before you invest in that refrigerator, TV, irrigation pump, or electric oven’.

The consequence of this slow demand growth is that the provider ends up throwing away 80% of its energy and having to charge too high a price for the rest. What could be an important way of helping local communities develop runs aground because that high price effectively throttles the emerging demand at birth. Catch-22.

Gridless represents an entrepreneurial way of reframing this problem. Given such a stalemate their business model asks a simple question. What if there were a consumer who would guarantee to buy electricity at the necessary market rate to support the project and then gradually retreat as the prices fell and the connections rose? A stepping stone approach, essentially a temporary scaffolding to enable an infrastructure to emerge and grow. Using a horticultural metaphor it’s like putting in place a trellis to support an early sapling until the plant is able to survive and thrive on its own.

That’s the vision part of the Gridless approach – to help Africa with micro-grid development. Their website describes it simply: ‘By combining small-scale bitcoin data centres and renewables-based mini-grids they aim to develop the foundation of a new model to expand profitable electrification to communities in emerging markets without the need for charity, aid, gifts, or government subsidy…’

Bitcoin mining – the energy intensive operation of multiple computers beavering away at solving complex mathematical puzzles to earn rewards in the form of bitcoins – does not have the best of reputations in terms of sustainability. By its nature it involves consuming huge amounts of energy whose generation often contributes to pollution and global warming. But Gridless have reworked the story so that it makes a positive contribution to both sustainability of operations and community development.

It does so in a simple a practical way. It hooks up a bitcoin mine with a source of sustainable energy provided by local renewables like hydro or solar. And it deals with the ‘stranded energy’ problem by joining in the system as a ‘buyer of last resort’. Their bitcoin mining operations provide plenty of demand for energy and those operations are profitable enough to buy it at prices which are too high for local communities to pay in the short term. But as the market develops so the local demand increases – and this means the provider can reduce prices, recouping their costs over a larger market. They can also invest to extend the grid and bring yet more demand into the system.

Eventually things reach a point where there isn’t enough power left for the bitcoin mining, so Gridless pack up their operations, move on to another site where there is ‘stranded energy;’ and start the whole cycle once again. It’s a business model for development with some important social values underpinning it. The main purpose is to help connect people through micro-grids and to gradually exit as the role of the buyer of first resort becomes unnecessary. It’s a business fuelled by bitcoin profits but these are effectively being reinvested in social development – a powerful alternative vision. By providing a consistent and reliable demand for electricity, Bitcoin mining helps to utilize excess renewable energy that might otherwise go to waste, thereby unlocking the potential of stranded renewable energy projects and contributing to a more sustainable energy future.

An impressive vision – but as Messrs Maclean and Brindley will tell you, the challenge is not in creating the vision, it’s in realising it. Visions like these need a lot of different dots to be joined up, a lot of problem solving to make it all work. The Gridless solution starts with the idea of being ‘geographically agnostic’ – meaning it is mobile and can be moved anywhere, finding and helping develop micro-grids wherever there is ‘stranded energy’ opportunity.

They do this by putting the bitcoin mine in a box – literally, using a shipping container in a way which would make Malcolm Maclean proud. They move it close to sources of renewable power – like a micro-hydro system in Zambia, harvesting the abundant energy from the fast flowing Zambesi river.

They’ve worked hard on adapting their technology – computers, power supplies, software – to operate in what can still be challenging conditions. Rural Africa is a long way from the clinical clean environments of Silicon Valley and they’ve had to learn to deal with the suite of problems this throws up in order to make their system reliable. For example air quality- the dust which the wind blows up as it sweeps across the wide plains means you have to be very careful to fit suitable filters to avoid all the expensive electronics grinding to a halt. Ditto the heat; average temperatures in Kenya hover around 30 degrees Celsius so there’s a big problem in keeping things cool. And then there are the bugs.

In 2022 when they set up their first facility the lights attracted plenty of curious insects and, especially in the rainy season, they flew towards them en masse, only to crash into the ventilation fans and eventually jam them!

Problems weren’t just physical; the economics of buying containers ready made from China or the USA to use as mobile bitcoin mines posed a big challenge. Quite apart from the logistics and transportation costs of getting them to Africa there were bureaucratic costs involved in getting the various permissions needed to import such equipment. And then there were the capital costs – at over $100,000 per container it was too expensive. So the team went back to the drawing board and designed their own container which cost 75% less. It’s also had the side benefit of bypassing many of the import regulations (since it is now a domestically manufactured product)

Their problem-solving also extends to another big issue with their business model – that of micro-grid management. How to balance supply and demand and make sure that the needs of the community are served first? Gridless wanted to make sure that they weren’t using electricity which somebody else needed. They did this by writing their own software – Gridless OS – which allows for real-time response to demand, making sure people get what they need when they need it whilst also stabilising the grid.

Africa Innovation

After three years of such problem-solving the team have a robust model which they have demonstrated can work in a variety of contexts, using whatever renewable power supply is available – solar, hydro or biomass. Theirs is primarily a social mission and so they’ve codified their experience and can offer a blueprint for the same kind of model to be used by others to help African development.

And it works. Not only by connecting people to electric power but by extending the range of possibilities which that then opens up. Once you have power you can have light – which offers more than just illumination, it allows children to study at night and boosts education. Local services become possible because power enables small-scale facilities to operate and deliver healthcare. Business can connect better to markets and small-scale farms and factories can improve their operations and profitability, generating employment.

In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine one of the Gridless founders, Janet Maingi, elaborated on this novel approach which now operates in several countries including Kenya, Malawi and Zambia, ‘…for example, there’s a tea factory in Muranga, Kenya, which is in the highlands. We partnered with the energy generator in the area and they were able to give the factory power. Now, their facilities are able to support the tea factory, which has two benefits: tea farmers can bring their tea to the factory, which means it doesn’t spoil on the farms because they can’t get it to point B in time and more employment has also been created just by that tea factory becoming an electrified space….’

The potential is huge. As Eric Hersman, points out ‘….just 10% – 40GW of the 400GW of hydroelectric energy in Africa – has been developed (and that’s just hydro!). There is a near unlimited supply of energy to be developed in the one place on earth that needs it most… Africa. But how to get the plants built? Despite being home to 17% of the world’s population, Africa currently accounts for just 4% of global power supply investment’.

As he points out mini-grid business models have traditionally focused on having an ‘anchor client’, a single large electricity consumer such as a telecom tower, which consumes the majority of electricity supplied by the mini-grid. The anchor client is the first step in what’s called an ABC strategy (Anchor—Business—Consumers) for mini-grid financial sustainability. The model builds on finding an anchor client with a predictable load profile and then helping develop around that a group of local businesses that can provide stable demand and promote economic growth in the communities. The last step is residential customers, bringing them in gradually by improving access and generating income from them.

Over the last 3 years Gridless has shown that mini-grids can be made profitable using their model of becoming a ‘geographically agnostic anchor tenant’. They’ve done this on 6 sites in 3 African countries, using the stranded (wasted) energy from hydro, biomass, geothermal, some of that augmented by solar. Their numbers prove that it can be done; they are confident that a 5-7 year return on investment is possible on almost any hydro mini grid.

There’s a lot to be done – figures from the World Bank estimate that Africa needs 140,000 mini-grids to help electrify the continent. But as of 2025 only 5000 have been built – around 5% of what’s required. Which opens up a huge opportunity – if we can reframe the problem.

The key thing about neuroplasticity is that it isn’t an instant process of constructing new neural pathways. Instead the connections have to be made and reinforced; only gradually does the new network become fully operational. Patients who manage to recover movement or speech after a catastrophic neural event like a stroke do so by a mixture of hard work and determination. Gradually creating those new pathways.

Fixing problems like Africa’s energy challenge won’t happen overnight. It’s not going to be simple, and it will need a lot of system-level problem-solving, joining the dots. But just like James Brindley imagining a network of canals or Malcolm Maclean picturing container routes spanning the world, it starts with an entrepreneurial vision.

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Three Executive Decisions for Strategic Foresight Success or Failure

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Three Executive Decisions for Strategic Foresight Success or Failure

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You stand on the brink of an exciting new adventure. Turmoil and uncertainty have convinced you that future success requires more than the short-term strategic and business planning tools you’ve used. You’ve cut through the hype surrounding Strategic Foresight and studied success. You are ready to lead your company into its bold future.

So, where do you start?

Most executives get caught up in all the things that need to happen and are distracted by all the tools, jargon, and pretty pictures that get thrown at them. But you are smarter than that. You know that there are three things you must do at the beginning to ensure ultimate success.

Give Foresight Executive Authority and Access

Foresight without responsibility is intellectual daydreaming.

While the practice of research and scenario design can be delegated to planning offices, the responsibility for debating, deciding, and using Strategic Foresight must rest with P&L owners.

Amy Webb’s research at NYU shows that when a C-Suite executive with the authority to force strategic reviews oversaw foresight activities, the results were more likely to be acted on and integrated into strategic and operational plans. Shell serves as a specific example of this, as its foresight team reported directly to the executive committee, so that when scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility, Shell executives personally reviewed strategic portfolios and authorized immediate capability building.

Start by asking:

Who can force strategic reviews outside of the traditional planning process?
What triggers a review of Strategic Foresight scenarios?
How do we hold people accountable for acting on insights?

Demand Inputs That Challenge Your Assumptions

If your Strategic Foresight conversations don’t make you uncomfortable, you’re doing them wrong.

Webb’s research also shows that successful foresight systematically explores fundamental changes that could render the existing business obsolete.

Shell’s scenarios went beyond assumptions about oil price stability to explore supply disruptions, geopolitical shifts, and demand transformation. Disney’s foresight set aside traditional assumptions about media consumption and explored how technology could completely reshape content creation, distribution, and consumption.

Start by asking these questions:

Is the team going beyond trend analysis and exploring technology, regulations, social changes, and economic developments that could restructure entire markets?
Who are we talking to in other industries? What unusual, unexpected, and maybe crazy sources are we using to inform our scenarios?
Does at least one scenario feel possible and terrifying?

Integrate Foresight into Existing Planning Processes

Strategic Foresight that doesn’t connect to resource allocation decisions is expensive research.

Your planning processes must connect Strategic Foresight’s long-term scenarios to Strategic Planning’s 3–5-year plans and to your annual budget and resource decisions. No separate foresight exercises. No parallel planning tracks. The cascade from 20-year scenarios to this year’s investments must be explicit and ruthless.

When Shell’s scenarios explored dramatic oil price volatility over decades, Shell didn’t file them away and wait for them to come true. They immediately reviewed their strategic portfolio and developed a 3–5-year plan to build capabilities for multiple oil futures. This was then translated into immediate capital allocation changes.

Disney’s foresight about changing media consumption in the next 20 years informed strategic planning for Disney+ and, ultimately, its operational launch.

Start by asking these questions:

How is Strategic Foresight linked to our strategic and business planning processes?
How do scenarios flow from 20-year insights through 5-year strategy to this year’s budget decisions?
How is the integration of Strategic Foresight into annual business planning measured and rewarded?

Three Steps. One Outcome.

Strategic foresight efforts succeed when they have the executive authority, provocative inputs, and integrated processes to drive resource allocation decisions. Taking these three steps at the very start sets you, your team, and your organization up for success. But they’re still not a guarantee.

Ready to avoid the predictable pitfalls? Next week, we’ll consider why strategic foresight fails and how to prevent your efforts from joining them.

Image credit: Pexels

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The Experience Nexus

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Integrating an XMO with Customer, Employee and Partner Advisory Boards

The Experience Nexus - Integrating an XMO with Customer, Employee and Partner Advisory Boards

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

In today’s fiercely competitive landscape, merely meeting expectations isn’t enough; delivering exceptional experiences is the non-negotiable standard. Customers demand seamless, intuitive journeys. Employees seek engaging, meaningful work that fosters growth. Partners require transparent, collaborative relationships that drive mutual success. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I advocate for a truly holistic approach: the Experience Management Office (XMO). However, an XMO, while powerful in its own right, truly achieves its potential when it’s synergistically integrated with the invaluable, unfiltered insights derived from Customer, Partner, and Employee Advisory Boards. This integration forms a dynamic “experience nexus” of feedback and action, ensuring that experience strategies are not just internally conceived, but genuinely co-created and reflective of the voices that matter most.

The Strategic Imperative of the Experience Management Office (XMO)

Historically, organizations managed customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), and often partner experience (PX) in isolated silos. This fragmented approach frequently led to inconsistent experiences and missed opportunities for cross-functional improvements. The XMO emerges as the strategic orchestrator, unifying these disparate efforts under a single, cohesive umbrella. Its core mandate is to ensure consistency, proactively identify and eliminate friction points, and drive continuous improvement across all critical touchpoints for every stakeholder. An effective XMO establishes robust methodologies, deploys standardized tools, provides clear governance, and acts as a central repository for all experience data, translating raw insights into prioritized, actionable initiatives.

“An XMO, while powerful in its own right, truly achieves its potential when it’s synergistically integrated with the invaluable, unfiltered insights derived from Customer, Partner, and Employee Advisory Boards.”

Amplifying Voices: The Power of Advisory Boards

While the XMO provides the essential strategic framework and operational discipline, advisory boards inject the authentic, ground-level voice of your critical stakeholders. They offer invaluable qualitative feedback that complements quantitative data.

Customer Advisory Boards (CABs): Comprising your most engaged and influential customers, CABs provide unfiltered feedback on product utility, service delivery, and overall brand perception. They offer a direct window into evolving customer needs, emerging pain points, and often highlight competitive shifts or significant unmet market opportunities. Their strategic input can be a game-changer for product roadmaps and service enhancements.
Partner Advisory Boards (PABs): For organizations deeply reliant on a robust ecosystem of distributors, resellers, integrators, or technology alliances, PABs are indispensable. They offer critical insights into channel effectiveness, the viability of joint go-to-market strategies, and operational friction points that directly impact mutual profitability and success. A strong PAB can foster greater collaboration and loyalty.
Employee Advisory Boards (EABs): Your employees are the living embodiment of your organization’s culture and processes. They are on the front lines, experiencing internal systems and customer interactions firsthand. EABs provide invaluable, real-time feedback on workplace culture, operational inefficiencies, the effectiveness of internal tools, and the direct impact of leadership decisions on morale, productivity, and retention. They serve as both early warning systems and fertile ground for grassroots innovation within the Employee Experience (EX).

The Experience Nexus: From Feedback to Breakthrough Innovation

The true magic of this holistic model is realized when the XMO functions as the intelligent central hub, systematically receiving, synthesizing, and acting upon the rich insights generated by these diverse advisory boards (the strategic spokes). This creates a dynamic, continuous improvement loop, and crucially, an engine for genuine innovation. The XMO’s role goes beyond just operational excellence; it becomes a powerful catalyst for change. By gathering and cross-referencing insights from all three boards, the XMO can identify truly breakthrough opportunities that a siloed approach would miss. It’s in the intersection of these diverse perspectives that the most profound insights for innovation emerge.

Structured Feedback Ecosystem: The XMO establishes formalized, yet flexible, processes for advisory boards to submit feedback. This ensures insights are consistently captured, meticulously categorized, intelligently prioritized, and seamlessly routed to the most relevant internal product, service, or operational teams.
Holistic Data Synthesis & Analysis: The XMO’s analytical capabilities are crucial here. It collates and cross-references qualitative insights from the advisory boards with quantitative experience data (e.g., NPS, CSAT, CES, employee engagement scores, churn rates, partner revenue contribution). This holistic analysis identifies systemic trends, uncovers root causes, and validates hypotheses across the entire experience landscape.
Actionable Insights & Strategic Prioritization: Armed with synthesized, validated data, the XMO plays a pivotal role in guiding leadership to prioritize experience initiatives. It ensures resources and effort are strategically allocated to areas that will deliver the most significant, cross-cutting impact across customer, employee, and partner journeys, driving maximum business value.
Innovation Acceleration: This is where the nexus truly shines. The XMO facilitates cross-functional “insight sharing” workshops, where product, engineering, and design teams are exposed directly to the synthesized feedback. For example, a common pain point from a Customer Advisory Board might be the lack of a specific feature, while an Employee Advisory Board highlights a related internal operational inefficiency, and a Partner Advisory Board reveals a similar competitive gap. When these three insights are combined, they don’t just solve a single problem; they can reveal a massive market opportunity for a new product, service, or business model. The XMO’s role is to identify and champion these “aha!” moments, channeling them directly into the innovation pipeline.
Transparent Closed-Loop Communication: Perhaps most critically, the XMO champions and facilitates regular, transparent communication back to the advisory boards. This demonstrates precisely how their invaluable feedback is being utilized, outlining the tangible progress of implemented initiatives, and celebrating the impact of their contributions. This transparency is vital; it builds deep trust, reinforces the perceived value of their participation, and encourages continued engagement.

Case Study 1: Global SaaS Provider – Unifying the Ecosystem Experience

From Fragmented Insights to Integrated Ecosystem Enhancement

A global B2B SaaS company faced challenges with inconsistent product adoption and suboptimal channel partner engagement. Their existing structure meant customer feedback was managed by the CX team, HR handled employee surveys, and the partner team conducted informal check-ins. This siloed approach led to fragmented insights and disjointed solutions, impacting their overall ecosystem health.

Recognizing the need for a unified strategy, they established a dedicated Experience Management Office (XMO) reporting directly to the Chief Operating Officer. The XMO’s clear mandate was to integrate and elevate all experience initiatives. Concurrently, they formalized their existing Customer Advisory Board (CAB) and launched a new, strategically focused Partner Advisory Board (PAB). The XMO developed a comprehensive quarterly insights report, meticulously combining feedback from the CABs, PABs, and internal employee surveys. A consistent, critical theme emerged from this integrated analysis: the onboarding experience for new customers and channel partners was clunky, inconsistent, and often frustrating across different product lines.

Leveraging this precise feedback, the XMO facilitated cross-functional workshops involving product development, sales, marketing, and customer support teams. This collaborative effort led to the rapid development and deployment of a unified onboarding platform and standardized, role-based training modules. The XMO rigorously tracked key metrics such as “time-to-first-value” for new customers and partner activation rates. Within 18 months, customer satisfaction scores related to onboarding surged by 25%, and partner-led sales increased by a remarkable 15%, demonstrating the profound, tangible benefits of integrating diverse external and internal voices through a centralized, action-oriented XMO.

Key Takeaway: A centralized XMO, fed by structured CAB and PAB insights, can drive enterprise-wide improvements in critical customer and partner journeys, leading to measurable business growth.

Addressing Inherent Challenges and Ensuring Success

Integrating an XMO with robust advisory boards, while incredibly powerful, is not without its inherent hurdles. Proactive mitigation strategies are essential:

Securing Executive Buy-in: This foundational step requires senior leadership to not only champion the XMO’s creation but also to genuinely value and act upon the feedback from advisory boards. Mitigation: Develop a compelling business case, demonstrate clear ROI by linking experience improvements directly to key business outcomes (e.g., revenue growth, cost reduction, retention), and involve executives directly in initial board meetings.
Resource Allocation: Establishing, staffing, and effectively maintaining both a strategic XMO and active advisory boards demands dedicated human and financial resources. Mitigation: Start small and iterate. Begin by focusing on the most critical experience touchpoints, prove incremental value, and then scale resources as the benefits become undeniable and quantifiable.
Preventing “Feedback Fatigue”: Advisory board members are busy, valuable individuals. Ensuring they feel their time is genuinely valued and their feedback consistently leads to tangible action is paramount. Mitigation: Maintain rigorous closed-loop communication, provide transparent updates on progress, celebrate their contributions publicly, and respect their time with concise, focused agendas and clear pre-reads.
Translating Insights into Action: Moving from qualitative feedback to concrete, measurable organizational actions can be complex and requires strong analytical and change management capabilities. Mitigation: The XMO must employ robust analytics, facilitate strong cross-functional collaboration to dismantle silos, and define clear ownership for implementing improvements.

Case Study 2: Regional Retail Bank – Synergistic Employee & Customer Elevation

Transforming Branch Operations Through Integrated Feedback

A prominent regional retail bank was grappling with a concerning decline in customer satisfaction related to in-branch service, compounded by alarmingly high employee turnover, particularly among its front-line tellers. Despite various internal initiatives, leadership struggled to pinpoint the true underlying root causes of these intertwined problems.

In response, the bank strategically established an XMO reporting within its operations department. Crucially, they simultaneously launched an active Employee Advisory Board (EAB), comprising a diverse cross-section of tellers, branch managers, and key back-office support staff. The EAB quickly identified several critical pain points: severely outdated core banking software leading to protracted transaction times, unclear escalation paths for complex customer issues, and insufficient, infrequent training for new product offerings. In parallel, the bank’s existing Customer Advisory Board (CAB) provided consistent feedback echoing concerns about excessive wait times, perceived inconsistencies in service quality, and a lack of personalized interaction.

The XMO proved to be the indispensable bridge. It meticulously analyzed the EAB’s feedback on software inefficiencies and training gaps, cross-referencing it with the CAB’s complaints about wait times and service quality. This integrated analysis revealed a direct, causal correlation: internal operational friction points directly translated into poor customer experiences. The XMO then championed a high-priority, cross-departmental project to modernize the core banking software, streamline digital workflows, and introduce a comprehensive, tiered training program for all branch staff, directly based on EAB recommendations. Regular, transparent updates on progress were provided to both advisory boards, reinforcing their critical role. Within a single year, teller turnover decreased by a remarkable 20%, and customer satisfaction with in-branch service experienced a significant, measurable improvement, unequivocally validating the transformative power of integrating direct employee insights into holistic customer experience enhancements.

Key Takeaway: Integrating EAB insights with CAB feedback via an XMO reveals systemic issues, leading to co-created solutions that dramatically improve both employee and customer experiences.

Conclusion: The Future of Holistic Experience Leadership

The strategic integration of a proactive Experience Management Office with thoughtfully structured Customer, Partner, and Employee Advisory Boards represents the pinnacle of human-centered innovation and leadership. This powerful nexus creates a robust, empathetic, and continuous feedback ecosystem that not only informs and validates but also dynamically refines an organization’s entire experience strategy. It ensures that all strategic decisions and operational improvements are profoundly grounded in real-world perspectives, fostering deeper trust across all stakeholder groups, accelerating the pace of meaningful innovation, and ultimately driving sustainable, differentiated growth. For leaders aspiring to truly excel in the experience economy, this holistic, integrated approach is not merely an option—it is an undeniable imperative. It’s about orchestrating a diverse symphony of voices to create a harmonious, compelling, and continuously improving experience for everyone involved, building loyalty and advocacy from the inside out.

Contact me if you’re interested in working together to build or enhance your Experience Management Office (XMO).

Accelerate your change and transformation success

Content Authenticity Statement: The ideas are those of Braden Kelley, with a little help from Google Gemini to shape the article and create the illustrative case studies.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Making it Safe to Innovate

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Building Emotional Safety

Making it Safe to Innovate - Building Emotional Safety

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

When my husband and I became accredited as foster parents for children in need, I thought my skills as a trainer and facilitator would help me navigate the challenges we faced. I quickly discovered that when children arrived at our home late at night, often physically injured and emotionally distraught due to a tragic accident or being separated from their families, their primary need was for emotional safety. This began my long and enlightening quest into what it truly means for someone to develop both emotional and psychological safety. To discover and explore why both emotional and psychological safety are crucial for people to survive, innovate and thrive in the post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

The whole issue of “safety” is a crucial one. Causing many people, especially those in the change, learning and coaching space, to stop, pause, retreat, and reflect upon how to personalize and contextualize it for ourselves and others we care about and interact with. Yet so few people understand the importance of creating safe environments, especially today when there is so much hatred and violence happening on many of our streets.

We all deserve to, and are entitled to, feel emotionally safe and secure in all aspects of our lives.

What does it mean to be safe?

Because safety: the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury, impacts everyone and everything in our entire world system. It is an essential element required for our survival, growth, and ability to navigate and innovate in the post-pandemic era. Safety is critical in enhancing people’s capacity to connect, belong, and engage in purposeful relationships, build happy families and secure communities, as well as produce creative, inventive, and innovative work that helps make the world a better place.

What is emotional safety?

Emotional safety exists in an environment where individuals feel valued, respected, and heard, regardless of their values, beliefs, or religious or cultural origins. It involves allowing people to feel safe and secure, nurturing vulnerability, and sharing personal thoughts and feelings without fear of having their words judged as “bad” or “wrong.” Without facing punishment, discrimination, persecution, diminishment, blame, shame, hatred, or violence by others.

It’s a space where it’s safe to say “I don’t know” or “I made a mistake” without being labelled as incompetent or “lacking” in some vital way.

Improving well-being, engagement and productivity

Emotional safety is a vital element of an emotionally and mentally healthy environment that fosters well-being, boosts engagement, and enhances productivity. In such an environment, individuals feel secure enough to express, explore, and share their thoughts and feelings about themselves, their colleagues, managers, leaders, and even their organization as a whole. People feel respected and trusted to share ideas, establish boundaries, and be accepted for who they are, what they believe in, flaws and all.

Building mutuality

The intention is to build mutuality, defined by the American Psychological Association as:

“The tendency of relationship partners to think of themselves as members of a dyadic relationship rather than as distinct individuals. As close relationships, particularly romantic ones, develop over time, partners display increasing levels of mutuality, which may influence their affect, cognition, and behavior. In interdependence theory, the tendency of partners to depend equally on each other’s behavior for the attainment of desirable outcomes”.

We live in an interdependent, globalized world where developing emotionally safe, positive, and interactive mutual relationships across geographies, technologies, demographics, and functions is more important than ever. Mutuality lays the groundwork for creating a shared understanding that fosters a safe and open space for learning and effective interactions, based on cooperative, co-petitive, and collaborative relationships in the workplace.

Becoming attuned

Emotional intelligence, empathy, trust, and effective communication are vital for fostering emotional safety and form the basis for developing effective emotional regulation and management strategies. This enables us to attune to and connect with others with whom we wish to build relationships.

According to Dr. Dan Seigal:

“When we attune with others, we allow our internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships. Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well, and throughout our lives we need attunement to feel close and connected.”

As a foster carer, my ability and willingness to attune with them represented the most important gift I could offer the children. It allowed them to feel close and connected to someone who genuinely cared for them by simply providing the most basic essentials. With no judgement or strings attached, and with both detachment and empathy, it also provided them with crucial evidence that this could indeed continue to be possible for them in their future lives.

As a trainer, facilitator, and coach, these are the key ingredients for establishing an emotionally safe and effective learning intervention, particularly about the people side of innovation and in building an organization that fosters a culture of failure.

Developing a psychologically safe culture

Emotional safety is closely linked to psychological safety, which is the belief that individuals can be themselves at work and share their opinions and ideas without fear of negative repercussions. According to Dr Timothy Clarke at the Leaderfactor, psychological safety empowers individuals and teams to reach new levels of creativity, collaboration, and innovation by nurturing a culture of inclusion and vulnerability. It is a social condition where people feel accepted and secure enough to learn, contribute, and question the status quo, free from fear of embarrassment, marginalization, or punishment, by creating an environment founded on permission, safety, and trust.

Embodying a way of being

Creating this emotional state or culture is much harder than most people think. Most organizations believe it’s something they must achieve through process and system changes, rather than by embodying it as a way of being a manager, leader, trainer, or coach who creates:

Sanctuaries of inclusion—a space where individuals feel safe and are encouraged to express their feelings, thoughts, opinions, and ideas, fostering a profound sense of inclusion, connection, and belonging.
Safe containers – a space where individuals confidently disrupt conventional or habitual ways of doing things, step outside their comfort zones, and challenge the status quo, allowing dissonance, contradiction, paradox, and conflict as sources of creative tension to disrupt, differ, and deviate from the norm.
Collective holding spaces—where individuals accept responsibility, take ownership, and are trusted to contribute to the entire system. By fostering co-creative, interdependent relationships both internally and externally, we work towards achieving the team’s and organization’s vision, mission, purpose, and collective goals.
Incubators and accelerators of innovation—where team members are free to emerge, diverge, and converge possibilities. They are empowered, enabled, and equipped to transform these into creative ideas and opportunities. Individuals and teams feel safe in unlearning, learning, and relearning new ways of being, thinking, and acting. This environment challenges the status quo by encouraging disruptive questions, taking calculated risks, and experimenting with new ideas within an authentic, fail-fast culture that promotes quick learning.

Benefits of emotional and psychological safety

Enhances individual, team, and collective engagement, connection, and belonging. It establishes a foundation for harnessing and mobilizing people’s collective intelligence in line with the organization’s vision, mission, and purpose.
Promotes effective team collaboration, where individuals feel at ease sharing their ideas, opinions, and concerns. It cultivates an environment where diverse perspectives can be openly discussed alongside differing views:
Inspires people to be emotionally energetic, agile, and adaptable in the face of uncertainty and chaos, as well as in a rapidly changing business landscape.

AI will continue to disrupt job stability and security.

Developing emotional and psychological safety is a key success factor that underpins a culture of innovation, as it creates the essential space for individuals to think and act differently. This is achieved through experimentation, learning from failures, and exploring new methods that lead to breakthrough ideas and innovative solutions, enabling individuals to survive and thrive in the age of AI.

Both job losses and opportunities

Fast Company shares that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has a stark warning for the developed world about job losses resulting from AI. The CEO told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. This could result in a 10% to 20% rise in the unemployment rate over the next one to five years, Amodei says. The losses could come from tech, finance, law, consulting, and other white-collar professions, with entry-level jobs being hit the hardest.

Just as the children we fostered needed emotional safety, we all require emotional safety when walking our city streets. Similarly, while at work, we all need a psychologically safe working environment rooted in mutuality and trust. This is what allows individuals to attune to each other, feel secure, bonded, and connected, fostering a sense of belonging and unity. This requires investing in the co-creation of emotionally and psychologically safe spaces that attract and retain top talent, enabling individuals to feel valued, as they truly matter, and helping them adapt, innovate, grow, perform and thrive in a post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 2025.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack . It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

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Strategic Foresight Secrets to Success

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Strategic Foresight Secrets to Success

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Convinced that Strategic Foresight shows you a path through uncertainty? Great! Just don’t rush off, hire futurists, run some workshops, and start churning out glossy reports.

Activity is not achievement.

Learning from those who have achieved, however, is an excellent first activity. Following are the stories of two very different companies from different industries and eras that pursued Strategic Foresight differently yet succeeded because they tied foresight to the P&L.

Shell: From Laggard to Leader, One Decision at a Time

It’s hard to imagine Shell wasn’t always dominant, but back in the 1960s, it struggled to compete. Tired of being blindsided by competitors and external events, they sought an edge.

It took multiple attempts and more than 10 years to find it.

In 1959, Shell set up their Group Planning department, but its reliance on simple extrapolations of past trends to predict the future only perpetuated the status quo.

In 1965, Shell introduced the Unified Planning Machinery, a computerized forecasting tool to predict cash flow based on current results and forecasted changes in oil consumption. But this approach was abandoned because executives feared “that it would suppress discussion rather than encourage debate on differing perspectives.”

Then, in 1967, in a small 18^th-floor office in London, a new approach to ongoing planning began. Unlike past attempts, the goal was not to predict the future. It was to “modify the mental model of decision-makers faced with an uncertain future.”

Within a few years, their success was obvious. Shell executives stopped treating scenarios as interesting intellectual exercises and started using them to stress-test actual capital allocation decisions.

This doesn’t mean they wholeheartedly embraced or even believed the scenarios. In fact, when scenarios suggested that oil prices could spike dramatically, most executives thought it was far-fetched. Yet Shell leadership used those scenarios to restructure their entire portfolio around different types of oil and to develop new capabilities.

The result? When the 1973 oil crisis hit and oil prices quadrupled from $2.90 to $11.65 per barrel, Shell was the only major oil company ready. While competitors scrambled and lost billions, Shell turned the crisis into “big profits.”

Disney: From Missed Growth Goals to Unprecedented Growth

In 2012, Walt Disney International’s (WDI) aggressive growth targets collided with a challenging global labor market, and traditional HR approaches weren’t cutting it.

Andy Bird, Chairman of Walt Disney International, emphasized the criticality of the situation when he said, “The actions we make today are going to make an impact 10 to 20 years down the road.”

So, faced with an unprecedented challenge, the team pursued an unprecedented solution: they built a Strategic Foresight capability.

WDI trained over 500 leaders across 45 countries, representing five percent of its workforce, in Strategic Foresight. More importantly, Disney integrated strategic foresight directly into their strategic planning and performance management processes, ensuring insights drove business decisions rather than gathering dust in reports.

For example, foresight teams identified that traditional media consumption was fracturing (remember, this was 2012) and that consumers wanted more control over when and how they consumed content. This insight directly shaped Disney+’s development.

The results speak volumes. While traditional media companies struggled with streaming disruption, Disney+ reached 100 million subscribers in just 16 months.

Two Paths. One Result.

Shell and Disney integrated Strategic Foresight differently – the former as a tool to make high-stakes individual decisions, the latter as an organizational capability to affect daily decisions and culture.

What they have in common is that they made tomorrow’s possibilities accountable to today’s decisions. They did this not by treating strategic foresight as prediction, but as preparation for competitive advantage.

Ready to turn these insights into action? Next week, we’ll dive into the tools in the Strategic Foresight toolbox and how you and your team can use them to develop strategic foresight that drives informed decisions.

Image credit: Gemini

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of June 2025

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of June 2025 Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are June’s ten most popular innovation posts:

Why Business Transformations Fail — by Robyn Bolton
Three Ways Strategic Idleness Accelerates Innovation and Growth — by Robyn Bolton
Overcoming the Fear of Innovation Failure — by Stefan Lindegaard
Making People Matter in AI Era — by Janet Sernack
Yes the Comfort Zone Can Be Your Best Friend — by Stefan Lindegaard
Your Digital Transformation Starting Point — by Braden Kelley
Learn More About the Problem Before Trying to Solve It — by Mike Shipulski
Putting Human Agency at the Center of Decision-Making — by Greg Satell
Innovation or Not – SpinLaunch — by Art Inteligencia
Team Motivation Does Not Have to be Hard — by David Burkus

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in May that continue to resonate with people:

You Already Have Too Many Ideas — by Mike Shipulski
Portfolio Management and Category Power — by Geoffrey A. Moore
Your Legends Define Your Culture — by Shep Hyken
Should We Stop Asking Employees to Innovate? — by Stefan Lindegaard
Benchmarking Innovation Performance — by Noel Sobelman

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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Strategic Foresight Won’t Save Your Company

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But Ignoring Strategic Foresight Will Kill It

Strategic Foresight Won't Save Your Company

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Are you spooked by the uncertainty and volatility that defines not just our businesses but our everyday lives? Have you hunkered down, stayed the course, and hoped that this too shall pass? Are you starting to worry that this approach can’t go on forever but unsure of what to do next? CONGRATULATIONS, consultants have heard your cries and are rolling out a shiny new framework promising to solve everything: Strategic Foresight.

Strategic foresight is the latest silver bullet for navigating our chaotic, unpredictable world.

Remember in 2016 when Agility was going to save us all? Good times.

As much as I love rolling my eyes at the latest magic framework, I have to be honest – Strategic Foresight can live up to the hype. If you do it right.

What Strategic Foresight Actually Is (Spoiler: Not a Silver Bullet)

A LOT is being published about Strategic Foresight (I received 7 newsletters on the topic last week) and everyone has their own spin. So let’s cut through the hype and get back to basics

What it is: Strategic foresight is the systematic exploration of multiple possible futures to anticipate opportunities and risks, enabling informed decisions today to capture advantages tomorrow.

There’s a lot there so let’s break it down:

Systematic exploration: This isn’t guessing, predicting, or opining. This is a rigorous and structured approach
Multiple possible futures: Examines multiple scenarios because we can’t possibly forecast or predict the one future that will occur
Enabling informed decisions today: This isn’t an academic exercise you revisit once a year. It informs and guides decisions and actions this year.
Capture advantages tomorrow: Positions you to respond to change with confidence and beat your competition to the punch

How it fits: Strategic Foresight doesn’t replace what you’re doing. It informs and drives it.

Approach	Timeline	Focus
Strategic Foresight	5-20+ years	Explore possible futures
Strategic Planning	3-5 years	Create competitive advantage
Business Planning	Annual cycles	Execute specific actions

The sequence matters: Foresight → Strategic Planning → Business Planning.

This sequence also explains why Strategic Foresight is so hot right now. Systemic change used to take years, even decades, to unfold. As a result, you could look out 3-5 years, anticipate what would be next, and you would probably be right.

Now, systemic change can happen overnight and be undone by noon the next day. Whatever you think will happen will probably be wrong and in ways you can’t anticipate, let alone plan for and execute against.

Strategic Foresight’s rigorous, multi-input approach gives us the illusion of control in a world that seems to be spinning out of it.

How to Avoid the Illusion and Get the Results.

Personally, I love the illusion of control BUT as a business practice, I don’t recommend it.

Strategic Foresight’s benefits will stay an illustion if you don’t:

Develop in-house strategic foresight capabilities. Amy Webb’s research at NYU shows that companies using rigorous foresight methodologies consistently outperform those stuck in reactive mode. Shell’s legendary scenario planning helped them navigate oil crises while competitors flailed. Disney’s Natural Foresight® Framework keeps them ahead of entertainment trends that blindside others.
Integrate foresight into your annual strategic planning cycle: Strategic foresight is a front-end effort that makes your 3-5 year strategy more robust. If you treat it like a separate exercise where you hire futurists, and run some workshops, and check the Strategic Foresight box, you won’t see any benefits or results.

What’s Next?

Strategic foresight isn’t a silver bullet, but it can be a path through uncertainty to advantage and growth.

The difference between success and failure comes down to execution. Do you treat it as prediction or preparation? Do you integrate it with existing planning or silo it in innovation labs?

Ready to separate the hype from the hard results? Our next post shows you what two industry leaders learned about turning foresight into competitive advantage and how you can use those lessons to your benefit

Image credit: Pixabay

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Fueling Competitive Advantage Through Continuous Experience Improvement

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Rise of the Experience Management Office (XMO)

Fueling Competitive Advantage Through Continuous Experience Improvement

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, the battle for market share is no longer waged solely on product features or price points. It’s fought and won on the battleground of experience. From the first touchpoint to ongoing engagement, every interaction a customer, employee, or partner has with your organization shapes their perception and ultimately, their loyalty. As a human-centered change and innovation author, I’ve seen firsthand how organizations that prioritize experience improvement don’t just survive – they thrive. But how does an organization systematically achieve this? The answer, increasingly, lies in the strategic establishment and effective operation of an Experience Management Office (XMO).

For too long, experience initiatives have been fragmented, siloed within individual departments, or relegated to one-off projects. This piecemeal approach might deliver incremental gains in specific areas, but it rarely translates into a holistic, differentiating experience across the entire organizational ecosystem. This is precisely where the XMO steps in, acting as the central nervous system for all things experience-related.

What is an Experience Management Office (XMO)?

At its core, an XMO is a dedicated, cross-functional entity responsible for orchestrating, governing, and continuously improving all facets of an organization’s experiences. Think of it as the strategic hub that connects the dots between customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), partner experience (PX), and even product experience (PX), ensuring a cohesive and compelling narrative across every interaction. It moves beyond simply collecting feedback to proactively designing, measuring, and optimizing experiences with a strategic lens.

The XMO isn’t just another committee; it’s a strategic imperative. Its mandate extends to:

Defining a Unified Experience Vision: Establishing a clear, organization-wide understanding of what “great experience” looks like and how it aligns with strategic business objectives.
Establishing Experience Governance: Setting standards, processes, and guidelines for experience design, delivery, and measurement across all functions and touchpoints.
Fostering a Culture of Empathy and Experience-Centricity: Championing a mindset where every employee understands their role in delivering exceptional experiences.
Driving Cross-Functional Collaboration: Breaking down silos to ensure seamless handoffs and consistent experiences across departments.
Leveraging Technology for Experience Management: Identifying and implementing tools for feedback collection, journey mapping, analytics, and personalization.
Measuring and Monitoring Experience Performance: Defining key metrics and establishing robust reporting mechanisms to track progress and identify areas for improvement.
Strategically Managing the Experience Improvement Backlog: Prioritizing and sequencing experience enhancement initiatives based on impact, feasibility, and strategic alignment.

Defining and Monitoring Experience Metrics: The XMO’s Data-Driven Approach

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. This timeless adage holds particularly true for experience. A mature XMO moves beyond vanity metrics to establish a comprehensive suite of experience metrics that provide actionable insights. These typically include a mix of:

Lagging Indicators: These reflect past performance and often include traditional metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), and employee engagement scores.
Leading Indicators: These provide foresight into future performance and can include metrics related to website navigation ease, call resolution rates, time-to-onboard new employees, or speed of partner response.
Operational Metrics: These track the efficiency and effectiveness of processes that impact experience, such as average handle time in customer service or employee training completion rates.
Financial Impact Metrics: Ultimately, experience must link back to business outcomes. The XMO tracks how experience improvements contribute to revenue growth, cost reduction, customer retention, and employee productivity.

The XMO is responsible for the systematic collection, analysis, and dissemination of these metrics. They establish dashboards, conduct regular reviews, and translate data into compelling narratives that drive action at all levels of the organization. This data-driven approach allows the XMO to identify pain points, celebrate successes, and most importantly, make informed decisions about where to focus improvement efforts.

Strategic Management of an Experience Improvement Backlog: Prioritization for Impact

One of the most critical functions of an XMO is the strategic management of the experience improvement backlog. In any large organization, there will be a seemingly endless list of ideas, suggestions, and identified issues related to improving experience. Without a centralized, strategic approach, these can become overwhelming and lead to a reactive, rather than proactive, improvement cycle.

The XMO brings discipline to this process by:

Centralizing Experience Feedback and Insights: Gathering input from all sources – customer surveys, employee feedback, market research, competitive analysis, operational data, and frontline observations.
Structuring and Categorizing Backlog Items: Organizing identified improvement opportunities by experience type (CX, EX, PX), impact area, customer journey stage, or strategic alignment.
Quantifying Impact and Feasibility: Working with relevant stakeholders to assess the potential impact of each improvement on key metrics and the feasibility of implementation (cost, resources, technical complexity).
Prioritizing Based on Strategic Value: Applying a strategic framework (e.g., Weighted Shortest Job First – WSJF, Kano Model, RICE scoring) to prioritize backlog items based on their potential to drive competitive advantage, address critical pain points, or capitalize on emerging opportunities.
Translating into Actionable Initiatives: Working with product teams, IT, HR, marketing, and other departments to translate prioritized backlog items into concrete projects and initiatives with clear owners and timelines.
Monitoring Progress and Measuring Outcomes: Tracking the progress of improvement initiatives and, critically, measuring the actual impact on the defined experience metrics to ensure the desired outcomes are achieved.

“An XMO transforms experience from a reactive afterthought into a proactive, strategic differentiator. It’s about building a muscle for continuous improvement, not just a one-time fix.”

Building and Maintaining Competitive Advantage Through Continuous Experience Improvement

In a world where products and services are increasingly commoditized, the truly sustainable competitive advantage lies in the experience you deliver. Organizations with a mature XMO don’t just react to market changes; they proactively shape customer expectations and employee capabilities. They build a culture of continuous learning and adaptation, where experience is not just a buzzword, but a measurable, managed asset.

By systematically defining and monitoring experience metrics, and strategically managing an experience improvement backlog, the XMO enables organizations to:

Increase Customer Loyalty and Retention: Delighted customers stay longer and refer more.
Improve Employee Engagement and Productivity: Empowered and positive employees deliver better experiences.
Enhance Brand Reputation and Equity: A consistently positive experience builds trust and a strong brand.
Drive Operational Efficiencies: Streamlined, user-friendly experiences often reduce costs and rework.
Accelerate Innovation: A deep understanding of experience pain points and desires fuels meaningful new solutions.

The journey to becoming an experience-led organization is not a sprint; it’s a marathon. But with an XMO leading the charge, equipped with the right metrics and a disciplined approach to improvement, organizations can systematically build and maintain a formidable competitive advantage. It’s time to stop treating experience as an afterthought and elevate it to the strategic imperative it truly is.

Contact me if you’re interested in working together to build or enhance your Experience Management Office (XMO).

Content Authenticity Statement: The ideas are those of Braden Kelley, shaped into an article introducing the topic with a little help from Google Gemini.

Image credit: Gemini

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Employees Are Calling BS on Customer-First Leadership

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Employees Are Calling BS on Customer-First Leadership

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

The data speaks for itself: Your employees don’t believe you practice customer-first leadership.

According to Gallup’s research, only one in five of your people think you make decisions with customers in mind. That means four out of five watch you say one thing and do another. Every. Single. Day.

And it’s getting worse. Fewer than three in ten of your employees feel proud of what they’re building for your customers. As a result, employee pride in what they create and deliver is at an all-time low.

You know what this means, don’t you? Your customer-first messaging isn’t inspiring anyone—it’s insulting them. Because they see the truth behind your town hall speeches, and the truth is that customers aren’t first.

How Are We Still Screwing This Up?

Customer-centricity has been business gospel for decades. We’ve got libraries full of case studies, armies of consultants, and enough “customer first” wall art to wallpaper the Apple HQ. So, how the hell are we getting worse at this?

Because most leaders treat customer focus like a box to check. They say the right words in town halls and analyst calls but make decisions that prioritize quarterly numbers, internal politics, and whatever shiny new idea they come up with.

Leaders say customers come first, then cut support staff to hit margins. They preach customer obsession, then ignore feedback that requires real change. They commission expensive customer journey maps, then never look at them again.

Employees see it all.

And when employees stop believing in what they deliver, customers know it immediately. Every burned-out support call, every half-hearted sales pitch, every policy that punishes the customer to boost the company’s profit.

You CAN do better

You only need to look as far as the telecom industry (?!?!?!) for an $800 million example.

In 2005, Arlene Harris co-founded GreatCall (now Lively) and did something radical: she built a company based on the Jobs to be Done of senior citizens. While everyone else chased flashy features for younger markets, she recognized that older Americans didn’t want a smartphone—they wanted a lifeline.

Harris delivered with the Jitterbug, a simple flip phone with giant buttons. But that was just the beginning. Focusing more on helping customers stay safe and connected than cool features for the tech geeks, she quickly built an ecosystem offering emergency response, health monitoring, 24/7 human support, and caregiver connectivity.

When Best Buy acquired GreatCall for $800 million in 2018, they weren’t buying a phone company. They were buying something rare: a trusted, high-value services company with intensely loyal customers.

Harris succeeded by doing precisely what the data shows most leaders aren’t doing: genuinely understanding and serving real customer needs.

WILL you do better?

Customer-first leadership isn’t a box to check. It’s basic leadership integrity. It’s the difference between meaning what you say and just saying what sounds good.

When four out of five of your employees don’t trust your customer commitment, the problem isn’t your strategy deck, digital transformation, or tariffs. The problem is you.

So here’s your moment of truth: When was the last time you listened to customer service calls? Not the sanitized highlights your team shows you—the raw, unfiltered frustration of someone who can’t get help. When did you last sit in a waiting room and watch how people navigate your system? Or stock a shelf and see what customers actually do?

If you can’t remember, that’s your answer. If you’ve never done it, that’s worse.

The question is: Will you keep performing customer-centricity, or start practicing it?

Image credit: Pixabay

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Innovation is Unknowable Not Uncertain

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Innovation is Unknowable Not Uncertain

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Where’s the Marketing Brief? In product development, the Marketing team creates a document that defines who will buy the new product (the customer), what needs are satisfied by the new product and how the customer will use the new product. And Marketing team also uses their crystal ball to estimate the number of units the customers will buy, when they’ll buy it and how much they’ll pay. In theory, the Marketing Brief is finalized before the engineers start their work.

With innovation, there can be no Marketing Brief because there are no customers, no product and no technology to underpin it. And the needs the innovation will satisfy are unknowable because customers have not asked for the them, nor can the customer understand the innovation if you showed it to them. And how the customers will use the? That’s unknowable because, again, there are no customers and no customer needs. And how many will you sell and the sales price? Again, unknowable.

Where’s the Specification? In product development, the Marketing Brief is translated into a Specification that defines what the product must do and how much it will cost. To define what the product must do, the Specification defines a set of test protocols and their measurable results. And the minimum performance is defined as a percentage improvement over the test results of the existing product.

With innovation, there can be no Specification because there are no customers, no product, no technology and no business model. In that way, there can be no known test protocols and the minimum performance criteria are unknowable.

Where’s the Schedule? In product development, the tasks are defined, their sequence is defined and their completion dates are defined. Because the work has been done before, the schedule is a lot like the last one. Everyone knows the drill because they’ve done it before.

With innovation, there can be no schedule. The first task can be defined, but the second cannot because the second depends on the outcome of the first. If the first experiment is successful, the second step builds on the first. But if the first experiment is unsuccessful, the second must start from scratch. And if the customer likes the first prototype, the next step is clear. But if they don’t, it’s back to the drawing board. And the experiments feed the customer learning and the customer learning shapes the experiments.

Innovation is different than product development. And success in product development may work against you in innovation. If you’re doing innovation and you find yourself trying to lock things down, you may be misapplying your product development expertise. If you’re doing innovation and you find yourself trying to write a specification, you may be misapplying your product development expertise. And if you are doing innovation and find yourself trying to nail down a completion date, you are definitely misapplying your product development expertise.

With innovation, people say the work is uncertain, but to me that’s not the right word. To me, the work is unknowable. The customer is unknowable because the work hasn’t been done before. The specification is unknowable because there is nothing for comparison. And the schedule in unknowable because, again, the work hasn’t been done before.

To set expectations appropriately, say the innovation work is unknowable. You’ll likely get into a heated discuss with those who want demand a Marketing Brief, Specification and Schedule, but you’ll make the point that with innovation, the rules of product development don’t apply.

Image credit: Unsplash

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