AI Will Create a More Human Future, Not a Less Human One

An AI Soft Landing Scenario

AI Soft Landing Scenario
by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

What If the Future Gets More Human?

We spend a remarkable amount of time rehearsing the wrong ending.

In one popular story, artificial intelligence hollows out work, flattens craft, and leaves people performing the emotional leftovers of automation. That is a hard landing: humans demoted by systems that do more of everything, including the parts of work that used to make us feel useful.

There is another future available to us, what I call an AI soft landing. In that future, organizations and societies deliberately design AI to absorb fragmentation, acceleration, and low-judgment transaction. What returns to humans is not emptiness. What returns is depth: larger blocks of time for insight, empathy, decision making, direction setting, problem definition, creativity, and collaboration. The future becomes more human, not less, because human attention is finally reserved for human work.

This is not a naive techno-optimism. Soft landings are designed. Hard landings arrive when efficiency is the only value on the dashboard.

The Hidden Enemy Was Never “Work.” It Was Fragmentation.

Most knowledge work did not become less meaningful because people stopped caring. It became less meaningful because attention was diced into tickets, pings, updates, status rituals, and micro-approvals. We mistook motion for progress and responsiveness for value.

Task switching is expensive. Every context shift asks the brain to unload one problem and reload another. Multiply that by a day of chats, forms, triage, and administrative glue work, and you get a workforce that is always “on” and rarely deep. Strategic thinking does not fail only for lack of talent. It fails for lack of contiguous time.

AI’s first gift, if we use it well, is not genius on demand. It is fewer interrupted minutes. When drafting, scheduling, summarizing, searching, classifying, routing, and first-pass analysis get accelerated or handled, the calendar can stop looking like confetti. Bigger time blocks reappear. And bigger blocks are the raw material of original insight.

AI Future of Work

What Humans Should Own in a Soft Landing

A soft landing is not humans “using AI better.” It is a clear division of cognitive labor, one that protects the uniquely human contribution instead of competing with the machine on volume.

In a more human future, people spend more of their capacity on:

Insight development — connecting weak signals into meaning, not merely producing more output
Empathy — understanding stakes, dignity, and lived context that no dashboard fully captures
Decision making — choosing under uncertainty with values, tradeoffs, and accountability
Direction setting — naming where we are going and why it is worth the journey
Problem definition — asking better questions before rushing to automated answers
Creativity — combining perspectives in ways that are novel, useful, and humanly resonant
Collaboration — building trust, resolving conflict, and making progress together

Notice what is missing from that list: being the fastest typist in the room. Soft landing excellence is not measured in tokens per minute. It is measured in clarity per hour — and in whether people leave interactions more capable, more trusted, and more oriented than before.

From Transactional Lives to Strategic Ones

When small tasks expand to fill the day, even senior roles become transactional. Leaders spend their best hours approving instead of directing, reacting instead of sensing, facilitating meetings about work rather than doing the work of judgment.

AI can reverse that inversion, but only if organizations stop using every efficiency gain to stuff more micro-tasks into the same damaged attention budget. Saving ten minutes and immediately filling them with ten more interruptions is not transformation. It is denser exhaustion.

The soft landing asks a different operating question: What human capability do we want more of, now that machines can carry more of the glue?

If the answer is “more throughput at any cost,” you will automate people into thinner slices of busyness. If the answer is “more strategic quality, better problem framing, deeper customer and employee understanding,” AI becomes a scaffold for human depth. Less task switching. More deliberate thinking. Fewer performative updates. More real collaboration around decisions that matter.

AI Human Endeavors

How Leaders Design a Soft Landing (Instead of Hoping for One)

Human-centered change makes soft landings practical. A few design moves matter more than tool catalogs:

Automate the glue, not the judgment. Route AI toward fragmentation: search, draft, summarize, schedule, classify, prepare. Keep humans responsible for choices with ethical, relational, or strategic consequence.
Protect deep-work blocks as policy, not privilege. If AI creates capacity, calendar culture must not immediately reclaim it for more meetings.
Redefine roles around human endeavors. Job descriptions should emphasize insight, empathy, problem definition, and direction — not inbox velocity as a proxy for value.
Measure success in human outcomes. Track decision quality, customer trust, employee agency, and innovation usefulness — not only cost per interaction.
Teach the craft of better questions. In an AI-rich world, problem definition becomes a core leadership skill. Bad prompts and bad frames still produce confident nonsense.
Build collaboration for synthesis, not status. Use reclaimed time for cross-functional sense-making, not another dashboard review theater.

This is experience design for the future of work: design the system so people can be fully human on purpose.

The Choice Ahead

Futurology is not prediction cosplay. It is responsibility with a longer horizon.

We can use AI to compress people into ever-faster transaction machines. Or we can use it to return something modern work has been quietly stealing: the ability to think, feel, decide, and create with integrity.

The soft landing is the second path, a future where machines handle more of the small so humans can do more of the meaningful. Where strategy is less of a slide ritual and more of a practiced habit. Where customer and employee experience improve not only because algorithms personalize, but because people finally have the attention required for empathy and judgment.

A more human future will not arrive by accident. It will be designed by leaders who refuse to confuse automation with progress, and who insist that the best use of artificial intelligence is the expansion of human capacity where it still matters most.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an AI soft landing?

An AI soft landing is a future in which artificial intelligence absorbs fragmented, transactional tasks so humans can spend more time on deeper endeavors — insight, empathy, decision making, direction setting, problem definition, creativity, and collaboration — making work more human rather than less.

How does AI reduce task switching at work?

AI can handle or accelerate small tasks such as drafting, summarizing, searching, scheduling, classifying, and routing. When organizations protect the time this frees, instead of immediately filling it with more interruptions, people gain larger blocks for strategic thinking and higher-quality collaboration.

What should leaders do to make the future more human with AI?

Leaders should automate glue work rather than human judgment, protect deep-work capacity as policy, redesign roles around human endeavors, measure human outcomes as well as efficiency, invest in better problem definition, and use reclaimed time for real collaboration and decision quality — not denser busyness.

Image Credits: Cursor

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Cursor to clean up the article.

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Managing Your Work Friends

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Managing Your Work Friends

GUEST POST from David Burkus

You just got promoted. Congratulations! But now you’re managing your friends. The people you used to grab lunch with, the ones you vented to about the boss, and the folks who knew every inside joke from your team Slack channel — they’re your team. And you’re their boss.

Work friendships are powerful. They boost morale, improve collaboration, and make the workday more enjoyable. I don’t have to convince you that having friends at work is valuable. But when the power dynamic shifts, when you go from being “work friend” to “work boss,” things inevitably change. Suddenly your decisions carry weight — promotions, raises, performance reviews, and tough calls that impact livelihoods. At the same time, your team knows a lot about you. Maybe they’ve seen your Instagram stories or been with you at happy hours. That blurred line between friendship and authority can get messy fast.

And this is the dilemma of managing your friends: how do you maintain meaningful relationships without undermining your credibility as a leader? How do you stay approachable and authentic while also being consistent and fair?

The answer isn’t easy, but it is possible. It starts with understanding what doesn’t work, and then rebuilding those friendships into a new kind of relationship.

Why Most New Managers Struggle

Most new managers stumble into one of two extremes when they start managing their friends. They either pretend nothing has changed, or they change everything.

Some ignore the shift. They keep gossiping, keep oversharing, keep hanging out exactly the same way — hoping the friendship will buffer any awkwardness. But it doesn’t. That kind of behavior undermines authority when it’s time to make a hard call. A joke about a teammate suddenly looks like favoritism. A venting session about a senior leader sounds like open dissent. And the manager’s credibility takes the hit.

Others overcorrect. They pull back completely. They stop socializing. They stop texting. They stop grabbing coffee or lunch. They put up walls and operate only in “professional mode.” That comes across as cold — because it is. And the sudden distance damages trust and morale.

Both extremes backfire. Pretending nothing has changed creates resentment and perceptions of favoritism. Overcorrecting destroys connection and trust. Neither approach works long term. What new managers really need is a third path: redefining the friendship for the new reality.

Why The Old Dynamic Doesn’t Work Anymore

It helps to remember why friendships at work felt easy before. They were built on equality. You were in the trenches together — venting about the same boss, rolling your eyes in the same meetings, maybe even sneaking out early together on a Friday. But the key word there is were. You were equals. Now you’re not.

Power dynamics are like gravity. You don’t always see them, but they’re always pulling. Once you’re in charge, every interaction gets filtered through that shift. You may think you’re just being candid with an old friend, but now it sounds like the boss has picked a side. You may think you’re just cutting them some slack, but others see favoritism. And once your team suspects favoritism, everything else you do gets questioned — your motives, your decisions, even your integrity.

That’s why the old friendship dynamic doesn’t work anymore. It’s not because the friendship isn’t real — it’s because the context has changed. So if you want to keep both your friendships and your credibility, you’ll need to redefine the relationship.

Five Tips For Managing Your Friends

1. Address the Shift Directly

Pretending nothing has changed is like pretending you didn’t just get promoted. Everyone knows. They feel it already. And if you don’t address it, the tension just lingers like an awkward silence no one names.

The fix is surprisingly simple: talk about it. You don’t need to make a big speech or hold a formal meeting. Just have an honest one-on-one conversation with each friend. Something as short as:

“Hey, I know this feels a little different now that I’m in this role. I really value our friendship, and I want to make sure I’m being fair and consistent with the whole team. What boundaries make sense for us?”

That’s it. Short, honest, specific. And it shows you care enough to be proactive. Trust me, your friend is already wondering how things are going to change. By being the first to bring it up, you take away the uncertainty and replace it with clarity.

2. Embrace Your New Role

You can still be friendly, but you can’t be “one of the gang” anymore. Accepting that reality is part of stepping into leadership.

This is where many new managers trip up. They cling to the old dynamic. They keep venting frustrations, gossiping, and oversharing with their closest colleagues. But once you’re the boss, those conversations hit differently. A joke about a coworker is no longer harmless — it’s favoritism. Complaining about company policy isn’t just blowing off steam — it’s sowing dissent.

And those side conversations? They never stay side conversations. They spread. They change perceptions. They chip away at your authority.

That doesn’t mean you need to become robotic. You can still laugh with your team. You can still celebrate wins. You can still be approachable. But you’re “leader first, friend second” now. And when you need to vent, find a new outlet—a mentor, another manager, or someone outside the company. Your team isn’t your sounding board anymore.

3. Stay Consistent to Avoid Favoritism

Fairness isn’t just a leadership principle—it’s a credibility shield. The quickest way to lose trust is to treat your friends differently than the rest of the team.

That doesn’t mean you’ll intend to play favorites. It’s usually subtle. Giving your old buddy more slack on a deadline. Asking them for input first in meetings. Grabbing lunch with them a little more often than with others. None of those things seem like a big deal, but your team notices. They always notice. And once they suspect favoritism, the dynamic of the whole team changes.

So be deliberate about how you lead. Rotate lunch invites. Keep feedback tied to measurable goals so everyone sees the standard is the same. Spread recognition evenly and shine the spotlight on the whole team, not just the familiar faces. Consistency protects your credibility and reinforces trust across the group.

4. Reevaluate Social Media Boundaries

Before you were the boss, your social media interactions were harmless — liking memes, posting weekend selfies, swapping DMs. But now? Those same interactions can be seen as bias or favoritism, and worse, they come with receipts.

A casual photo at a backyard barbecue? Favoritism. Liking a slightly edgy meme your friend shared? Bias. Responding privately to a rant about another teammate? Favoritism again — this time with screenshots. You don’t have to ghost your entire digital life, but you do need to tighten boundaries. Adjust privacy settings. Consider unfollowing or at least limiting interactions. Keep work and social media in separate lanes. And follow this rule of thumb: if you wouldn’t put it in a company email, don’t put it in a DM.

5. Focus on Connection Through the Work

One of the best parts about working with friends is the sense of connection. The risk, when you become their boss, is thinking you need to pull away completely to preserve fairness. But you don’t. You just need to redirect that connection into the work itself.

Research on prosocial motivation—our drive to protect and promote the well-being of others—shows that teams thrive when they’re bonded around shared purpose. That’s your new role: to cultivate connection not through gossip or side chats, but through collaboration, recognition, and shared wins.

Keep the relationships, but root them in the team’s mission. That way you’re not just holding on to friendships—you’re strengthening the team.

The Bottom Line

Managing your friends after a promotion is one of the trickiest leadership challenges you’ll face. If you pretend nothing’s changed, you’ll lose credibility. If you overcorrect, you’ll lose connection. The path forward is acknowledging the shift, embracing your new role, staying consistent, setting boundaries, and channeling friendship into shared purpose.

You don’t have to lose your friends when you become their boss. But you do have to lead them differently. And if you do it well, you won’t just keep your friendships — you’ll earn their respect.

Image credit: Gemini

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Customer Experience Audit vs. Customer Satisfaction Survey

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Why They Measure Different Things

Customer Experience Audit vs. Customer Satisfaction Survey

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

“We already survey our customers” is the single most common objection I hear when I raise the idea of an experience audit, and it’s a reasonable one on the surface — why pay for a second measurement of the same thing? The honest answer is that a survey and an audit aren’t measuring the same thing at all. They’re not even measuring in the same direction.

A survey measures what customers are willing to tell you

NPS, CSAT, and CES all share a structural feature: they depend entirely on a customer choosing to respond, and then choosing to be candid in that response. That’s not a flaw in the instrument — it’s simply what the instrument is. It tells you the sentiment of your most engaged customers (response rates skew toward people who feel strongly, in either direction) at a single moment, about the parts of the experience they happened to be thinking about when the survey arrived.

What it structurally cannot tell you: what happened to the customer who didn’t respond. What the friction actually looked like, step by step, that produced a “6” instead of a “9.” Whether a “9” from one customer and a “9” from another represent the same underlying experience, or two very different ones that both happened to land on the same number.

An audit measures what’s actually happening in the journey

An audit doesn’t ask customers to self-report — it walks the journey directly, the way a real customer experiences it, and documents what’s actually there. That distinction matters most exactly where surveys go quiet: the steps a customer takes for granted and never thinks to mention, the workaround they built without realizing it was a workaround, the moment where the process technically succeeded but took four times longer than it should have.

You can walk journeys for clients whose NPS had been flat, technically acceptable, for years — and find friction serious enough to explain real revenue loss, sitting in a step that had simply never come up in a survey response because no customer thought to complain about something they’d quietly adapted to.

Where each one actually earns its place

None of this makes the survey obsolete — it makes it a different tool for a different job. A survey is the right instrument for tracking sentiment trend over time, cheaply and continuously, across your whole customer base. It’s the wrong instrument for finding out why the trend is what it is, or for finding the friction nobody thought to mention.

An audit is the right instrument for that “why” — for producing a specific, prioritized map of where the experience actually breaks, ranked by business impact. It’s not something you run monthly; it’s something you run when the survey data has told you that something’s wrong without telling you what.

The tell that you need one, not the other

If your satisfaction scores have been flat — not declining, just plateaued — despite genuine effort to improve them, that’s usually the clearest signal that the problem lives somewhere the survey can’t see, and that more survey data won’t produce a different answer than the data you already have. That’s the specific situation an audit is built for.

If you want a rough sense of what that plateau might be costing before committing to a diagnosis, the CX ROI Calculator is a fast way to put a number on it. When you’re ready to find out exactly where the friction is living, that’s what a Customer Experience Audit is for.

Want to learn more about the value of having an independent Customer Experience Audit done? Or are you ready to invest in one?

Image Credit: Gemini, ChatGPT

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article.

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The Leadership Journey

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The Leadership Journey

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you know what to do, do it. Don’t ask, just do.

If you’re pretty sure what to do, do it. Don’t ask, just do.

If you think you may know what to do, do it. Don’t ask, just do.

If you don’t know what to do, try something small. Then, do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

If your team doesn’t know what to do unless they ask you, tell them to do what they think is right. And tell them to stop asking you what to do.

If your team won’t act without your consent, tell them to do what they think is right. Then, next time they seek your consent, be unavailable.

If the team knows what to do and they go around you because they know you don’t, praise them for going around you. Then, set up a session where they educate you on what you should know.

If the team knows what to do and they know you don’t, but they don’t go around you because they are too afraid, apologize to them for creating a fear-based culture and ask them to do what they think is right. Then, look inside to figure out how to let go of your insecurities and control issues.

If your team needs your support, support them.

If your team need you to get out of the way, go home early.

If your team needs you to break trail, break it.

If they need to see how it should go, show them.

If they need the rules broken, break them.

If they need the rules followed, follow them.

If they need to use their judgement, create the causes and conditions for them to use their judgement.

If they try something new and it doesn’t go as anticipated, praise them for trying something new.

If they try the same thing a second time and they get the same results and those results are still unanticipated, set up a meeting to figure out why they thought the same experiment would lead to different results.

Try to create the team that excels when you go on vacation.

Better yet, try to create the team that performs extremely well when you’re involved in the work and performs even better when you’re on vacation. Then, because you know you’ve prepared them for the future, happily move on to your next personal development opportunity.

Image credits: Pixabay

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Case Study – Innovating Around a Disruption

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Škoda built a bike bell that beats noise-cancelling headphones

Case Study - Innovating Around a Disruption

GUEST POST from Jason Hauer

A near-miss on a London street became Škoda’s smartest marketing spend in years. The bigger idea: someone else’s AI has broken something in your category too, and fixing it might be your next growth play.

Ben Fraser was walking to work near Borough Market, headphones on, when a cyclist nearly hit him. The cyclist had been ringing his bell the whole way down the street. Fraser never heard a thing.

Fraser works at PHD Media, and the near-miss became a brief. Transport for London data showed bike-pedestrian collisions rose 24% in 2024, with cyclists set to outnumber car drivers in London for the first time this year. One quiet contributor: active noise cancellation. The bike bell had worked for a century. On a growing share of pedestrians, it simply stopped working, because an algorithm in their headphones was scrubbing it out of the air.

Škoda, the Czech carmaker owned by Volkswagen Group and one of Europe’s biggest auto brands, took the problem to acoustics researchers at the University of Salford. Testing turned up something useful: noise-cancelling algorithms struggle with a narrow band between 750 and 780 hertz. So Škoda built the DuoBell, a second resonator tuned to that gap, plus a hammer that strikes in an irregular rhythm the algorithms can’t predict. Fully mechanical. A piece of metal designed to beat software.

They tested it with a fleet of Deliveroo riders in London, people whose income depends on being heard in traffic. One rider said that with the bell, he finally had a voice in the streets. The riders wanted to keep them.

Pedestrians in noise-cancelling headphones gained up to five extra seconds of reaction time and up to 22 metres of additional distance. Roughly four times the cut-through of a standard bell. Škoda published the underlying research as an open-source white paper, and the work took Silver in Creative Data at Cannes in June. One case-study breakdown projects €79 million in vehicle sales connected to the project, which fits how the company sees it. Škoda started life as a bicycle maker in 1895 and still sponsors the Tour de France. The fix sits inside a hundred-year-old brand truth.

Nobody at the headphone companies set out to make cyclists invisible. Noise cancellation was a good product decision that quietly broke a safety system in a completely different category, and the breakage sat unowned for years while collisions climbed. That pattern is everywhere now. Every AI deployment of the last three years created some downstream effect in somebody else’s business.

Somebody is absorbing that cost right now, and no line item owns it.

Look at your own category through that lens. A century-old bell stopped working because ears started running software. Every signal your company sends was built the same way, for a human on the receiving end, and a machine now sits between you and that person. Your buyer’s first impression of you is written by a model you’ve never briefed. Everything you send after that runs through software tuned by companies with no stake in whether you’re heard. Somewhere in that chain, something that worked in your category for decades is being scrubbed out of the air, and the loss surfaces in a metric you’ve been explaining some other way. The collision numbers sat in Transport for London’s data before anyone thought to blame headphones. Your version of that number already exists. It’s in a dashboard right now, filed under something else.

Škoda’s move was to treat the breakage as a market. Find the gap, spend the budget on fixing it, and let the fix carry the brand. The bell exists because someone measured a frequency nobody had bothered to look for.

Skoda DuoBell statistics

WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK

The first conversation moved. Your customer now asks a model before they ask you, whether that’s a buyer building a shortlist or a client second-guessing your advice. This week, put your customers’ most common questions to the major models, worded the way they’d word them. What comes back is your new first impression.

The unfiltered channels are still open. Every digital signal you send now clears someone else’s software before a human sees it. Nothing stands between a room and the people in it. Škoda answered an algorithm with a piece of metal; your equivalent might be a dinner, or a printed report that lives on a desk for a month. Pick the one message this quarter that can’t survive being flattened and spend real money delivering it by hand.

The next breakage is already in somebody’s data. The collision numbers sat in Transport for London’s files before anyone blamed headphones. Spend an hour with your team on two questions. What have our own AI deployments broken for the people downstream, the customer who needed a person, the partner whose emails our triage now buries? And what’s degrading in our category that nobody has claimed yet? One of those answers is a liability you can still price before a competitor does. The other is a bell nobody has built.

Whatever you find, take it all the way to metal. Škoda could have stopped at the white paper. The bell is the reason you’re reading about them.

A century-old bell needed one new frequency to work again. Your category has a gap like that somewhere.

What’s quietly stopped working in your category?

Image credit: Jason Hauer

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10 Ways to Build Customer Trust in Customer Experience

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10 Ways to Build Customer Trust in Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

This article answers the question: Are organizations not only paying attention to the feedback customers give but also to the feedback they unintentionally withhold?

In the past few months, I’ve been writing and speaking about how trust fits into the customer experience. Trust is earned, and once earned, it results in a customer who has confidence to keep doing business with you. I created a metric, the Customer Confidence Score (CCS), to measure how much a customer trusts you. So, let’s say the customer gives you a 10 on a scale of 1-10. Why do they give you that perfect score? Here are ten reasons why:

You Keep Your Promise: This is simple. You do what you say you will do, and always when you say you will.
Fixing and Owning Mistakes: You don’t make excuses and blame others. You simply focus on fixing whatever needs fixing.
Transparency: There are no surprises, such as hidden fees or rules hidden in small print.
You Protect Your Customer’s Data: Your customer’s privacy and security aren’t negotiable. How the customer’s information and data are protected and how breaches are handled will add to your customer’s trust. Customers must know you guard their information.
You Show Respect: Treat your customers with dignity, respect, and appreciation. This builds trust.
You Embrace Feedback: Your customers know their voice matters. You listen and act on their feedback, and, just as important, you acknowledge them for sharing it.
You Give Back: A company that has a social cause or gives back to the community enjoys more trust than companies that don’t.
You Don’t Take Advantage of Customers: Your customers never feel manipulated by sales tactics, small print, or anything that makes them feel uncomfortable or taken advantage of.
Consistency: When customers do business with you, they know what to expect.
Ethics: This is non-negotiable. There should never be any question about your ethics.

Customer Trust Formula Cartoon

Bonus: Give the customer a great customer service experience. Our annual customer service and CX research found that 83% of customers said that a good experience increases their trust in the person or company they are doing business with.

Trust is more than a business strategy. It’s a promise you keep every day. It is part of your company’s DNA. When customers trust you, they believe in you. They become your fans, your evangelists, and your best source of growth. Earning trust isn’t about one big moment. It’s built over a period of time when your customers know their experience is consistent, you’ll keep your promise, and you’ll do what’s right. Do that and your customers will say, “I’ll be back!”

Special Bonus: If you want a copy of a short eBook I created on the Customer Confidence Score, go to www.Hyken.com/customer-confidence-score.

Image Credits: Gemini

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Category Creation

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Category Creation

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

Category creation is a critical success factor for start-ups bringing to market a disruptive innovation that calls for a new ecosystem, to support a new class of use cases, funded by a new budget line item. If the category does not form, the start-ups have no place to hang their hat. They can acquire early adopter customers via a bespoke project approach, but they cannot scale any further without help from the rest of the marketplace.

Similarly, established enterprises in mature categories also need to find new venues for growth if they are to break free from their value-investor-set market caps and create net new shareholder value. Whether through acquisition or in-house innovation, they, too, can have the challenge of category creation. So, in both cases, companies need to reengineer the marketplace in order to realize their ambitions. The question is, what would make the marketplace want to lean in?

Marketplaces are made up of ecosystem players, be they partners, competitors, or an installed base of customers. All these constituencies keep their eyes out for disruptive developments that could either benefit or jeopardize their future performance. The early adopters are typically motivated by the benefits, seeking a first mover advantage, while the early majority normally takes a wait-and-see approach, thereby creating a chasm, which in turn can be crossed wherever there is an urgent customer problem that is resisting standard solutions and thus warrants taking a novel approach to solve it. If the category does show it is getting traction, then all those wait-and-see pragmatists will begin to feel threatened by FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), and that is what creates a tornado of demand that puts the category permanently on the map.

Okay, so there is reason to believe that under the right circumstances, markets will support the creation of a new category. That said, we should not underestimate the power of inertia. Markets do not welcome transformational changes with open arms. Indeed, their default move is to deflect most attempts. What we need is a proven playbook. Fortunately, there is one, written some forty years ago, written by an old boss of mine, Regis McKenna.

The Regis Touch

It is hard to overstate the impact that Regis had on high-tech marketing, especially in its early days when it was trying to break free from advertising as its primary medium. At the time, the tech sector was just emerging, the bulk of spending was in B2B markets, the focus was on automating core business processes, and every buying decision entailed considerable risk, not only in terms of the product and vendor’s staying power but also in terms of the impact of the business processes themselves. As a result, advertising per se was not sufficiently informative or credible to drive purchasing. Regis saw this and, with the help of a talented set of consultants and communications professionals, developed a public-relations-led approach that successfully launched hundreds of new products and created dozens of new categories.

The key to his approach was a framework called the infrastructure model that organized the various audiences and constituencies that make up a marketplace in what one might call a ladder of communications:

Relationship Marketing Infrastructure Model Geoffrey Moore

Here’s how it works. The goal is to convert prospects into customers. In B2B markets, those prospects organize around three centers of interest—the technology itself, the impact on productivity, and the financial returns. These prospects get their information most directly from the media, the technologists from the technical press, the end users these days from social media (no such thing, of course, back in the day), and the executives from the business press. The agents of the press, in turn, get a lot of their information from opinion leaders, be they the industry analysts for the technical press, the influencers for social media, or the financial investment analysts for the business press. Those opinion leaders, in turn, get their information from their engagement with the marketplace itself, be they customers, partners, or competitors already involved with the disruptive innovation.

The point is, any claims about the disruptive innovation are verified and validated by working down this model, which means any communications program should organize around working up the same model. Skipping over any one of these audiences and going straight to the prospects directly—the way advertising does—is bound to fail because you have not got your references lined up and sufficiently informed to support and endorse a high-risk buying decision. Product launches and category creation initiatives, therefore, work up this ladder of communications, rung by rung, starting in the executive suite, moving from there to the product organization, and from there to the go-to-market team. That team, in turn, needs to start with educating the ecosystem players, typically with talks and panel sessions at industry conferences, then connecting with the opinion leaders, typically via one-on-one briefings that end up being two-way dialogs, and only then out to the media that will engage with the target prospects.

Category Creation Playbook

A lot of what would go into a complete playbook is product and market-specific, but there are audience-centric principles that remain relatively constant. The key question in each case is, what is it about the emerging category that would be of interest to this particular constituency? With that in mind, here is a brief take:

Executive team. This team will value growth to boost market cap, something that participation in an emerging category can be expected to deliver, but it may well be reluctant to take transformational risk to achieve it. If this team is not 100% behind the effort, don’t start, as every other rung on the latter ultimately calls for investments that this team must endorse.
Product team. This team has to be all in for a wild ride—and usually is. You have to pressure test their claims nonetheless, as they can often get over their skis, promising more than they can deliver within the window that matters.
Go-to-market team. This team requires maturity and patience. The big sales commissions won’t come until the category enters the tornado, so for now, the focus is on creating a market, not harvesting it. That means paying deep attention to developing the ecosystem, including bringing along the installed base, helping to engage and enlist partners, and (oddly enough) encouraging competitors. The last one is important because, ultimately, a category is defined by a set of competitors, not just one company, so for a healthy growing category you need to have peers that are winning too—hopefully in target market segments that are distinct from yours.
Ecosystem. These are the people your go-to-market team is engaging with. The sales team has the installed base, the business development team, the partners, and the marketing team, the competitors. The goal is to get everyone speaking from their own perspective to reinforce your story that something big is underway. One item of note: With respect to competitors, marketing needs to develop a narrative that has room for more than one winner while at the same time staking out turf where your own differentiation makes you the obvious choice. What you do not want to do is bad-mouth the other team’s products—that will create anxiety that will cause everyone to wait and see some more. So, save your sharp tongue for when you get inside the tornado—that’s the no-holds-barred battleground where a well-placed elbow can make a real difference.
Opinion leaders. The goal here is to get conceptual endorsement for the claims you will be making via the media. Opinion leaders need to maintain their independence and do not want to shill for you or anyone else. What they do want to do is look intelligent and have something differentiated to say. What they want from you is enough context to do their job and no interference thereafter. In addition, opinion leaders want to share their opinions with you, in part to influence your future investments, and so it is just as important to listen and ask them questions as it is to present your own story. With respect to your presentation, demos can be useful, but repurposing a customer sales pitch is not, as this audience is not going to buy your product but rather is going to opine on the reasons why other people might.
Media. This is the means by which you will communicate with the three prospect audience types—the technical team, the end users, and the executive sponsors. Each has a preferred media type—industry press, social media, and business press—and each of these types wants to be treated in its own special way. The technical press wants to talk about the product itself. They want facts, love demos, and like to talk to specialists more than generalists. They also are often happy to beta test products or get any other kind of advanced notice as to what’s coming next. Social media wants to talk about the applications of the product, and the ways in which it will impact end users’ lives. So demos can work here only if they are in service to an end-user story as opposed to a run-through of all the features and functions. The business press wants to talk about the “size of the prize,” the impact of the new technology on productivity, how it will reengineer bottlenecking processes, and thus how much trapped value it will be able to release. Demos are wasted here, but PowerPoint can help a lot.
Prospects. When category creation is the focus, it is important to engage the three types of prospects in the right order. If the technology is outrageous, you need to start with the technical audience first just to earn the right to talk to anyone else. If it is not outrageous, then the executive sponsor needs to be your first port of call. The reason is that the other two audiences will actually be willing to meet with you to learn about the latest and greatest thing, but they will have budget, not permission to get new budget, if the executive sponsor is not on board. So a typical path through a major account would start with an executive from your company having a conversation with the prospective executive sponsor at your target customer, which would lead to a referral to the technical team to test your bona fides, and then on to the end-user team, to validate your productivity claims. Proof-of-concept projects are necessary at the very beginning, but one of the major milestones in category creation per se is to generate enough marketplace acceptance that future prospects will forgo these tests.

To sum up, category creation is an outbound communications effort to orchestrate a coalition of the willing across a laddered set of constituencies, each with its own set of interests. The goal is to build an inbound path of verification that reinforces the new category’s right to existence. Trying to shortcut the outbound process by skipping over one or more audiences will defeat the purpose, as any doubts raised this early in the game result in lost momentum that can never be recovered. There is no magic here, but patience and discipline are required.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

— Image credit: Pexels

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Building the Business Case for a Customer Experience Audit

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What the C-Suite Actually Asks

Building the Business Case for a Customer Experience Audit

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

Every Customer Experience (CX) leader I’ve worked with believes, correctly, that their organization needs a customer experience audit. Very few of them get the budget approved on the first try. The gap almost never comes down to whether the need is real — it comes down to whether the person championing it walked into the room prepared for the four questions a C-suite reliably asks, in roughly this order.

“What does this cost us if we do nothing?”

This is the opening question, and it’s the one the CX ROI Calculator exists to answer. Walk in with your own churn rate, revenue per customer, and a modeled range — conservative to optimistic — rather than an industry statistic borrowed from a research report. A number that’s obviously yours survives scrutiny. A number that’s obviously generic invites the room to argue with the source instead of the substance.

“Why an audit, and not just another survey?”

This is where most business cases quietly fall apart, because the honest answer requires admitting a limitation of what you’re already doing. Your NPS and CSAT programs measure what customers are willing to tell you. An audit measures what’s actually happening in the journey, including the parts customers work around instead of reporting. If your organization has been running satisfaction surveys for years and CX metrics still haven’t moved the way they should, that’s not evidence the audit is unnecessary — it’s usually the single best evidence that it is. Surveys have had their chance to find the problem. They haven’t. A different method is the correct next step, not a redundant one.

“What will we actually be able to do differently afterward?”

An executive approving a budget is not funding a diagnosis for its own sake — they’re funding the decisions the diagnosis will enable. The strongest version of this answer is specific: an audit produces a prioritized list of friction points ranked by business impact, not a general health score. Walk in already able to name the kind of decision it unlocks — “we’ll know whether to fix onboarding or billing first” is a far stronger sentence than “we’ll understand our customers better.”

“How disruptive is this, and how long until we see something?”

This is the question that kills otherwise-approved initiatives at the last step, usually because nobody addressed it until it was asked live in the room. Have the realistic timeline ready before you’re asked for it, not after: when the audit starts, what it requires from internal teams, and when the first findings arrive. Vagueness here reads as risk, even when the actual answer would have been reassuring.

Sequencing the case correctly

The order matters as much as the content. Lead with the cost of inaction (the number), and the room is primed to hear the diagnosis as the obvious next step rather than an added expense. Lead with the audit itself, and you’re immediately negotiating from a weaker position — explaining a cost before anyone in the room has agreed there’s a problem worth solving.

If you haven’t run your own numbers yet, start with the calculator — it’s the fastest way to walk into that first conversation with your own defensible figure instead of someone else’s. When you’re ready to talk about what an audit specifically finds and how it runs, the audit page has the detail, and I’m glad to answer the disruption and timeline questions directly if you’d rather hear them from me before you’re asked them by your own leadership.

Building the Business Case for a Customer Experience Audit

Image Credit: Gemini, ChatGPT

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article.

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You Need a Strategy Not a Slogan to Overcome Resistance to Change

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You Need a Strategy Not a Slogan to Overcome Resistance to Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When we’re passionate about an idea, we want others to see it the same way we do, with all its beautiful complexity and nuance. We want to believe that if others can just understand it, they will embrace it. That’s why most change management practices focus on persuasion, explaining the need for change and creating a sense of urgency.

But consider recent research that finds that we can’t even agree on simple concepts such as what a penguin is and it becomes clear that for any given initiative, people are bound to see it differently. The simple truth is that change doesn’t fail on its own, it fails because people resist it. If we are to bring about genuine change, our first job is to overcome that resistance.

We need to internalize that humans form attachments to people, ideas and other things and, when those attachments are threatened, we act in ways that don’t reflect our best selves. Every change strategy has to begin with that. Clever gimmicks or snappy slogans won’t bring about true transformation. We have to build a strategy to overcome resistance from the start.

First, Follow The Energy

There’s something about human nature that, when we’re really excited about an idea, makes us want to go convince the skeptics. That’s almost always a bad idea. A much better strategy is to start with people who are enthusiastic about your change, who want it to succeed. They can help you strengthen it and spread it to others, who can spread it further still.

For example, in his efforts to reform the Pentagon, Colonel John Boyd began every initiative by briefing a group of collaborators he called the “Acolytes,” who would help hone and sharpen the ideas. He then moved on to congressional staffers, elected officials and the media. By the time general officers were aware of what he was doing, he had built up too much support to ignore.

In a similar vein, a massive effort to implement lean manufacturing methods at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals began with a single team at one factory, but grew to encompass 17,000 employees across 25 sites worldwide and cut manufacturing costs by 25%. The campaign that overthrew Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević started with just 5 kids in a coffee shop.

One advantage to starting small is that you can identify your apostles informally, even through casual conversations. In skills-based transformations, effective change leaders often start with workshops and see who seems enthusiastic or comes up after the session. Your apostles don’t need to have senior positions or special skills, they just have to be passionate.

“You have to go where the energy is,” John Gadsby, who built a movement for process improvement inside Procter & Gamble that has grown to encompass 60,000 employees, told me. “We’ll choose energy and excitement and enthusiasm over the right position, or the person at the right leadership level, or the person whose job it is supposed to be to do that.”

Identify Shared Values

Humans naturally form tribes. In a study of adults that were randomly assigned to “leopards” and “tigers,” fMRI studies noted hostility to out-group members. Similar results were found in a study involving five year-old children and even in infants. Evolutionary psychologists attribute this tendency to kin selection, which explains how groups favor those who share their attributes in the hopes that those attributes will be propagated.

So it’s natural that when we feel passionately about an idea, we want to focus on how it’s different, to create our own tribe. For example, the Agile Manifesto has inspired fierce devotion and helped build a vibrant community around Agile product development. So it shouldn’t be surprising that when evangelists try to attract others to the movement, it’s the Agile Manifesto that they want to emphasize.

Yet for those outside the Agile development community, its principles can seem strange and impractical. It emphasizes adaptability over planning which can appear to be chaotic for those who are used to a more traditional approach. If you want to bring in new people, it’s better to focus on shared values, such as the ability to produce better quality projects faster and cheaper.

One of the biggest challenges in driving transformation is that while differentiating values make people excited about an idea, it is shared values that help build genuine and widespread support. That doesn’t mean you abandon or water down your beliefs. It just means that you need to meet people where they are, not where you wish them to be.

Design A Dilemma Action

Unfortunately, building a shared purpose isn’t always possible. Whenever we set out to make a significant impact you are bound to get pushback, not for any rational logic, necessarily but because, for whatever reason, but because for whatever reason, it offends some people’s dignity, their identity, their sense of self. A simple truth is that we all form irrational attachments and when those are threatened, we tend to act out in ways that don’t reflect our best selves.

When that happens — and it always does eventually — we can get sucked into a conflict, which will likely take us off course and discredit what we’re trying to achieve. Yet, here too, developing empathy skills to identify shared values can be extremely helpful. They can help us to design a dilemma action, which puts the opponents into an impossible position.

Dilemma actions have only recently become an active area of research, but have been used by practitioners for at least a century — famous examples include Gandhi’s Salt March, King’s Birmingham Campaign and Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels. They are just as effective in an organizational context, using an opponent’s resistance against them.

One of the great things about dilemma actions is that you approach them exactly the same way you approach building allies — by identifying a shared purpose. Once you do that, you can design a constructive act rooted in that shared purpose that advances your agenda. Your opponent then has a choice: they can disrupt the act and violate the shared value or they can let it go forward and let change progress.

For example, I was once leading a transformation project that was being impeded by a sales director hogging accounts. Although it was agreed that she would distribute her clients, she never got around to it, so I set up a meeting with a key account and one of our salespeople. When she tried to disrupt the meeting, she violated the shared value we had established, was dismissed from her position and everything fell into place after that.

Planning To Survive Victory

Many change leaders assume that once they win an initial victory that everything will get easier after that. They work for months — and sometimes years — to get a project off the ground. Yet just when they think they’re turning the corner, when they’ve won executive sponsorship, signed up key partners and procured enough financing to have a realistic budget, all the sudden things seem to get mired down.

That’s no accident. Just because you’ve won a few early battles doesn’t mean opposition to your idea melts away. On the contrary, faced with the fact that change may actually succeed, those who oppose it have probably just begun to redouble their efforts to undermine it. These efforts are often not overt, but they are there and can easily derail an initiative.

As Saul Alinsky once put it, every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution. That’s why every change effort must plan from the beginning to survive victory. You need to anticipate resistance, think about where you’re vulnerable and how you’ll mitigate those attacks by leveraging shared values.

The truth is that change is always a journey, never a particular destination, which is why lasting change is always built on the common ground of shared values. The answer doesn’t lie in any specific strategy or initiative, but in how people are able to internalize the need for change and transfer ideas through social bonds. A leader’s role is not necessarily to plan and direct action, but to inspire and empower belief.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Time to Rethink Pitch Fests and Business Plan Competitions

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Time to Rethink Pitch Fests and Business Plan Competitions

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Pitch fests happen almost every week somewhere in the US, They happen in primary schools, high schools, institutions of higher learning , incubators and accelerators. In addition, the spring and the fall are B school business plan competition season, so look for tweets about who won and pictures of those smiling millennial faces holding big cardboard checks.

These competitions serve many purposes, but, fundamentally the objective is 1) to practice your presentation skils, 2) to get feedback, 3) to find money

I have participated on both sides of the check, as both pitcher and catcher (judge) and have always found the format wanting.

Carl Schramm describes the problem:

If you look at all our older major corporations — U.S. Steel, General Electric, IBM, American Airlines — and then you look at our newer companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, none of these companies ever had a business plan before they got started. Empirically, it appears as if you don’t need a business plan.

Second, the business planning process is largely generated as a preview for venture capital. As I show in my book, from empirical studies, much less than 1% of all new startups ever see a venture capitalist. Much less than 1% of all new companies every year have venture backing of any kind. So, I largely view the creation of a business plan as something of a waste of time.

The third problem is that it seems to make starting a business somewhat like a cookbook. If you do this, and then you do this, and then you do this, the cake will come out okay. And that’s really not how it happens.

I think it is time to rethink these events, and, it seems, so do some investors who are moving towards data-driven investing.

EQT Ventures in Europe takes data-driven investing to a new extreme. The 2-year-old VC firm, which is part of private equity group EQT, uses an AI-driven data platform called Motherbrain to help it make investment decisions. The firm’s €566 million fund backs companies at all stages—except seed—with €3 million to €75 million checks. So far, the firm has invested in 22 startups.

Analytics partner and former VP of analytics at Spotify, Henrik Landgren, said Motherbrain could’ve identified Spotify and Uber as unicorns in the companies’ early days. He believes letting software play a key role in crafting one’s portfolio is “the next evolution of VC.”

Conditional on getting to the stage of submitting a business plan, the judges’ scores have almost no predictive power in determining which entrepreneurs will succeed.

1. The whole notion of writing a business plan v a business model canvas has been called into question given the reality that no battle plan survives the first shot. A colleague suggested “Wild Ass Guess” competition as another way to brand them.

2. Pitches should be limited to no more than m5inutes. Who, in this day and age, watches anything for more than 3 minutes before moving to the next You Tube? Like the hangman’s noose, it focuses the mind. Taking it one step further, idea pitches should last no more than 1 minute.

3. The award money has to be spent on the business, not be used to finance a trip to Europe this summer

4. Winners must commit to passing it forward. There should be an expectation that they will contribute money, effort, time , mentorship or other things to future events and applicants

5. We should publish rates of startups, success rates, exits and the contributions made to the local, regional and national economy

6. We should require that applicants participate in a pre-submission bootcamp to get their presentations ready for prime time in an effort to not waste the time of volunteers who were hesitant to help in the first place. Here are the skills we want participants to practice:

The professionalism of the technical parts and the presentation itself
Was the presentation appropriate for the audience?
Did you talk about the why or the how of your idea and why did you choose to do that?
Did you tell a story and did it have a biginning, a middle and an end with heros and villains?
Could someone with a fifth grade reading level understand it?
Did you props and other media?
Did you end with a strong call to action?
Did you pitch to the heart or the head of your audience
Did this look like your first rodeo or did you practice?
Was your presentation scripted, look like you “winged it” or did you appear more confident and relaxed?

7. Spend most of the time in front of judges “defending their thesis”. They should be required to think on their feet, answering “what ifs” , since that’s what they will have to do the moment they walk out of the award ceremony.

8. Awardees should be required to participate in iTeams to develop and further test and validate their ideas. They should be encourged to resubmit their business ideas in Phase 2 to apply for money to scale their validated models, similar to the SBIR process. Call it the Scalerator Competition.

9. Awardees must agree to submit testimonials, what the Disney Corporation calls Magical Moments, telling their stories not just about success, but how they overcame adversity and failure.

10. Awardees should spend some time in a real startup, perhaps with the sponsors who put up the bucks to help pay for the event, as an experiential learning opportunity

11. The winner take all format leads to churn and discourages further participation by those who are not the winners

12. Judges come with biases they apply to their decisions whether they use instinct or analysis. There are many false negatives (passing on ideas that are eventually successful) and false positives (getting on ultimate failures).Since we don’t really track long term outcomes of these events, we don’t know many there are.

13. Picking one winner or loser is different than picking a number of companies as part of a risk portfolio. Picking winners in a calm market is something first-timers do just as well as old hands, but avoiding losers is where skill and experience matters.

14. Customers are the ultimate arbiters of success or failure. Rewards should go those teams who have demonstrated they have created them.

15. Here’s another way to launch entrepreneurs and their ideas.

Another issue is the lack of consistency, criteria and implicit bias judging business plans. Business plan judging software has made things more consistent, but as long as humans are applying subjective criteria, there will be some variation. For example, here are some do’s and don’ts from one HBS judge.

Business plan competitions , to some, are a waste of time. Instead, maybe we should have Business Model or just idea competitions.

Encouraging students to submit pie in the sky plans that have little or no validity, judging them using vague and unproven methodologies, awarding them money that they don’t even have to spend on their business ideas and cutting them loose afterwards means the biggest winner is the B school building brand equity. For doctors, scientists and engineers, pressing them to write a business plan before using a validation method is like writing a scientific paper and then doing experiments to find the data you used to justify the conclusions.

Can you imagine pitching at a Quantum Business Plan competition?

We need to stop reality TV B school business plan competitions and pitch fest reward structures and get real about business model and idea competitions.

Image Credit: Pexels

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