Holistic experience - first principles perspective

I'm interested in providing a first principles perspective on the problem. This is about knowing what a problem is then doing research to uncover problems after that. But before talking about this, what happens when we don't understand the nature of a problem?

There's a design floor in the Titanic. In simple terms, the design didn’t account for the context of coming across a massive iceberg! There's this idea that big banks were too big to fail too, but they did in 2008 and this means they can again. At the time governments had to step in to save them. We may believe big organisations are the most resilient but that's not on the side of the evidence.

You might've remembered some of these. At the time, a lot of people might've thought they were the most resilient. Nokia's chunky phones everyone had them. Blackberrys - perfect for all those C-level executives. Kodak was one of the most popular camera films to print photos. Blockbuster - who imagined they'd need to worry about online films??There's lots of established organisations that stayed on a certain path and went extinct. The world changes, it's complex and we try to adapt to it, often after the fact (above slide from Regenerative Leadership course:?https://www.regenerators.academy).

Technology is a big driver of change. In the seventies there were mainframes and big room-sized computers. We saw office computing in the 1980s then personal computing the first PCs and Macs. In the 1990s every office started using email. In the 2000s, internet use exploded with Internet Explorer and Netscape browser wars. Then in the 2010s, everyone had to have a smartphone, wearables also started trending. Big data was a game changer and cloud computing too. Now in the 2020s technology is still changing. We have the internet of things, digital money and blockchain. We're witnessing the start of quantum computing. There's also adaptations with genes and merging of technology with biology.

So it's clear change happens all the time and we’re not always great at adapting. And we have better and worse ways of doing that. For example, design centric companies adapted better than those that weren’t. This graph describes how the top design centric companies compare to other fortune 500 companies towards 2015. There’s a 211% difference and that trend is likely way, way ahead now.

The Dasgupta Review has a different take to the customer centricity. Dasgupta is a Cambridge biologist who spearheaded this review. The review talks about how Nature’s value must be at the heart of economics. So our economy is not contained by customers only. It's not contained by companies or individuals either but our whole ecosystem. Our current trajectory can't continue without impacting the ecosystem that sustains us. So the customer experience is also broader than the individual and organisation. It covers many things, all peoples’ groupings and includes Nature too. We're not outside or siloed from Nature. That's a big failure of our thinking and it’s time to change. We need to look at what success means holistically (above slide from Regenerative Leadership course:?https://www.regenerators.academy).

What's a problem?

So we know there’s a problem. That introduction to the problems we face will help get back to first principles. What is the problem and how do we unpack it?

In simple terms the foundation of why we act, what's behind our behaviours is simple and pragmatic. We always look to go from a lower value to a higher value state or relationship. That's also what's behind our needs. We meet our needs when we improve our states or relationships. Here's a simple explanation with a dehydrated state. When my actions include drinking enough water, soon I'm hydrated. I've moved from the lower to higher value. And the opposite is also true. My actions using certain tools or objects in my environment can take me to a lower value state. If I'm drinking too much coffee to hydrate myself, I'm going to go backwards - that's an unmet need. So it's a very simple way of looking at it.

Another simple way lens considers current and future states or relationships. Both follow the same pattern. They start with our intentions, desires, beliefs and values. Those drive our actions or interactions with people and products in a place and moment of time. After that we have the result, outcome, consequences and impact. So as before, if the results meet our intentions, we have a good experience. If they don't and we're getting a very different result than our intentions, the experience is not good. So when we seek to know the problem, this is a helpful model to use.

Problem as a formula

Consciousness

Intentions, beliefs, values and desires and those are part of our?consciousness. From a broad definition of consciousness, we're often not aware of our conscious workings. That's another topic. But they drive us to do action.

Medium

And where we are acting occurs in the medium of our reality. Real actions don't happen in our heads. They take place in reality, which either resists or allows the change we desire to occur. So products and the places will either help or hinder our actions towards a change.

Experience

Together these will tell us about experience we're interested in. What's fascinating is you can flip the model around and it starts to look familiar. It looks a lot like Einstein's famous formula. So instead of energy we're talking about experience. And it's not that different. Good experiences, feel like they increase the energy in that ecosystem. That ecosystem includes all other people, places, organisations and Nature.

A holistic experience measure?

This could help us understand the components of a problem even better. Instead of mass we've been using the word "medium" where action occurs. Mass must have a similar sized force to move it. Think about a big planet in space, that's not easy to move. Actions are either resisted or permitted in the medium of our reality. Instead of light, we can talk about consciousness in alike ways. Our drivers of action are those intentions, beliefs, values and desires. How important they are to us, tells us a lot about how likely they will drive real change.

This can also help us frame how we can research the problem. It's?key to understand what's important to people first. What do they value? What are beliefs that they hold true and what are their desires? It's key to also understand how satisfied people are with their needs. How much of a challenge is it to meet those needs? How painful? How much resistance is there?

And that can give you an idea of whether the experiences are altogether good or bad. But our understanding of course, is not only from the individual's perspective. There are all groups of customers and potential customers living in an ecosystem. What is the impact on relationships and wider communities? How does this impact all other forms of life in our ecosystems? These questions will tell us about the holistic experience.

So, a holistic customer experience would then ask:

1. How important is this to your own life?
2. How important is this to life that surrounds you (other people and nature)??
3. Considering that, how satisfied are you with this service altogether?

This is one example of how an organisation could survey people for this. It's likely we'll be seeing more considerations for holistic experience measures.

References

• Images 1, 4 and 5 are referenced from content and slides from Laura Storm’s Regenerative Leadership course. See more here: https://www.regenerators.academy
• View accompanying Academy Xi live session video with this topic here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/davidberigny_academyxi-design-regenerativeleadership-activity-6908653771409252352-dDKZ