Leveraging an Ideate-Test-Scale Playbook to spark cultural change

In earlier blogs, I've shared that the name JourneySpark Consulting is a layered metaphor. There's the customer journey, the company's overall journey to become more customer-driven, and the employee’s individual learning journey. Building your cultural movement helps support your employees' individual journeys to be part of the movement and reinforces your company's overall journey to be more customer-driven. There are different stages along your company's journey, and decision-making effectiveness is key for each of them. As the exhibit below shows, there are a set of distinct things you can focus on across Ideate, Test, and Scale stages of your journey to nurture greater organizational effectiveness. By approaching CX and culture together, as laid out in my book, The CX and Culture Connection, you can reinforce and amplify the adoption of behaviors at each stage that increase your success, boosting the ROI of your CX investments and making your growth flywheel spin faster.

Decision-Making Effectiveness Across Stages of Your CX Journey

Stage 1: Ideate

Last week, we focused on the CREATE chapter in my book, The CX and Culture Connection, including how you can engage your team in crafting your Experience Collage and use that to focus your efforts to create emotionally engaging experiences along your customer journey. We shared how using personas and journey maps can be a jumping-off point to spark ideas for your bold bets to create “beyond the product” experiences. There are cultural behaviors that will help make this journey easier and more effective for your company

In their book Decisions Over Decimals, Christopher Frank , Paul Magnone , and Oded Netzer argue convincingly that there is no perfect decision and that getting more data and structuring the most rigorous analytics is not always needed to make an effective decision (you can find the review included in my own book, The CX and Culture Connection, which is available on Amazon here). The authors, who are all professors at Columbia Business School, teach a unique approach called Quantitative Intuition (QI), which is based on over seven years of coursework, focusing on how you can combine data-driven analytics with your business intuition. The challenge is typically not lack of data but the wisdom to use data combined with intuition. Moreover, effective decision-making is often accomplished in team settings where you encourage behaviors that increase your openness to new perspectives, bring together people with diverse skill sets, and encourage exploration of ideas beyond your own industry context.

Stage 2: Test

Once you have alignment on your Experience Collage? and a deeper understanding of your key personas and the moments that matter on their customer journey, you will naturally look to prioritize ways to maximize the ROI for your investment in CX. By breaking down your CX opportunities into more manageable bite-sized chunks, you will overcome resistance to change and gain valuable learnings. You will also build organizational muscle to team together in new ways. IDriving the adoption of lean startup mindsets and behaviors will be key to your success in this stage of your company’s journey. This will require sustained engagement from your people to make these behaviors stick in the organization. Showcasing your success stories and building confidence in new ways of working will be key to sustaining your motivation and commitment to change.

Stage 3: Scale

To reach the full potential of your Experience Collage and keep your growth flywheel spinning, you need to transition effectively from Test to Scale. This involves a shift from resources working on changing things to putting in place the resources, governance, and measurement to enable continuous improvement. Securing access to these resources will require executive sponsorship to clear a path for your teams and ensure they have the funding required so people don’t have to do the work “off the sides of their desks.” However, more resources are not enough to drive the business outcomes you are looking for. You will need to drive ownership and accountability for your business outcomes, both through behaviors that encourage people to feel empowered to act if their decisions are “above the waterline” (i.e., they won’t sink the ship and shouldn’t need to ask for approval) as well as behaviors that focus on engaging others to build alignment on shared goals and cross-functional collaboration to reach them.

We’ll revisit these stages again later in Chapter 4 (Team) of the C.U.L.T.U.R.E. methodology, where we’ll dive deeper into how your people can contribute most effectively across the Ideate-Test-Scale modules of your CX playbook.