Getting started on your PX transformation

It's important to recognise where you start from - and which direction you need to head in - when you are going on a journey. The journey to generating a great Planet Experience is no different.
So here's one way of considering your start-point and what good might look like on your organisation's route to a better, more sustainable partnership with your planet.

Consider this (above) alongside the high-level designs I have previously shared:
First (immediately below), the need ensure all the dimensions of experience are considered - PX is now ONE of the experiences you should design for - alongside Customer Experience, Employee Experience and Workplace Experience. A great PX alone is not the recipe for the next 20 years of success - it must be combined with equally great CX and - in any kind of organisation at scale - purposefully designed and aligned EX and WX.

And finally, a guide to generating those Experience-First propositions on which the org stands or falls. (below).

Feel free to explore, reconfigure and reshare!
And if you have a challenge you would like to explore solutions to using these approaches - please get in touch.

Introducing Planet Experience

No Planet B - so we need Planet X

There's no Planet B - but there is Planet X. Planet Experience is the framework through which we can help make our organisations ones we can all live with; as customers, as employees and as participants in a biosphere we all rely on.

In recent and previous posts I have outlined the value of PX as the new business superpower - shaping our overall experience as potential and repeat customers (Customer Experience [CX]), as potential and continuing employees (Employee Experience [EX]), and in shaping the working culture (Workplace Experience [WX]).

PX elevates the status of the planet in our sustainable success - just as CX elevated the status of customers. No longer is the planet something to exploit, it is something to build a relationship of mutual benefit with. Through the PX filter it is something to purposefully design a relationship of mutual benefit with.

I believe this is important because:

1. It is business which can have most impact - since it is business which drives consumption.
2. Increasing transparency is revealing the impact of exploitation; of planet and people.
3. Customers are increasingly coming to care. The web has revealed our connectedness. We want our experience to be great but only if the cost of delivering it is, literally, one we can live with. I get that this is far from the case for all people in all cases - but the number it is true for is rising, and they carry a large amount of economic power.

Those that dismiss point 3 may suppose that the world is not changing around them - that the reality of climate change, reduced biodiversity, water scarcity, dwindling icecaps can be ignored with little impact on how they do business. The same mindset leads to relationships of abuse with customers, employees and society at large. And we now have increasing evidence that does not lead to economic success or business longevity. Ignore PX and you'll be revealing a lot about your opinion of your customers and employees, too.

But when all is said and done, PX is just the latest (but essential to acknowledge) expression of the long-known business fact that building relationships of benefit is the key to sustainable success. This time the planet needs to benefit, too.

I'm making my thinking on this as open as possible, deliberately. I want others to pick it up, fill the gaps, improve on it, share those improvements - for the benefit of us all.

It's too important for IP. What can you share?

Work with me!

Planet Experience - the next business superpower

The winners of the last start-up revolution achieved their success by focusing on experiences.
Their continuing success has built on designing to deliver great customer experiences, expanding, as they have expanded, to also deliver great employee and workplace experiences.

To deliver these require different priorities in everything from ops to marcomms. Having a 'digital'  or data-led business model alone will not and does not cut it.

It's why I believe to deliver a successful digital transformation (ie a modern business) your first principle is to design (everything) around the experiences you want to create. Customers, employees and workplaces experiences have been well considered - and very effectively. Great experiences have been the start-up superpower that drove the best businesses you know.

Now it is for PX - Planet Experience - to serve as your next business superpower.

Good CX has always made customers your partners. It's the trust thing. You want your customer to believe you have their best interests at heart. To do this your business has to generate win-win benefits. A customer win is a business win.

This has driven the whole customer-centricity revolution across business - the rediscovery of the customer as less someone to exploit, more someone to partner with. It has served the winners well. They understand that winning is about serving the needs of customers in a relationship of mutual trust. ie Exploit the customer and you get one big bang pay day, build a relationship of trust with a customer and you may miss out on today's pay day, for a longer term and (here's that word) sustainable relationship generating value for both parties.

Screw your customer - lose your customer.
Love your customer - keep your customer.

Some of you will already have guessed where I am going with this:
Delivering great Planet Experience will treat the planet like we (should) treat a customer - winning is about serving the needs of the planet in a relationship of mutual benefit.
The best businesses have now learned that exploiting their customer is essentially an abuse and a recipe for a short relationship.

Now they are coming to realise that their relationship with the planet requires just as much care.
A new superpower - yes because apply PX at the core of how you change or operate is becoming essential to the total experience the customer has of your brand or product.

If you want to sustain a relationship with the customers and employees who pay your bills, you will need a relationship with the planet that they can (literally) live with. Start designing for a great PX today!

Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash

The next 1000 start-ups need to be Planet-led as much as they are Customer-led

Tesla's success in becoming the first US car maker to reach a valuation of $100bn provides stark evidence that start-ups will always outperform incumbents once they reach the scale to compete with incumbents.

The model S only started delivering in 2012. Growth has been, er, rocket-like.

Businesses built on start-up principles (purpose-driven, platform, working in insight-led (data and human) rapid iterative cycles towards customer value at every step, with processes & ops designed to deliver great experiences) have a structural advantage over incumbents in their capacity to deliver vs rapidly moving markets.

It's happened in media, it's happened in retail, now happening in manufacturing... and it'll happen in every sector.

The next step is to include sustainability as a structural design principle.

Start-ups today must be data-led, human centred, purpose driven etc etc - but must also align to sustainability goals - ways of doing business that are better for the whole not just the shareholder. They must seek to exploit less (people or planet) and instead co-create benefit for those they seek to partner with (people and planet).

Where the last generation of start-ups was driven by making your customer your partner, the next is about making your customer, your people and your planet partners, too. As much planet-led as they need to be customer-led.

Do Make Me Think

2020 marks 20 years since Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think ushered in two decades of 'Easy'. The next decade is one in which meeting more than our dumb desire for instant gratification will need to be taken much more seriously.

Easy has been a mantra across web design, UX, c

Work it out for yourself...

ustomer experience, communications strategy and alarmingly, media and political propaganda.

The drive for easy should now be tempered with the need we all have to apply more critical thinking.

Easy underestimates human complexity. It dumbs down. And in so doing it reduces our engagement. In our desire to make so much so frictionless, we have unwittingly shifted consumers (and citizens) toward consumption (and passive acceptance) when the promise at the start of the decade was for ever greater participation - with all the value generation of co-creation and collaboration through communities of purpose - people caring enough to act.

Human needs include and demand much more than instant gratification. Challenge, inspiration, judgment, justice - all these contribute to the self-actualisation through which we derive our meaning.

If the last two decades have all been about easy, the next must build on the benefits that has delivered (essentially making technology invisible - an enabler rather than an end in itself).

Easy has become table stakes.

To win in the next decade will be to understand and respond to more complex needs -unearthed through quality human insight. Businesses will have to deliver against those needs in rapidly shifting contexts - managing the ambiguity that inevitably produces - at speed.

And they will need to do it with products and services which challenge, inspire and encourage participation; whether that be to save the planet, improve the lives of millions or the health of the individuals engaged.

It's time to make them think.