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.

The Rt Hon Chief Product Officer

If you were planning to build a successful product called Brexit where would you start?
Well - you could, like the least successful product makers, sit around a table and work from a set of assumptions about what you think the British people are likely to buy.
You might even run a 'what do you like' survey. You would then invest the farm (or in this case, the country) on what you assume IS 'what they want'. And then spend, spend, spend on advertising to convince people that the thing you now 'have evidence that they want', is what they should invest their hard-earned in.
This is the way of the 95% of product innovation that fails.
The trouble with this approach is that even if the con(vincing) job works, and the customer does indeed buy, that customer ends up with something that doesn't fit their needs or answer the pain-points in their lives. They won't find it of value - they won't recommend it and they won't buy it again.
No, if you want to build a successful product called Brexit you must start with understanding the core needs of those you are making it for.
What are the core needs of the citizens of the UK? There may be some complex emotional ones (known as Esteem needs in Maslow's hierarchy) about fear of change, loss of status etc. But there are some tangible and more basic ones too: Security; Food; Clothes; Shelter.
And right at the top of the hierarchy is all the 'self-actualisation' stuff about being able to achieve one's full potential.
When those needs are understood - then is the time to move to developing concepts that could be best shaped to meet those needs, to solve their pain.
And in a series of iterations in which you shape the direction of that concept, always validating that it is meeting the needs of those for whom it is intended, always testing they understand and get value from what it is you are shaping, you may move to low-through-high-resolution prototypes until eventually you are in a position to launch something you can be pretty sure meets the actual needs of the people it is meant for.
I have yet to see a version of Brexit that serves more than a very narrow band of the nation's needs. You may see it differently.
We don't need (yet) another PR Guru in No10 to con(vince) us of what we want. At this point we need a very capable Chief Product Officer to respond to what we need.