Customer Experiences With Soul: A New Era In Design

By Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson

This pioneering book explains how a whole organisation can come together to evolve an entirely new way of being in the world. It introduces the Holonomic Circle, a new tool which provides a holistic framework for designers, corporate executives, creative leaders and those starting a new business or initiative to explore the principles underlying the dynamics of soulful customer experiences. The insights from the authors will help you take a radically new approach to customer experience design; fully integrate purpose, goals and strategy with customer experience; implement human values across the whole organisation; and develop long-term and more meaningful relationships with your customers. Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design provides the guidance needed for developing, structuring and implementing customer experiences with soul, helping you to build and grow authentic businesses and organisations which honour what it is to be human in our world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Holonomics Publishing
• Release date: Jun 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9780995715813

Simon Robinson

Simon Robinson is a researcher in the Future Interaction Technology Lab at Swansea University. His work so far has focused on mobile technologies that allow people to immerse themselves in the places, people and events around them, rather than just in their mobile devices. His research - much of which has been part of the thinking behind this book - has been featured in New Scientist magazine, on CBC Radio, and in other international media venues; and, has also been published in many international academic conferences and journals. In the past few years his emphasis has turned toward developing similarly face-on user experiences for resource-constrained communities in regions such as South Africa and India. Simon is an avid rock climber, and loves the fact that climbing doesn’t need a touchscreen to be thoroughly enjoyable. More at simon.robinson.ac

Book preview

Customer

Experiences

with Soul

A New Era in Design

Simon Robinson and

Maria Moraes Robinson

Holonomics Publishing

Published in 2017 by Holonomics Publishing.

Copyright © 2017 Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law. For permission requests, please write to the publisher via the contact form on the Holonomics Publishing website.

HOLONOMICS PUBLISHING

Holonomics Publishing is the UK-registered publishing division of Holonomics Education.

Office 7, 35-37 Ludgate Hill, London, EC4M 7JN

www.holonomics.pub

The right of Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN: 978-0-9957-1580-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-0-9957-1581-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017905363

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

Front cover: Double-walled Espresso Glass, Bredemeijer®

Rev. date: 6/2/2017

Also by Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson

Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter

This book is dedicated to the memory

of

Sônia Moraes Amiden and Amim Amiden

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgements

1. Customers, Experiences, Soul

What Do We Mean By Soul?

Why Customer Experience Matters

Soul in the Expression of Service, Design and Beauty

2. Authentic Purpose

Keeping It Real

The Trinity of Authentic Purpose

3. The Transition of Consciousness

The Journey to Authentic Dialogue

Knotworks – Networks with Ego

Creativity, Ego and Transformational Leadership

4. The Holonomic Circle – Tools and Techniques

Designing the Customer Experience

Purpose

Methods

Relationships

Meaning

Values

5. The Holonomic Circle: Human Values

Education in Human Values

Peace

Truth

Love

Righteousness

Non-violence

6. The Holonomic Circle – The Transcendentals

The Elements of Being

The One and the Many

Identity and Difference

Beauty

Truth

Goodness

Justice

7. The Dynamics of Being

Wholeness in Lived Experience

Calor Humano

Being and Soul

8. Arriving Full Circle

Journeying Through the Holonomic Circle

Love, Beauty, Generosity and Soul

Endnotes

Bibliography

About the Authors

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: Counterfeit Purpose

Figure 2: The Holonomic Circle – The Trinity

Figure 3: The Four Ways of Knowing

Figure 4: The Holonomic Circle – Tools and Techniques

Figure 5: Human Values and their Sub-Values

Figure 6: The Holonomic Circle – The Transcendentals

Figure 7: Being – Doing

Figure 8: Meaningful Innovation

Figure 9: The Druids – Bringing in the Mistletoe, reproduced courtesy of Glasgow Museums, (Photo: Simon Robinson)

Figure 10: The Ladder of Seeing (Silhouettes reproduced under licence, © fotosearch.com)

Figure 11: The Value-Focused Approach, © Cindy Barnes, Helen Blake and David Pinder, 2009

Figure 12: The Age of Measurement, British Science Museum, (Photo: Simon Robinson)

Figure 13: The Holonomic Circle

Preface and Acknowledgements

The last three decades have seen a steady evolution in customer experience design methods and practices. These have been complemented by the introduction of systemic and visual business tools such as Balanced Scorecard and the Business Model Canvas which have radically changed the way in which entrepreneurs and corporations develop new businesses, innovate new products and services, and improve and evolve their existing business models and strategies. However, despite a growing awareness of the impact on profitability of being a customer-focused organisation, and despite the wealth of new approaches to innovation, many studies report that a substantial number of new products and services are still failing to meet customer expectations. The time therefore has now arrived for business leaders to radically reappraise what they are doing, how they are doing it, who they are doing it with, and most importantly, why.

The subtitle to Customer Experiences with Soul is ‘A New Era in Design’. The reason is that this is a book about customer experience design which approaches the discipline in a way that has never been discussed before. Our approach is based on the philosophy of wholeness, which we introduced in our first book Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter. After many years of working with enterprises, helping them to see their organisations as an authentic whole, and improving how they function and operate, we brought together our knowledge of strategy and change management, user experience design, product marketing and business development in Holonomics which was published in 2014. The book was written to help people engage in issues and problems in an entirely different manner from business as usual, resulting in evolutionary business models, powerful and effective strategies, and the development of purposeful, meaningful and sustainable brands.

One of the most important dimensions of our Holonomics approach is a concept we call ‘the dynamics of seeing’. The reason is that within general business practice there is an implicit assumption that the world ‘out there’ is a given and that people simply have different opinions about it. One of the qualities of a truly great designer is that the manner in which they experience their reality is dynamic, always searching for new ways of seeing and understanding the world. The importance of the dynamics of seeing to developing a more profound understanding of customer experience design cannot be underestimated. All of us have the capacity to evolve if we develop an expanded level of consciousness, but we also have to develop an awareness of the barriers which can prevent us from achieving this.

A second important dimension to our Holonomics approach is our expanded interpretation of sustainability, which we define as the quality of our relationships. This is much wider than more typical definitions of sustainability, because it allows businesses to understand how they can better prepare for the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous reality in which we now live. When the leaders of an organisation fully sign up to this way of understanding sustainability, they are then able to transform their businesses through the redesign and rethinking of one of the most fundamental relationships they have – that which exists between a company and its customers. Given that this relationship is fundamentally human, we wished to introduce the one vital factor which until now has been notably absent from business discourse, and that factor is soul.

Customer Experiences with Soul has been written to show how our holonomics approach can be applied to the area of customer experience design. It introduces our tool, the Holonomic Circle, which articulates the meaning of soul in a design, business and branding context. It provides a holistic framework for designers, corporate entrepreneurs, creative leaders and those starting a new business or initiative to explore the principles underlying the dynamics of soulful experiences. It does so by linking the tools, techniques and frameworks for developing customer experiences with soul with an exploration of the questions of authenticity, purpose and human values.

The Holonomic Circle is a tool which allows us to ask probing questions about the customer experience and the very ‘being’ of brands from a perspective which is simply not found in more traditional methodologies. To help illustrate each aspect of the holonomic circle we have included in-depth, visionary interviews from entrepreneurs, CEOs, designers, artists and philosophers. The insights from this book apply not only to the design of the customer experience itself, but also to product and service development, organisational design, branding, communications, leadership, training and strategy. It will help you to take a radically new approach to customer experience design; to fully integrate your purpose, goals and strategy with your customer experience; to implement human values across the whole organisation; and to develop long-term and more meaningful relationships with your customers.

Because of the scope and ambition of our project, there are of course a great many people we would like to thank and without whose help our book could not have been written. We are especially grateful to Dr. Paulo Chapchap, CEO of Hospital Sírio Libanês, Cris Dios, co-founder of Laces and Hair, Walter Mancini, founder and owner of Famiglia Mancini restaurants, Eduardo Srur, artist and entrepreneur, and João Bernartt, founder and CEO of Chaordic Systems, for sharing so much of their rich knowledge and wisdom with us and for taking the time to explain and explore their organisations and ways of thinking. We also thank Helen Blake, Thomas Kolster, Gunther Sonnenfeld, Andrew Markell, James Souttar, Thomas Giordano and Pedro Oliveira for their valuable contributions and insights, many of which have come from numerous conversations with us over the last two years. We offer our heartfelt thanks to the late educator Sri Sathya Sai Baba for creating such a fundamental programme in human values which has provided so much inspiration for our work.

We thank Tao Ruspoli for graciously allowing us to share material from his wonderful documentary Being in the World (Mangu Films, 2014), and John Timpson for allowing us to publish extracts from the BBC interview in which he discusses his philosophy of Upside Down Management. We are also very grateful to James Watt for allowing us to share the BrewDog charter, Bruce Temkin for providing us with permission to cite findings from the research of Temkin Group, Jennifer Elks for providing us with permission to republish parts of John Schulz’s presentation at Sustainable Brands San Diego, Matt Watkinson for allowing us to publish his ten principles of great customer experiences, Henrik Kniberg for letting us use quotations from his video on Spotify’s engineering culture, Raphael Bemporad for providing us with the permission to share insights from BBMG, Winnie Tyrrell, Photo Library Co-ordinator at Glasgow Life/Glasgow Museums for helping us obtain permission to reproduce our photograph of The Druids – Bringing in the Mistletoe, and to Vicky Mitchell, Business Affairs Executive, BBC Rights, Legal & Business Affairs for helping us to obtain permission to reproduce John Timpson’s interview.

The front cover image of the double-walled espresso glass comes from Bredemeijer®, a company based in The Netherlands. We are most grateful to Esther de Wit, Marketing Coordinator at Bredemeijer Group for allowing us to reproduce their glass, an image which for us has many layers of meaning in relation to customer experience, service and soul. We would also like to extend a special thank you to Jonathan Robinson for his advice and great diligence in editing our manuscript, and to Justin Schofield from Lulu for his guidance in managing the publication process.

Behind the scenes many friends, colleagues and other people have provided invaluable assistance in many different ways. We thank Douglas Dias from Famiglia Mancini, Fiona Stewart, David McDowall, and Neil Taylor from BrewDog, Erika Thais Rocha from BrewDog Bar São Paulo, Cindy Barnes from Futurecurve, Christine Hickman from Timpson, and Andrea Rosen from Contagious. We would also like to thank Fritjof Capra, Bruno Cheuiche, Olavo Oliveira, Daniela Carvalho, Zoraide Stark, Dalton de Souza Amorim, Rodrigo Bicalho, Tadeu Navarro, KoAnn Vikoren Skrzyniarz, Sirikul Laukaikul, Itamar Cechetto, Lilian Lopes, Betsey Merkel, Anderson Nielson, Andrea Nalesso, Darlene Dutra, Wilmar Cidral, Philip Franses, Jan Hoglünd, Andrea Somoza-Norton, Jenny Andersson and Benjamin Butler for their valued support which in many different ways helped us to spread the message about Holonomics and our work around the world.

Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson

São Paulo, Brazil, May 2017

1. Customers, Experiences, Soul

What Do We Mean By Soul?

This is a book about customers, experiences and soul. These are not three easily understood discrete entities which we can simply sum together. We need to explore what we mean by these terms, and how they come together to help us move beyond designing great customer experiences, to be able to offer something deeper – customer experiences with soul. A little over twenty years ago an approach called ‘designing the customer experience’ was developed at the Human Factors department of BT Laboratories in Ipswich. In the early 1990s the focus was on human-computer interaction, a discipline mostly based in university research departments, with little connection to marketing departments, product managers, service centres and business strategists. The process ‘designing the customer experience’ was created to reposition Human Factors and user-centred design at the very heart of the product life-cycle within organisations, thus becoming one of the precursors to the development of design thinking, service design, customer journey mapping and concepts such as customer success.

Two decades later we felt the need to transcend what have now become well-defined approaches and definitions of customer experience, to help companies understand why their offerings are no longer resonating with people, where this deep source of a lack of authenticity, coherence and values comes from, and how to develop a profound understanding of the lived experience of every single person whose lives our organisations touch. This approach is rarely spoken about in business, but those who take on board what is being said, and who can develop the maturity and bravery to disrupt their own mental models of how things have to be, will find that they have the resources to create an entirely new way of being for their businesses, a way of being which is soulful.

In the last twenty years two significant trends have emerged which have changed the business landscape dramatically and which now require businesses and organisations to shift their attention from offering great customer experiences to customer experiences with soul. The first trend, which needs little explanation, is the explosion in our use of mobile and internet technologies which have opened up many new ways for consumers to research, connect and interact with businesses, resulting in a shift in power away from marketing campaigns and towards consumer activists, ambassadors and critics. This has led to advances in the way in which we think about and design customer journeys, developing tools such as customer journey maps which visualise in graphs and grids the many different touchpoints that customers have.

The second trend relates not to technology, but to a consumer-led paradigm shift in attitudes and beliefs not just in Generation Y and Millennials, but across all age groups as people seek to reconnect authentically to other people and to nature. Consumers are seeking out experiences rather than ever greater consumption, desiring a more dignified life where work is more meaningful, lives are happier, and relationships with businesses and brands are fully authentic, aligned with their own personal missions, values and beliefs. People today are seeking more alignment, more engagement, more connectivity, more honesty and more transparency from the companies and organisations they chose to do business with. This is now causing a crisis in companies in terms of leadership, management, sales and results as they fail to connect with their customers and clients.

Around the world there is a growing awareness of the destructive nature of current economic paradigms based on fragmentation, where powerful nations aim to dominate weaker nations rich in natural resources. The most enlightened businesses are now transforming their life-destroying business models to ones which are life-enhancing and which regenerate natural ecosystems and local economies. The concept of customer experiences with soul radically transforms our attention from a focus on interactions that individual people have with products and services, to the quality of experience of communities and the richness of the quality of their lives.

What this boils down to is a crisis of essence and a crisis of values. It is not a crisis of coherence since there are many companies operating from traditional mindsets and values which are coherent, but not authentic. Companies are confusing emotion-driven marketing campaigns which still focus on the products and services, with authentic missions which inspire people with a higher purpose beyond the core offering. This new business paradigm places a huge emphasis on business culture, as the companies which will thrive in the twenty first century will be transparent, understanding that internal equals external, meaning that every single action they carry out will constitute marketing.

In the new business paradigm you cannot design the customer experience because you are the customer experience, and so in order to understand the customer experience, you have to understand what it means to be. This is the great question of ‘being’. While this may sound like a philosophical question of little relevance to leaders, as a business begins to experience early success and starts to grow, sometimes exponentially, the sense of who we are can often become lost and confused, especially as new recruits join who were not present at the inception and who do not necessarily live the mission and vision.

In order to help businesses understand this question of being, we created the holonomic circle, a tool designed to help everyone across an organisation think about the customer experience of their offerings, and all those different aspects which need to be considered in order to be able to reach that point where the customer experience has soul. While we are perfectly willing to describe a corporate culture as soul-destroying, when we turn this concept around and ask if a company can have soul, the question can be particularly unsettling for many, especially if we leave the concept of soul undefined. The word ‘soul’ has many different meanings and connotations. While it is common to hear the claim in business of putting our heart and soul into our work, it is quite valid to ask the question of whether or not it is possible for a customer experience to have soul, or to put it another way, if it is possible to experience soul in a transaction?

An experience has soul when one soul recognises another soul. For this reason this book reveals the hidden qualities of experience which are rarely spoken about in a business context. Emotions play an extremely significant role in decision-making; they can cloud our judgements and can lead us to decisions which later we can come to regret, allowing less scrupulous businesses to manipulate our emotions in the buying process. But when we strip away thinking and we strip away emotion we are left with feeling, through which when combined with an intuitive understanding of a phenomenon such as a brand, a product, or an experience of a representative of an organisation, we achieve a deeper sense of connection with the essence of that phenomenon.

The soul in customer experiences with soul is the essence of a business and we encounter the essence through each and every part, be it product, service, advertisement, interface or personal interaction we have with the organisation. For this reason the term ‘customer experience’ refers not only to the interaction our paying customers have with our products, services and brands, but also to every single interaction inside the business between colleagues, employees, suppliers, shareholders and contractors, and every interaction between those who work for a business and who are representing the business, and every person who comes into contact with the business. Every single one of us has our own personal customer experience which we project and for which we have to take full responsibility. For this reason, before we explore the holonomic circle in detail, we have to explore matters relating to the transition of consciousness. The reason is that if we are stuck in ego, and if we have not developed a sense of human values, no matter how worthy our purpose there is still a danger that archetypal behaviours such as being blinkered, predatory, selfish and elitist will sabotage our efforts.

More often than not, cognitive dissonance protects people with these types of behaviours. Many people are unable to believe that leaders and gurus with such worthy aims could ever act in ways which are not congruent with their stated missions and purposes in life. While this may sound a little melodramatic, it is a sad fact that many places of work are disheartening environments to be in, and this is exacerbated by managers and leaders who may be stuck in their individual egos and therefore simply unable to ascertain just how their speech, actions and non-verbal behaviours are being communicated and picked up by those around them. While technology has given us untold abilities to interact across traditional boundaries, the networks we develop are not going to be authentic and therefore sustainable without people who have an expanded level of consciousness. Discernment is required as never before in an age of personal branding, in order that we do not accidentally find ourselves being a part of a ‘knotwork’ – a network with ego – which can be more cliques than authentic networks of people working towards a higher purpose for the good of all.

The journey from where we