Why Your Organization Needs a Digital Sense DNA Layer

No industry is immune to the new rules of social business, the increasing demands, and the need to make customer experience the one metric that matters. World renowned futurist Gerd Leonhard has gone on record to say that the exponential speed and evolution of technology has created a digital-first world in which “humanity will change more in the next 20 years than the previous 300.”

Think about that for a minute. Imagine it is the year 1717 (300 years ago from the release of this book) and that you are hanging out with us over your favorite adult beverage in a candlelit tavern on Manhattan Island in New York. Imagine that as we all fill up our bladders and make our way to the outhouse (or side of the building) to relieve ourselves, we notice a small hot spring on the ground. We decide in our stupors to take off our sweet powdered wigs and take a relaxing bath for the first time in a few weeks, while continuing our imbibition.

As we begin to relax, Travis tells some joke about the British soldiers, making you laugh so hard that you spill what is left of your beverage into the sulfur-infused bubbling water and it transforms our hot spring into the Hot Tub Time Machine! Immediately we are transported to present-day New York City 300 years into the future! (It could happen.) Talk about feeling overwhelmed. We would have a real challenge (Colonial skivvies aside) assimilating into the 2017 world with our 1717 understanding of how society is organized, information is proliferated, and commerce is done.

Well friends, whether Gerd is 100 percent correct or not, the reality is that all humans alive today will experience the same level of change by the year 2037 as our fictitious Colonial counterparts would experience if they were transported to present day. In the next 20 years, with 5G Internet, AI, AR, VR, chatbots, and the Internet of EVERYF#%KINGTHING, the world as we know it is certainly going to change (Figure 1.1). Welcome to the Fourth Industrial Revolution! Nothing before has ever prepared us for what is going to happen. As Wired Magazine's founding executive editor, famed futurist Kevin Kelly, also states, “It's Inevitable.”

Are you ready?

The Game Has Forever Been Changed

Your reality today is that your customer doesn't care about your internal battles, political hurdles, or legacy technologies' lack of integration into your newer cloud-based ones. She doesn't care about your struggle to retain top talent, or your troubles creating a culture unified around core values, while continuing to hit the quarterly earnings numbers. Nor does she care why, at different touch points along the journey, you can't seem to deliver the same brand promise she bought into on the front end. She could give two craps about your issues and is—like all of us—no longer loyal to a brand as much as she is loyal to the need for a solution to the problem she has in that moment. She grades you only on how you deliver against it and how consistently you can meet her evolving needs over time.

Just because you have satisfied customers doesn't mean you have happy ones. Satisfied customers are best defined as those customers who continue to pay for the service you provide, because they have not yet found another way to live without you.

Think about that for a minute.

It makes sense but it is hardly aspirational as an offensive strategy. It merely serves as a temporary defensive one that can fool you into complacency, because it doesn't currently violate the universal Law of Compensation. There is a universal Law of Compensation you ask? Yes, there is. There are only three rules to earning the majority of the market share at any given time, and for those who haven't read any of our earlier stuff, the Law of Compensation is defined below as follows:

1. the need for what you do,
2. your ability to fulfill that need consistently, and
3. how difficult or easy it is to replace you.

Satisfied customers are not secure customers in tomorrow's marketplace, and you are vulnerable because of the false sense of security you feel as it relates to number three in this law. The reason is simple. If your customer is merely continuing to pay you because you fulfill their need consistently (taxi cabs fill the need of rented individual transport) and you are difficult to replace (2007), then once Uber/Lyft and so on get to scale (2010), your satisfied customer becomes your disruptive competitor's happy one. Then the cycle starts all over again.

Satisfied customers of Uber are now just as vulnerable to leave if it becomes easier and more exciting to replace Uber with some other option for timely, affordable, easy transport. In the same way, happy lessees or owners of (insert your favorite automaker here) cars and trucks are a vulnerable asset the minute they decide ridesharing is more economically viable and convenient than paying for a vehicle they only use on average 5 percent of their week.

Companies like GetAround, Turo, and Skurt are renting people cars and disrupting the car rental business now. If you're driving your car only 5 percent of the time, why not rent it out to someone who needs it? The sharing/trusting economy is in full effect, and some simulations show that in the coming years taxibots could replace 90 percent of all cars on the road, drop commute times 10 percent, and open up acres of land for parks and public use, completely transforming cities with a marriage of mass carpooling and UPS delivery intelligence.¹

The cycles of innovation around your customer experience, business model, and solution set as a differentiator must continue to speed up without sacrificing the reliability of that delivery. Your organizational DNA and leadership teams must make immediate shifts in prioritization around the following new ideals.

• The Customer is the Number One Asset. (We suggest you follow fellow Wiley author Jeanne Bliss at CustomerBliss.com. immediately, read Chief Customer Officer 2.0, and commit to implementing her five core competencies to your corporate list of Key Performance Indicators [KPIs].)
• There is no online/offline world in which we exist. It is now an always-on world.
• There may be multiple budgets within the org chart, but there is only one bank account.
• Every decision must be measured against how it impacts the customer experience.
• The internal customer (employee) is as important as the external customer you seek to serve.
• You can't keep up with it all, so focus on improving the areas with the least friction and highest ROI first, and then gain momentum daily, monthly, and yearly to tackle more.
• Empathy (EQ) is the number one skill to cultivate in your organization.
• Design thinking is not just for creatives and should be rooted in your professional development plan for all departments.
• In a software-is-everything world, your product is your focus group, as sensors connect everything, availing data-fed iterations in real time for those who build the proper technology stack.
• Your organization needs digital sense.

As you read this book, please understand that we are both pragmatists at our core, more than we are anything else. We are both insatiable learners and fearless doers, but at our mutual hearts, we are pragmatic problem solvers and dot connectors before we are anything else. Each of us has been blessed with the gift of gab, and our intention with this book is to use our ability to assimilate a multitude of inputs into succinct and focused outputs that inspire you to action that causes massive impact. We have endeavored to make this book a pragmatically powerful perspective and reference resource for you, the reader. Our goal is that Digital Sense will help provide you the context and configuration to build a custom solution for your business that achieves a focused social business strategy, powered by the proper technology, to deliver your customers (internal and external) a world-class experience, day in and day out.

This book is not going to read like a marketing or operations textbook or technology manual. Instead, it will be infused with cross-functional exercises, a framework, a mental model for optimizing communication, case studies statistics, data, a few emojis, and jokes. We will discuss some of the research and provide assessments at your fingertips that are cutting edge, but we did not run any double-blind experiments on a group of test subjects in a lab.

We are not those authors. We are not in an ivory tower. We are warrior generals in the field running full speed into success and failure, licking our wounds while researching, thinking, and DOING in real time. We know that a large percentage of the tactical advice in this book won't work exactly the same in the near future and will face obsolescence, but the framework and thinking that created those efforts will be foundational for your ability to stay ahead of the game and solve the problems you face in the future.

The book is designed to build, more than anything else, a common set of language, visual tools of communication, and an active community of fellow field generals. Join the community and stay up on trends with our newsletter at DigitalSen.se and help each other as we iterate this work in the future.

We will provide references to several of the extremely valuable ivory-tower authors and sense-making organizations throughout this book, since we consume content voraciously from them, but we are writing this book primarily to deliver on its subtitle and provide you with “The Common Sense Approach to Effectively Blending Social Business Strategy, Marketing Technology, and Customer Experience.”

Our recommended approach within this book is completely customizable. It is simple, but won't be easy. We have provided Chapter 2 and Chapter 5 to ensure that you are armed with the proper mental awareness and leadership ammo to take the ideas in this book and put them into use in any organization regardless of where you sit in the hierarchy.

Bits of Knowledge

Throughout the chapters, we will have several Digital Bits of knowledge that we call out or link to for your further discovery or deeper diving into key topics. We also will utilize these links and assets to continually update the supplemental and supportive content of this book as the months and years pass and exponential shifts change the truth around some of the strategies and tactics we are sharing in this version. Please consider this a reference point and check back often with our Digital Bits as we provide updates and changes to the ideas and recommendations we discuss herein.

Who Is This Book For?

Our goal for Digital Sense is to empower all executives, marketers, internal change agents, and entrepreneurs with a framework and structure to build an amazing work culture that aligns the customer needs to the major business goals in a sustainable way that delivers both reliability to the customer experience across all channels and a method to operationalize innovation more effectively.

This book was written for the executive of a growing or large organization to illuminate the robustness of the techniques discussed and empower you to lead from wherever you are in the org chart, to help you defend against the coming disruption to your existence. This book is also written for the founder/entrepreneur or early stage company leader building a vision from the ground up to take on an inefficient and impersonal giant in the industry. Disrupt away, brothers and sisters!

Throughout this book, we will highlight some great examples from your peers in both regards, as they have navigated the bumpy road of proliferating a Digital Sense across the layers and silos of their organization to build a social business strategy that delivers a better customer experience each and every day.

Mostly, however, we wrote this book for anyone who wishes, as Steve Farber says, to “do what you love in the service of those who love what you do!” Adding what Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, says as his personal mission statement, “To help lead with wisdom and empathy.” If it is true that work is love made visible, we can only hope that at the conclusion of this book, you will clearly feel and know how much we loved working on this book together in service to you, our peers. Enjoy the journey!