Conclusion

Becoming an experience-centric organization is not a choice you make, but an imperative driven by the market. Where there is competition, all organizations are competing on experience in one way or another, and all are inevitably on a trajectory toward experience centricity. You can choose to move quickly along this trajectory and gain competitive advantage, or you can wait and watch others speed past you.

In this book I have shown what it means to be experience-centric as an organization, and the steps that you need to take to reach experience centricity. You can obtain quick wins by embracing an experiential journey approach, so that is a good place to start. However, this is something your competitors will also be doing, and my experience is that you need to think long-term and start an organizational transformation. Key to this transformation is experience thinking, a way of thinking that is powered by design. If there is one discipline that can accelerate your transformation to experience centricity, it is design—but not design in the traditional sense. Experience centricity requires that you embrace design thinking as a way of thinking, and design doing as a way of doing. A central part of this design-driven experiential competence is being one step ahead of your customers by being able to see them, hear them, and be them. This understanding is not enough on its own, though; you have to translate it into experiences in order to deliver a combination of an experientially desirable offering and touchpoints along the experiential journey. This requires an organizational competence that connects you to trends, meaning, and culture on the one hand, and to experiential fulfillment, technology, and organization on the other.

The wheel of experience centricity should form the backbone of your understanding of experience centricity. It is a powerful model that describes how the various parts of your organization have to fit together to be able to deliver on your experiential offerings. I cannot overemphasize the importance of your experiential DNA in this, because knowing yourself takes you halfway toward being able to create and deliver great experiences. This is not to undermine the other parts of the wheel, since all are vital to make the approach work effectively and efficiently. But if you do not know yourself well, then how can you expect your customers to know you and want to develop a relationship with you? The wheel helps you understand the roles of various parts of your organization in making great experiences happen, and it allows you to align them to the goal of providing desirable experiences. It equips you to ask the right questions of each part of your organization, such as “How will this software platform support experience fulfillment and the experience we want to provide?” or “How will this strategic collaboration improve the customer experience?” These questions have unfortunately been lacking in the past, leading to a blurring of lines around the customer experience. Now you have the structure to ask them, and to bring everything into focus. I recommend you make the wheel of experience centricity your own, and use it actively as you develop your own experience-centric organization.

It is my sincere hope that by employing the approaches presented in this book that you will create more value not only for your organization but also for your customers, and will build a long-term competitive advantage in the marketplace. In the years to come, I hope you will be able to look back on the journey you have embarked on and check off the stages toward experience centricity. Your customers will thank you for it, your employees will thank you for it, and your investors will cheer you on.

Further Reading

It is always difficult to recommend further reading without knowing more about the reader who wants to learn more. So, with that in mind, I have listed books here that I recommend based on my own interests and the theme of this book. Please point me to other books if you have suggestions, as these are key areas of reading for me.

Design Thinking

Resources in the field of design thinking are a mix of consultant-based books and research-based ones. From the consultant point of view, Tim Brown’s book Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (HarperBusiness) was a kick-starter to the wave of design thinking and is therefore worth a read. His articles in the Harvard Business Review are also good, and fairly easy to find online. I have always been a fan of Jeanne Liedtka too, and can recommend her book Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers (Columbia University Press). From the research point of view, Hasso Plattner’s book Design Thinking Research: Taking Breakthrough Innovation Home (Springer) is a good research summary. To gain a good understanding about how designers design, I recommend Design Expertise by Bryan Lawson (Taylor & Francis) as a good start.

Service Design

To my mind, service design takes design thinking a step further by applying it to innovation in services. Service design has not expanded as much in the US as in Europe, but I really recommend the thinking and approaches behind service design as a pragmatic and successful approach to using design thinking to innovate. For me, This is Service Design Doing, by Marc Stickdorn et al. (O’Reilly), is the best book by far, standing head and shoulders above all others at the moment.

Customer Experience

This is a minefield of an area, and is partly the reason why I wrote this book. There are a lot of books that preach about the importance of the customer experience, but I don’t find them very useful. I did find Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s book The Power of Moments (Simon & Schuster) to be a good read, even though its aim is to convince you of the power of experiences, not show how you can harness it yourself. In terms of understanding experiences, Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) is a classic. I recommend How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett (Mariner Books) to explain the neuropsychological basis of emotions and experiences. Finally, I recommend Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason by Mark Johnson, who also co-wrote a classic called Metaphors We Live By with George Lackoff (both published by University of Chicago Press).

Nudging

Linked to customer experience, the area of nudging is interesting and the books Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely (HarperCollins) and Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (Penguin) are good resources. The website Coglode.com has a nice collection and clear interpretation of many nudging or behavioral biases we have. There is little background on the site explaining why nudges work, but it offers some useful summaries of what they are.

Designing for Experience

To be able to design for experience, you will have to learn how to map experiences, and Mapping Experiences by Jim Kalbach (O’Reilly) is a fantastic book that tells all you need to know. I would complement this with Orchestrating Experiences by Chris Risdon and Patrick Quattlebaum (Rosenfeld).

Organizational Transformation

I have struggled to find good books that relate to organizational design from the perspective of this book. So, I have gone back to the basics of organization. Designing Dynamic Organizations by Jay Galbraith, Diane Downey, and Amy Kates (AMACOM) is a good book on this topic. Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux (Nelson Parker) is also good choice; and I can’t discuss organization design without pointing you to Holacracy by Brian J. Robertson (Holt, Henry & Company).

Culture and Meaning

This field is crying out for a book that applies cultural theory to design, but until it arrives, then I suggest the following. How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding by Douglas Holt (Harvard Business Review Press) is very good and shows how consumption and branding can respond to cultural need. His follow-up book with Douglas Cameron, Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands (Oxford University Press) is also worth a read. If you are interested in rituals and the design of tradition, The Invention of Tradition by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge University Press) is a classic and full of aha moments where you realize that cultural pillars (including the kilt) were actually invented.

Biographies

Simon Clatworthy is a professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). He has worked with design for experience and the strategic use of design for over 20 years, and has worked with large global service organizations such as Lufthansa, Telenor, Visa, and Adidas. Simon has a PhD in service design and was central in forming two eight-year national initiatives: the Norwegian Centre for Service Innovation and Centre for Connected Care.

Ted Matthews, the author of Chapter 9, 4Me: Designing for Meaningful Experiences, is a service designer, speaker, trainer, and researcher. He is Chair of Service Design at AHO and recently delivered his PhD on the potential of ritual and myth in the design of meaningful service experiences. This work has been applied to a diverse range of areas, including professional football, banking, and meaningful tourism experiences in Norway.

Claire Dennington, the author of Chapter 10, Trendslation, is an experienced and recognized designer who has worked in design and fashion for many years, together with national and global fashion brands such as BikBok and Adidas. She is currently carrying out her PhD at AHO in the area of trendslation—translating cultural trends into service experiences.

Colophon

The cover design and illustration are by Simon Clatworthy and Graham John Mansfield. The cover fonts are FreightSans Pro and Guardian Sans Condensed. The text fonts are FreightSans Pro and Garamond.