Simone Cicero

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. On this podcast, we explore the future of business models, organizations, markets and society in our rapidly changing world. I’m joined today by my usual co-host, Shruthi Prakash. Hello Shruthi.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Hello everybody!

 

Simone Cicero 

And we are honored to welcome our guests for today with a leading strategist, innovative thinker and advocate for adaptive and customer centricity, adaptiveness and customer centricity in business, Helge Tenno. Helge, did I pronounce it well?

 

Helge

Very good. Thank you for having me.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you for being with us.

 

And yeah, I mean, it’s really a privilege to have you on our podcast today. Today’s episode, I think it’s great because I’ve been kind of reading your stuff, your articles for almost 15 years now. And you, like me, you have been a very prolific writer for nearly two decades. But we just recently connected on a personal level, which prompted us to run this episode together.

 

What I always liked about your writing is that you cannot develop a unique framework that basically approaches and take hold how complex is now in evolving market to keep this idea that an organization needs to, from what the organization sells to how the organization is set, should always keep the customer in mind. 

 

So it’s really about being customer-centric as a raison d’etre, as French people would say. So essentially, want to discuss with you and explore your experience and how you see it moving forward in terms of organizations integrating customers and customer centricity deeply in the products, how they’re organized, and now the skills of the people is nurtured and developed. 

 

You also start from a very wide experience both as a consultant across many industries, but also you played internally to a large conglomerates, like for example, your latest experience was with a pharmaceutical company, a very big company. You know how important it is, but also you know how difficult it is to shift organizations in a customer centric way.

 

Simone Cicero 

So let’s start maybe with an opening question. I will ask you to share with us, I would say, what led you to realize that as an organization, you cannot really achieve success and support the customer unless you fully lean into customer centricity.

 

Helge 

Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Simone and Shruthi. So I think this was from my last experience in this pharmaceutical company. My initial job was to work with the marketing teams and my job was to make them more customer centric. And the way that we did that was that we kind of met with these marketers across many of these countries and then we figured out what they had in common.

 

And what they had in common is, of course, it’s very natural. It’s a product centric kind of view. Now they all wanted to become more customer centric. So that was kind of my job was to try to lead that. We chose jobs to be done as a methodology to kind of say, like, what’s the lowest hanging fruit, the simplest possible way for these marketers to be able to get a little bit closer to the customer. And one of the reasons we chose that as well was because there’s 5,000 marketers.

 

So there’s no way we could physically engage with each one of them and train them individually. So we had to create something that enabled them to kind of understand and get closer to the customer on their own with a little bit of our support. And jobs to be done is such a nice framework. So we still, brought that from the outside and then we worked with these teams, several teams over some time to kind of change jobs to be done to fit into the kind of the nature of this organization and these teams.

 

And then something really, really cool happened because suddenly many of these teams truly started asking better questions about the customer. But then to your question, what happens next? Because once you change the questions these teams ask, it’s like putting a Ferrari engine into an old Fiat. Now, suddenly they’re asking all these good questions, but they’re also finding that they can’t answer them because they’re missing the insights, they have the wrong data. Once you can give them the right data, suddenly they’re getting new insights, they’re learning that they want to do new things, they’re asking to do new experiences, which means they need new types of technologies to serve those experiences. They need new ways of working to be able to respond to the customer in good way. And also they need to be measured in a new way because they’re not going to be measured by engagement measurements anymore. They’re going to be measured by customer and business value. So it’s kind of, it’s finding this kind of this key in the middle that unlocks the whole thing. 

 

And basically for a whole year in the middle of this this kind of five year period, we were just trying to figure out what is the most important next thing we need to do in in order to build this customer centric organization and then kind of bit by bit kind of working closer and closer to this machine, this car that supported the engine that enabled these marketers to get where they wanted to go.

 

Simone Cicero

I mean, it would be nice to give a tangible, because I think you raise a very important, I mean, many questions that I have on my notes already, but maybe a good one is to look into what are the key elements of a customer-centric transformation. So you mentioned, for example, technology, ways of working, performance measurements.

 

What is in your experience the framework that companies need to start from when they embrace customer-centricity?

 

Helge 

Yeah. So, we went about it in two ways. So one was this narrative. So if you change the why, like the why is, am I doing this to sell products or to serve customers? So once you change the why, which is what we were able to do with this needs focus, then we said, then the why changes the questions. You start asking new questions – these questions demand new data and then data needs new type of – I call it sense making – I know that’s a term not many people use, but it’s the models we use to make sense of the data. 

 

So if we use a customer journey, example, as an example, we’ve kind of chosen the way we would like the perspective we would look at the world. We squeeze the data we can fit into that journey. But sometimes the journey is the wrong model, like to one of your initial comments Simone. So once you get the models, then you get the insights. Then you say, I want to do new things. Then you have to do the channels. 

 

Then you have to do the ways of working and then you have to do the… So this is going to be hard on a podcast, but we created a stack, like we had a stack of four. This is not unique or special to this organization. We took it from the outside and made some adaptations. But the first layer, if you remember Jesse James Gareth, the old model adaptive path back in 2003, it’s kind of similar to his work. So we said at the top is the experience itself. Now, what we realized there and maybe this is common in many organizations, is that the organization is very focused on activating customers, spends most of their time and money on getting out to the customer.

 

But if you ask the organization, you might find out that most of the time we spend with our customers is when they come to us. So you have to make sure you’re both doing this kind of activation and response. Both of them needs to be equal. That’s the top layer.

 

The second layer we call the strategy layer. sorry, the data layer. So in the data layer, you both need the insights to make the right decisions and you need the technology to serve your experiences. Strategy layer is, first of all, making sure we understand the customer from a strategic perspective. But secondly, I think this is crucial, is to see this link between customer value and business value. 

 

Because if you, so this is my kind of at the heart of customer centricity is this belief that in order for an organization to produce value, it’s an equal exchange of value with the customer. So our job is to figure out what is the value the customer needs? How do we offer them that value? This unlocks a behavioral change in the customer that brings value back to us. So that was kind of that second, like the customer to business value link. And at the bottom, we had cultural ways of working and then leadership. 

 

And so hard to do and put cost, but there was kind of a stack model that we kind of stole or took or adapted to our company.

 

Shruthi Prakash

What I was per se interested in is one of the last points that you mentioned, right? Of connecting the customer value to the business value. So when I was reading a lot of your articles as well, is mention of how, let’s say, establishing a line of sight between a work and the value that is created.

 

So how do you enable that more with the employees, with the organization? How can they take ownership of the results that a customer then experiences?

 

Helge

Yeah. So this is, so there’s two parts. So we used this Venn diagram where business value is one circle and customer value is the other. And we said our goal as marketer and business people is to figure out the overlap because we don’t want to do things that are only valuable to us because customers won’t care. And we don’t want to do what’s only valuable to the customers because there’s no commercial model in it. So figure out the thing in the middle. That was like a super simple visualization and story that kind of got the organization interested, like they were leaning, they really liked that one and it really kind of leaned into it. 

 

Now, when the next thing is that, how do we create this line of sight of measurement? And then we start with the engagement. So preferably digital engagement was most of the activities that we kind of touched on in our team, but we already measured the engagements. Unfortunately, many organizations I believe they kind of measure the engagements and then they make an assumption about value. 

 

But if you talk to data people and data scientists and the better they are, the more they would insist on this is that you’re only measuring what you’re measuring. If you’re measuring engagements, it’s a measure of engagement. It’s nothing else. And so making an assumption about business value based on engagement is a huge leap of faith and also sometimes hugely erroneous. 

 

So we said the first thing you need to do is of course, are we getting the engagement? Are we getting the right people for the right price? Are they paying attention to us? Which means they’re kind of leaning in a little bit. And then we said, if that works, now we got the time we need with them to produce value. Now this is their value. So any reason I would come to engage with any of your activities is because I’m trying to get some value as a customer. It’s not because I want to spend time with you. It’s I’m trying to get help for myself.

 

So you have to kind of identify these micro values or the smaller values. Like I’m reading an article because I want to learn something. So what is the value? Value is I learned something of value, significant useful current or whatever we want. But that is the match. So measure the engagement. We’re getting the right people at the right place. Are we giving them something of value? Yes, they are learning while they’re spending time with us and they recognize that they’re learning. Now they’ve got value.

 

Now, is this learning turning into a behavioral change that leads to business value? So you also measure, this is depending on industry. If you’re selling fast moving consumer goods, the behavioral change might be just picking up a chocolate bar at the end of a supermarket aisle. If you are in pharmaceuticals as I was, I mean, you’re trying to change and trying to have influence on how experts and specialists make decisions. It’s really, really hard.

 

So it’s kind of, it’s a journey of change. You need to measure that you’re slowly changing. They’re slowly learning what we hope they would learn. And then that learning is changing their behavior. And then the last thing you would want to know is to make sure that even if you get the behavioral change, it produces value back to the organization. Because sometimes you might be in a situation where you’re, you’re giving them all this learning and that just leads them to the competitor’s products.

 

So you want to make sure that your strategy actually makes sense. And so you measure the link between the behavior and the strategy. that was engagement, customer value, behavioral change, business value. So which is kind of very, very common. So most of the work that we did was like, we’re taking common models of the internet and experts. And then we’re kind of just trying to fit them into kind of giving them some local nuance inside of this organization.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

For me, the idea of value itself, right? Like you can look at it in so many different ways, like you described, like it can, let’s say, be short term, long term, it can be like we were discussing at the back as well, Simone. So do you as an employee see it as a customer ownership versus a product ownership and thereby your, you know, idea of value changes? 

 

So considering there are so many different ways in which your result can be considered either valuable or invaluable at a certain time, how do you sort of go about assessing that to begin with to decide what works for you at a particular time?

 

Helge 

This was a bit difficult because we were looking at high, I call it high level customer outcomes or value and then low level, low altitude. I think there are in jobs to be done, there are different terms to describe these. So for just, I’m going to do the physicians again “as a physician, I want to improve the health of my patients.” That’s super like super, super high level.

 

But if I’m making a very specific campaign engagement, then like, I’m not going to be able to have an influence on that significantly. So I want to figure out if they’re going to spend seven minutes with me, what is it that I can offer that is of value in those seven minutes? And very common one, of course, in these, in these industries where you’re trying to like scientific material and engagement is you’re trying to get them to learn something. 

 

So that’s why kind of we were trying to articulate you need to have this higher level understanding because that’s their major motivation. But also when you’re inside a situation or a specific context, there are kind of contextual values they’re trying to achieve. And maybe if it’s like in a micro action, I’m just trying to learn something or I’m just trying to register.

 

So to me, that’s still little bit fluffy. I can’t really nail it down like specific theory, but we kind of try to train marketers on kind of understanding the context and kind of what would you be able to offer a value in this situation that relates to the customer. Maybe there’s one more thing I’ll on. 

 

So there’s a saying, you become what you measure. And if you are measuring engagement metrics, like time on site or scroll depth or downloads, like what does that tell you about what you become? And I think everyone goes to work because they want to contribute something of value. Like they want work to be meaningful. And so we will clearly see that once we were able to share with teams, the value that the customer was looking for and that they were contributing to that value immediately the work became more meaningful to them and they were more enthusiastic and engaged. And it was not very sophisticated. Like we used the market research to prove that this is what they’re looking for a value. And we figured out a way to measure if we were doing it. And then we were kind of just designing what we were doing. But now they knew, they knew that what they were doing was valuable and they were able to measure that they were kind of offering that value. That was appreciated. Huge, huge change for a team in terms of purpose and meaningfulness.

 

Simone Cicero

So I have a couple of questions. Let me try to recap for the listeners as well. I see this vertical stack you mentioned. One is kind of engagement and customer value. So you try to engage the customer. You try to tell them that you can deliver the customer value they’re looking for. And you mentioned that you have been using jobs to be done, for example, as a framework to define customer value. So people have jobs to do.

 

And delivering customer value is essentially helping them achieve their jobs. Then you mentioned behavioral change, which I translate. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Very simply, it could be you can perform that job with my product. So it’s essentially you move from a behavior that exists before, then counter your company, your products, into a new behavior that includes using your products, essentially your services, your products, and your organization outcomes.

 

So once this behavioral change happens, you start to translate these engagements into business value. And business value is what I would like to focus for a moment here. I have another set of questions that we can come back later on, which is about representing customer value in complex ecosystems, which is something that I would like to discuss with you. 

 

But if we just focus on you know, this is a stack, customer value, engaging on that, helping the customer change their behaviors, including your products in the picture of how they perform their jobs, then translating into product use. How do you take all these ideas that, for example, when you have multiple products in an organization, which is the reality now, how do you orchestrate this business value?

 

I don’t know, creating, for example, economic models that you can distribute across the board. How do you keep track of the complexity of products that multiple teams deliver to the customer in behavioral change?

 

Helge

So I’m gonna critique a little bit the customer journey. So we’re in this workshop with this country and it’s a cross-functional team. So they have all these representatives from different departments and the pharmaceutical industry is very siloed.

 

Like because it has to be siloes. You do not mix medical with commercial. That is a no-no in every country. but you can, you can, in some instances, there’s a market, there’s an opportunity to learn and to understand what each other are doing, of course. And so everyone is brought into this, this workshop and we’re trying to map out like, what is everyone doing with one of our customer groups? But the model that was chosen was a customer journey. 

 

Now, in this workshop, two of the people that talked and shared a lot, were salespeople or accels and salespeople, and they were able to really share really deep, valuable, thick contextual stories of their experiences with customers. And so you get this anecdotal evidence, of course, but it’s like you really understand, like, that’s a beautiful insight. That is valuable.

 

You go from this looking at this kind of what you’re doing as a mechanics to to to kind of empathizing more and adding more emotional insights. None of that insight from these two people made it into their customer journey because the customer journey is so one dimensional, it didn’t fit any of the information. So we started looking at like, how could we how could we learn so much? How could this organization be sitting on so much information and still not be able to use it? So how can we get it to use it was more of the question. And I think we made three or four or five different kind of it, model it and model it. And we tried to figure out what is the, what makes sense here. And then suddenly we ended up with a systems map. 

 

So a systems map is, a co, we use a causal diagram. So if this happens more or less, if this happens more or less of this will happen. So many of you would know what that means. And with a system map, you are able to include all the forces of influence towards kind of the system, the mechanics of the system. And so so we were able to start using system maps, not in order to kind of map down like A is doing A and B is doing B, but in order to figure out like, where are we? Where is it possible for us to have influence and who is working on that influence?

 

And now you can see kind of you can see the whole through the whole ecosystem in one picture and be able to so it’s it’s not a straightforward model, but it enabled everyone to see we are working together in the same ecosystem. These are our roles. This is where we have influence and this is where we could collaborate. Just one of the benefits of this map like that. 

 

But that was one of the few times I think we were able to kind of get this overview of how we had influence on the ecosystem.

 

Simone Cicero

I think an answer more to the first question, right? That I was raising that is the, let’s say wholly inadequate capability that traditional monolithic and very specific tools like customer journeys have now to represent the complexity of interactions that you have in ecosystems, right?

 

At the moment, we don’t target customers anymore. Even the, to be honest, even the defining customer centricity is very reductionist, respect to the ecosystem centricity or complex system centricity that we want to achieve nowadays as an organization. But, you know, I think we are on the same page when we say customer journeys are not enough. For example, you mentioned jobs to be done and then you move into causal diagrams. 

 

I think what emerged for me from this conversation is we don’t have it yet. We don’t have yet a new practice to map really customer ecosystems and partner ecosystem very well that we can really interact with them, you know, completely. it’s an ongoing work and you are pioneering this, we are pioneering this on our side. So I think this is the point. 

 

But one big point is you have to represent the system, all the interactions and the multiplicity of personas and the players that exist.

 

But question, tying back to the question that I raised before we are used to helping organizations embrace a product-centric organizational model. And I get your point when you say becoming too fixated on product centricity can disconnect you from the customer because the customer is, what you want to achieve is customer-centric. It’s not organization-centric. It’s not about your products. It’s about their jobs, what they want to achieve and so on.

 

So normally when we manage, when we help organizations transform and evolve towards product centricity, a big part of it is distributing ownership of the product, of the P &L. Basically using this forcing function of telling people you have to run a product profitably. This is the key point.

 

And of course, you on top of that, you can also distribute other business outcomes in some cases. So what is your approach to distributing ownership on the backside of the picture? What do they teams, what teams, what do they own at the end of the day? Do they own the product? Do they own a customer outcome? Do they own a customer? How does it work?

 

Helge

So I would assume that’s very industry specific. Again, in pharma where I spent my last five years, the marketing doesn’t own the product. It’s wholly owned by my medical. Marketing is a huge important function, but it doesn’t mix with the product. I used to, before joining this company, I used to be a consultant. I used to be a business designer, or I hope I still am, kind business designer.

 

And my job was to figure out these things, is to come up with this creative idea that enables value to the customer and then look at the kind of business component on the inside as well. And in some organizations that works, I do think it’s, I think we’re still kind of a little bit far away from kind of getting that kind of in a good place. 

 

So that might be why you’re asking, but I feel like one of my critiques of design thinking as a process is that it doesn’t look at the operational environment of where these solutions are going to be solved. And so you have these creative exercises where people come up with brilliant ideas and then you push them into an organization that’s not fit for it. One of the ways, and I’m kind of deviating a little bit from your question now, but one of the ways that we tried to do that in my work in the pharmaceutical company was that we said, why are we treating innovation as a ceremony, as an event that’s detached from the organization itself? People come to work every day with brilliant ideas. Like anyone can have a brilliant idea anywhere, anytime. Why don’t we have an organization that captures these ideas as they happen, are able to kind of test them to see if they’re good or not. And then if they’re good enough, then you the operational team itself is filled with ideas. So how do you enable the operational team to kind of always be innovative in their work instead of creating these solutions next to it? That’s the closest I think I have to your kind of question. I don’t have much experience kind of dividing up the internal fractions of a company to serve ideas. What we tried to do was rather to enable the organization itself to come up with ideas instead of getting them from an artificial environment, how could we nurture creativity and ideas inside the existing environment?

 

Shruthi Prakash 

I just wanted to probe on it a little bit further. So let’s say if an employee in an organization is their current, let’s say, mechanism or metric of evaluating is, let’s say, how much sale of a particular product they’ve made. And then now we are, introducing newer metrics, like how the customer is experiencing the product and so on, and thereby shifting the focus in terms of value. Right. So

 

One does like rethinking such metrics. Can it also be enabled through any incentives for an employee? I think it’s similar to what we were asking at before as well – How does an employee take ownership of the effect it has on the market, the product itself? And I’m particularly asking this from my side because a lot of metrics are also, I don’t want to call it manipulated, but essentially, there’s a lot of performance based sort of significance that are given to metrics, right? Like keyfabe and metrics being manipulated, especially in companies which are let’s say VC back, things like that. So how can you design systems in an organization that will enable for authenticity within employees and thereby enabling a better customer based metric system?

 

Helge 

Yeah. So we, so one of the, there’s, there’s this thing called the Cobra effect. So Dave Snowden talks about it. so it’s a story from when the British colonizers invaded India and then have us a snake problem. And then there’s too many Cobras in New Delhi. And they’re saying, I, we have got a brilliant solution to that. Let’s just pay the local population to kind of kill all the snakes for us. Now that’s what the British thought they were doing.

 

They were paying for them to kill all the cobras. What the local population was hearing, they’re paying for dead cobras. Let’s start farming them and farm the cobras. And they escaped and go back into New Delhi. I used to say you are only human if you game your metrics. And that happens when you have one metric. So there’s several different ways to try to get around this problem. My preference is create a chain of metrics, because if you game one metric, you still have to be performing on the next metric in the chain.

 

So that’s the one that the line of sight we talked about in beginning, this chain of measurements, you’re trying to create this chain so that you’re not able to kind of game the system to your advantage that much. 

 

Your second question. So this is many years ago, I was working with an insurance company and leadership was asking me to create an onboarding, like a customer program for them. So onboarding and then how do you give them value after the onboarding? And we did that. We presented it to them and leadership was happy and presented to the people who doing all the work and they were happy. And then at the end of the meeting, this one person raised her hand and she said, I really think you did some excellent work here, but I’m not going to do it. like, why? Like everyone is saying you should do why? And everyone thinks it’s good. Why not? 

 

And she said, because I’m being measured on how many people open my article or I’m being measured by how many articles I publish each week. So all of that you just showed me, I’m not going to be measured on any of it. 

 

And so I think to your point is that we are in the current state, our measurements aren’t incentivizing us to do what the organization wants. But that’s the best that we have. We’re pretending that these measures are bringing us where we want.

 

Like when you have engagement metrics on one side and then you jump to business and sales or sales data on the other, like there’s a chain of events in the middle that you did not measure. So you’re just making an assumption. So from what I’ve seen at the moment, I do think organizations have massive blind spots in engagements. We are doing things because we assume they work, but if we actually tested it, we would show that it wasn’t, wouldn’t. And so there’s a huge opportunity for improvements in metrics to organizations because the blind spot is too big today. So I think we can get much better at it.

 

Shruthi Prakash

I wanted to ask about the solutioning phase of this. Let’s say I presume one of the biggest solutions to this is integrating technology or modern tool systems to collect, analyze, and act on this data metrics that are accumulated and any other key indicators, right? 

 

So is that correct? How do you see, let’s say, organizations doing it, improving their metric systems and also avoiding for any blind spots?

 

Helge

Yeah, so. There’s so I was just reading this book called The Book of Why by a guy called Judea Pearl. And he makes this point early in the book. He says the world is not only made up by dry facts. And his point is that a big data engine that trying to make sense of the world doesn’t know the relationship between things. It only says if A is our goal.

 

I can clearly see from the data I have available that B and D is having an influence. There’s some correlation between B and D. Like if my goal is to become a better runner, then having good shoes and exercising. Well, clearly we can see the data is telling us that these two, but it doesn’t know how they relate. It just tells us that these two data points have a correlation with the goal. And what Judea Pearl is saying that what you actually need is you need to map out first this causal diagram. 

 

Like what are the things that actually lead to you being a good runner. And so the humans in the room, the specialists, the expertise, they sit down and say, OK, we’re good at this. We’ve running shoes for the last 100 years. We know approximately what leads to good running outside of shoes. And so you map out this map and then you look at this map and you say, now, what data do we have and what data is really important that we’re missing? And that exercise helps the organization figure out, we have a huge blind spot, but now we can see it. 

 

Because just looking at the data and asking what’s missing doesn’t going to help you. again, this kind of diagram, causal diagram helps the organization see what’s missing. And then to try to figure out like, how do we get a hold of it? 

 

And I think the second part there is that we should like we’re missing out, like we have a very one dimensional approach to what can be measured. And so I’ll give you an example. So very commonly today, maybe in kind of some industries is if I want to try to figure out if someone’s getting some value from engaging with my website, I’m going to try to measure how much time they spend on it. At least that was maybe 10 years ago, but some still do. 

 

So, but that that’s not their goal. Like nobody’s visiting your website to be on your website. So as I said earlier, maybe they want to learn something. So the measure of value is learning. So how can you do that? Well, if someone gets into an article on your website and their goal is to learn something, why don’t you ask them if they learned something? Like not directly, like that’s just silly. But if you go to Udemy or Coursera or any learning platform.

 

Learning is about reading and interacting and viewing and listening and doing. Why aren’t these articles more interactive? Like why, if I get a physician to read for three minutes, why can’t I give her an interactive element that then tests her knowledge? And then I can see she’s learning something. And then maybe she also gets this response. Yes, you’re learning something. You’re learning the right thing. So, so that kind of interactive element, which is integrated into her experience now also becomes a part of our measure of producing value. 

 

Secondly, many people know this, so a physician is very stretched for time, like they do not have time. So the second element you want to do is you want to make sure that if she learned something, how can I make her learn it as fast as possible? Which is the opposite to how we usually measure value, right? So reducing the time it takes for her to learn something and that she’s learning something, too critical, important to measure so value. 

 

So you see, I think we can apply a lot more creativity to how we’re actually getting the data that we need in order to measure that we’re producing the value that we’re going after.

 

Simone Cicero

I have two questions that I would like to bring up. So first of all, let me make a consideration. Let’s see if this resonates with you. So from what we are saying, I feel like by merging this idea of customer centricity and product centricity, so basically for me, product centricity is an expression of organizational modularity and unbundling.

 

So when I say product, for me, it’s anything that is an independent service, essentially, that exists inside, maybe a company, maybe it’s targeted to the inside of the organization or to a business element, or sometimes also faces the customer. So it’s customer available. So if I look at the organization as a set of independent services, independent modules, let’s say, that can be combined, so I have an unbundled organization.

 

This is good because by unbundling the organization, you normally take all depth. Because otherwise, whenever you have a big ball of mud, that can be anything inside. So we do unbundling to reduce organizational depth, and technological depth. 

 

So the big question is, how do you re-bundle? And from what you are saying, I feel like that customer centricity offers, potentially system centricity offers a good hint towards how do you re-bundle. So you should re-bundle the pieces in the organization in a way that is customer centric at least. Let’s say for sake of simplicity, customer centric, right? Of course this brings with it all the things that we discussed, the impossibility to define really customer centricity in a systemic world, in an ecosystemic world, in a complex world.

 

But let’s say that we can at least take a stab to define what is customer centricity, is customer value, experiences. So let’s say that we re-bundle the organization around experiences. So it makes me think that you should look into the independent modules inside the organizations mainly as you have to understand their cost, their total cost of ownership.

 

And then when you rebundle, you can start thinking about P &L, so profit and loss, essentially. So if you push profit and loss to the module, what you can have, you end up with an organization which is too fragmented. You start focusing on products instead of customers. So instead, if you say, let’s rebundle for the customer, let’s look at profit and loss, for example, in this way, that helps you to be customer-centric. And then you finally have the question of metrics.

 

And metrics should be probably, as I get it from you, should be used to measure the performance of an experience you’re delivering to a customer. So is this experience right? Is it the right experience for the customer? Is it sticky? Is it engaging? Is the customer achieving its own outcome? So I think that’s also another big, big piece that fits into the picture. 

 

So a quick question for you that I have on top of this – What is the role of, because I’ve been working a lot in open source for ages now and I’ve always been fascinated by this idea of user innovation, User innovation toolkits. So my question for you is, how do you see in the future, in the present, this element of users re-bundling stuff on their own? 

 

So basically in somehow reducing the burden of the organization to think about experiences, but rather thinking about customers, self-configuring their experiences around the pieces that organizations make available. And I want to connect these also with AI, because I think what we are seeing here with AI is an increasing and even stronger, I would say, power shift from the organizations to the users. 

 

So how do you see that moving forward in the future? Will the market become even more customer centric to the extent that customers can self-design their own experiences? And of course, what’s the role of the organization products and all the things we discussed so far?

 

Helge 

Yeah. So I think if I go back to 2013, 14 or 15, I was in a conference in Amsterdam and I was listening to Jeff Jarvis, he’s an author, written a few books about Google. And he points out at this time, at that time in history, all the most valuable companies in the world, they 100 % individualize their offering to their customers. 

 

And he made this point, he said, nobody has the same Amazon search result. Nobody has the same Google search result. Nobody has the same iPhone or iTunes or Spotify playlist. And two minutes after you open up your own iPhone, it’s unique to everyone else in the world. And then it continues. 

 

But if you look at any other industry or competitor, like they don’t they know nothing about their customers. Like if you go to your local national newspaper and ask them, does this reader have a dog? They wouldn’t even know that.

 

And it was just a silly example, but his point was that they have been able to completely fragment their offerings because they’ve kind of tapped into this kind of data available to do personalization. Nobody else has understood it. And I think your point Simone is correct. It’s correct as the way I interpret it. It’s because most other organizations are stuck in their existing kind of commercial silos are rigid. They can’t move away from it. 

 

And so I give you a wonderful example from the insurance industry. The purpose of the insurance industry is to give you some kind of not safety but protection like “what you find valuable. I want to make sure if you lose what’s most valuable to you like your house or your car, you can get it back”. Now what happens with what’s most valuable to us? It changes from the material world to the immaterial world.

 

Suddenly back in 2005, 2010, the data was the most valuable to us. Like if I lost my computer, that doesn’t matter. I get a new computer. If I lose all my pictures and all my data, that’s what’s valuable to me. Now, what does the insurance industry do? They haven’t got an idea of how to solve this because they are structured, or at least in the Norwegian kind of market, it’s like health and house and car.

 

And where does personal data fit? They couldn’t fit it anywhere. And so what do they do? They give it away for free. So they start giving away these services related to protecting your data away for free. They’re not earning any money from it. They’re trying to squeeze it into their loyalty programs. And it’s just painful. Luckily, at one point, another industry says: “Oh that’s cloud computing.” And the relief in the insurance industry went: “huh – I don’t have to solve that problem. I can stick to my silos. That is such a relief.” And so in this you can see the insurance industry used to be massive at protecting. They’ve kind of been giving away stuff all the time because in essence their product is the contract. That’s what they’re offering you. Anything else is like “I don’t understand this business model.” And so a perfect example of how you kind of miss the boat. 

 

Now I do think though that to your kind of question, like how do you atomize, how does a customer kind of make their kind of their own configuration of your services to serve their needs? I’ve not seen many cases where customers are willing to do that work themselves. So it’s up to organizations to make it available to them. And this is where I think organizations are missing the kind of a lot of the opportunities at the moment, because personalization is – It’s not what you think it is. 

 

And I think Deloitte two years ago, they said personalization will fail by the end of 2025. There’s an article on the internets or something. And I completely agree because what data do we use? Most organizations use to personalize their offering. It’s product data and sales data and channel optimization data. It’s not human data. Like they literally know nothing about what I want or what I need or who am I as a consumer, they know how many products they sold and where they sold it. 

 

And they also know that some kind of identity roamed around their website and clicked on a few links. And so what we were trying to do, so this is actually we tried to kind of work at this a little bit in this organization I was a part of by arguing that the humans don’t buy things or customers don’t buy things, but situations and needs do.

 

Because if you’re going to look like what is the largest source of influence on what leads to a behavioral from my end as a human, it’s the situation I’m in and the need that appears in that situation. So if we try to stop collecting all these silly demographics and we start thinking about what is the data that I can collect that helps me understand the situation and the need and then try to make sense of that data, then suddenly you are in kind of, you’re saying, oh, this person is trying to they’re trying to buy a coffee maker. Oh, modular content. Let’s bring him all the coffee maker services. 

If you know there’s a 45 year old dude visiting your website and he has a station wagon and a dog and two happy kids, I say they’re happy. Then like, how do you modularize your website? You’ve got nothing to go on. 

 

So I think there needs to be a back to this. we’re collecting so much data so little of it is interesting data. There needs to be a generational shift in the quality of the data that we’re collecting. We got all the quantitative data we want. We have so little qualitative data. How do we collect that at speed and scale to kind of enrich what we have? And how do we kind of shape it or look at it through these perspectives of situations and needs? That’s been my kind of approach. I haven’t solved it, but that’s kind of the opportunity I see is kind of through those lenses.

 

Simone Cicero 

Yeah, I mean, that’s interesting. I was thinking through this as you were speaking, and this is one of the big questions I have in mind at the moment. if we look at everything modularizing and becoming, let’s call it instead of an application programming interface, an AI programming interface. So let’s say that we see the emergence of AI becoming some kind of personal orchestrator of your experiences as a consumer. 

 

I kind of feel like that when you say we need, know, when you’re making the point for us becoming more able to capture data on real data on customer experiences so that we can design perfect experiences for the customer and putting, sorry, putting these two options on the table, right? 

 

So on one side, we as an organization, we collect information, we are able to provide you with perfectly designed experiences for you because we understand you. And on the other side, there is an LLM, for example, that is able to patch together everything you need, maybe interacting with you, with you conversationally, trying to understand you as a psychologist would do because they have this capability nowadays. 

 

On the other hand, I make the question that I have in mind, and this is also a good question for you maybe. How do we, so, so what is the role of simplicity? What is the role of design? What is the role of aesthetics in this? So is there a still a space in this universe where you have on one side, customers optimizing based on data, sorry, organizations optimizing based on data on the other side, LLMs you can delegate, you can give the task of optimizing things for you, do we have a possibility in the middle that there is still a role for aesthetics and design to define what a good experience is for customers? Because I feel like this space in the middle is squeezing so much that it may be the death of design?

 

Helge 

Absolutely not. So do you remember Nike Plus? So Nike put a sensor in to your listeners. Nike put a sensor in the sole of your shoe that was tracking your exercises. And I was again in Amsterdam. I end up in Amsterdam on these exciting conferences all the time. There’s this I think it was the brand director or something of Nike Plus.

 

And he made this point initially, was like presenting Nike Plus. It was a huge thing at the moment. And he said, we made nothing new. Like literally this technical solution has been available to everyone for years, but it had the emotional appeal. I’m quoting him now. It had the emotional appeal of an EKG combined with an Excel spreadsheet. So nobody’s going to use it. And so his point was that if it’s ugly, or unusable, nobody’s going to be motivated to use it. 

 

You have to make it aesthetically pleasing because aesthetics is not beauty. Aesthetics is simplicity, it’s intuition, it’s logic. If you go into the definition of aesthetics, it’s actually a very functional kind of element. And his point was done with Nike Plus. 

 

The only reason we made a success out of this and you could argue that maybe Nike Plus also started driving this rest of the kind of industry with step trackers and those solutions. It was because we understood what kind of beauty and aesthetics people needed in order to take advantage of it. And they were talking about visual beauty, also practical beauty. But I think that could be like you can design anything. You can design a sound or you can try to design a feeling can design pressure, you can design the sound of a Mercedes door when it closes. 

 

So I think designers are incredibly important in order to make sure that people kind of are able to understand and want and desire and are motivated to kind of use these solutions that we produce and that the AI is producing for us in the future.

 

Shruthi Prakash

I was just remembering our previous episode as well. think Simone where we spoke about how design and that human element of it enables diversification, which let’s say AI and LLM doesn’t, right? Like that’s always going to like the human touch or like human made kind of products, which is another big sort of category opening.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you. So, no, I mean, I have this feeling that in a world where everything becomes malleable and very much connectable, kind of getting into some kind of simple agreement and simple structures and simple framings will be a driver of value essentially.

 

I get your point that, and I buy your point that that’s not going to be the death of design because basically in a world where the norm is being overwhelmed, know, having some kind of ontological simplicity and convergence and aesthetics is going to be available elements. 

 

But still I have many questions, because what we are witnessing is the radical unbundling of everything. So the big question for me is now, what’s going to emerge as a pattern of rebundling that keeps us together and keeps us in interaction between customers, organizations and markets? So this is a big question that I have in mind.

 

Shruthi Prakash

I was just going to add, I would definitely urge like in terms of just the design aspect, right? Like the beauty campaign done by Ordinary recently, if you can take a look at that, like that was so clutter-breaking in terms of design, aesthetic purpose, the value that it drove. They simply put like hoardings with like five words of text, that was the maximum.

 

And the kind of results it drove even in terms of sales customer engagement was extremely interesting and nuanced.

 

Helge

Yeah, I I remember when when Steve and Apple and Steve Jobs launched the iPad, like how would they do completely new thing for most people? How do they introduce it? And I remember this TV ad and it’s just call it like it’s a magical paint of glass. That’s what they call it. And then he unfortunately left us and then Tim Cook took over. And then the next ad for the next update to the iPad.

 

It was like technology, somethi . was just open up the iPad, looked at all the chips, looked at all the technology. It a completely different approach to selling the product. But I also think the, and this is a large part of my work for the last few years, is the simplicity to the customer is, of course, incredibly important. 

 

I think that’s where aesthetics comes in as well. It’s understanding which nuts and bolts do not need to be there to take away all the noise and just like prioritize. But also there’s people inside an organization who is going to build this. And how do you like we are pretty nerdy when it comes to the topic that we are experts in. But how do you bring that to other people? 

 

And so so when I started in this pharmaceutical organization, we there’s 140 markets, 5,000 marketers and 140 markets. And we were like hoping like, let’s bring CX to everyone, like a CX in every market. That would be beautiful. We realized very quickly that that’s going to be impossible, of course. And so we said, let’s try to give a little bit of CX to every marketer instead. But many of these would have to learn it on their own. So it was a mass like our work was a lot of our work was just simplify, simplify, simplify, take away, take away, take away and reduce, reduce.

 

Just trying to make like, how do you see the world through this lens? And how are you able to kind of start doing something at least just a little bit on your own and then be motivated to be able to do it? That was I think it was crucial to get so many people eventually so so kind of more leaning in towards the customer and kind of understanding customer. And that’s again, that’s the key, right? You have to.

 

In many organizations, you have to start with this key. to figure out, where does it start? And start with a why. That was kind of at least my recommendation. And then figure out what that is. And then once you get that seed in place, there will be more motivated to kind of learn more and do more. But you have to find this kind of initial seed to get the organization to kind of lean into these solutions.

 

Simone Cicero

I mean, which brings me before we move into the break, which leads me with another point that I was feeling through the conversation that is how, you know, my experience, a lot of organizations get very nervous when it comes to today markets and, you know, the needs, the changes that are these markets entailed for the organization. So sometimes my question is, how do we keep the organization grounded and calm and patient towards this kind of mess that they are facing at the moment. 

 

So what is your experience in keeping leadership calm and practice this change instead of, know, kind of urging the organization to respond to this clear mess that we have just discussed?

 

Helge 

Yeah, that’s a good, good question. So. So the lens that I’ve experienced, so I was working with the financial sector back in 2012 or something, and at the moment it was like FinTech, like every bank is going to be destroyed and the upstarts or scale ups or startups are going to take over the world. And none of it happened. And so we were like looking at it. Why? Why isn’t it happening?

 

At the same time, you’re looking at the TV industry and you’re looking at like traditional TVs to completely disrupted by Netflix and HBO and now Disney Plus. And like, why does it happen in that industry and not the other? What we came like the theory we ended up with was our assumption was that, well, because the startups in FinTech isn’t really offering any new options. They’re just offering the same. mean, some of many of these startups bank is just like, we’re going to give you a very good looking first front page on your web online bank.

 

So it’s about giving people options. Now to your question. So my impression has been that the customer is a slogan exercise for senior leadership. What they’re worried about is competition. And if the competitor doesn’t change anything, that’s kind of, then we don’t need to change. Now, what kind of makes them then lean into the change?

 

I think there’s a slow boil, there’s a slow, depending on, very depending on industry. Some industries are like super aggressive. And I was just in one that was kind of held back a bit and everyone was holding back. It was kind of, again, it was, changed this language. We said it’s about customer needs that became comfortable for everyone because they could get that and they could articulate it. 

 

And then I think they just it was kind of orchestrated like they felt that it’s it was orchestrated like this change is orchestrated in a way that doesn’t fragment the organization, but it’s kind of under control. Sometimes, though, I am and this is another part. I sometimes I ask this question, like why is innovation often an event or a ceremony? Like I talked about in the beginning, design thinking. And it’s because it removes the problem from the organization. It takes the risk out of the operating environment and says, let those crazy people have fun over there, but don’t mess with the core business. And so I think it’s, there’s flexibility when it comes to not touching the core business. If you’re touching the core business, I think they need to kind of be comfortable that the structure and the orchestration and the process is safe and predictable.

 

Simone Cicero

Yeah. I mean, that’s why they fail sometimes, because they look for a safe place in an inherently kind of crazy moment that we live in markets and society at the moment. yeah, would say the message is for us as agents of change to try to give this, as you said, this orchestrated vision of what’s happening. 

 

On the other side, I feel like customers, customer organizations need to be more patient and more ready, I would say more thoughtful of what’s really happening, more aware of what’s really happening, which sometimes I think they fail at being. So thank you for the last bits.

 

Helge 

If you are able to demonstrate this link between customer and business value, and even our old CEO has had customer value as business value, but it’s not measured. But if you’re able to create this chain on measure where you can prove it, like prove that delivering value to the customer drives value to the business, then you’ve got something. But if you can’t create that chain, if you can’t prove that link, then they’re just going to keep doing what they’re already doing.

 

Shruthi Prakash

Thank you. So Helge, as we come to the close, before we wrap up, we have a segment called the Breadcrumbs, where we ask our guests to share any resources they might have, like suggestions like books, podcasts, or articles that our listeners can learn from. Any recommendations to share?

 

Helge

Yeah. So, so my two favorite books from 2024 was the first one is this one, which is called is from Roger Martin. It’s called A New Way to Think. So Roger Martin, he was running the Rothman Business School, which was a business school that focused on design. And I think Roger Martin’s point is that business is good at business, but it’s really, really bad at customers. Designers, on the other hand, are really good at customers, but they’re really bad at business.

 

So why don’t we try to combine these two in order to get the both of them and to create kind of business design. And so this book is a summary of many of his articles. You can also go on Medium and search for Roger Martin and you’ll find all of them in 500 more or something. It’s a really good book. It’s really easy to read and it’s short and it makes sense. And the other one is this one by Christian Madsberg. So he’s written a few books over the years. Like the last one was called Sense Making.

 

He talked about the importance of thick qualitative data and how organizations need to understand that thick data to make better decisions. And in this book, look, what he’s doing is that he’s trying to teach everyone to be observers. Like, how can I look at a human or a customer and then understand them better? Like, what does it take to observe? How can I do this myself? And so it’s a really, really good book that kind of feeling kind of concludes his story through a few books where he takes us from why quant data doesn’t work on his own, the importance of thick data and how you could observe your own your own to kind of add that thick data. So those are my two biggest recommendations for from 24.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the thoughtful conversation. I think we brought up many, many topics that should be on the agenda of our listeners. I think sometimes, again, we lose track of customers when we focus too much on the internal aspects of our organizations. And this is a something that maybe at Boundaryless we do sometimes, because we are so interested on the inner workings of organizations. So it’s good to not lose track of customers in the picture. So thank you for joining us today. I hope you also enjoyed the conversations.

 

Helge

Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for having me.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you, Shruthi, for your always on-point questions.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Thank you. Thanks, Simone. Thanks, Helge.

 

Simone Cicero 

And for our listeners, as always, if you head to boundaryless.io/resources/podcast, you will find all the transcript of the conversation with Helge and also including the links, the notes and all the elements and pieces that we mentioned during today’s conversation. Until we speak again, remember to think Boundaryless.