Jason Grant on Customer Experiences with Soul
Jason Grant is the CEO of Integral. He is a multi-award winning Design Thinking management consultant who has helped many world-class brands deliver customer-centric company transformations.
Jason has consulted professionals and coached designers at companies like: Amex, eBay, Bupa, Legal & General, Tesco, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, EON, Samsung, Disney, as well as super successful startups like ROLI and Mind Candy. His expertise sits in a fold over of business, design, psychology and technology.
Having formally coached User Centered Design at various institutions, his focus now is on a mission to coach people Design Thinking, enabling them to create what he describes as Designed Companies, which in turn will create a better world for all of us.
When Customer Experiences with Soul was first published, Jason commented on social media that it was “the most significant book in UX design this decade”. Jason was really able to appreciate the depth and significance of our Holonomics Circle design framework, and for this reason we were honoured when he cited at a recent ACE! conference on UX and Design.
I really like the way he introduced the theme by asking the audience if anyone had come across any mention of soul in the area of user experience design before. You can find out how the audience answered in the video below
Jason talks about our book quite early on. It’s a really interesting talk on how he is designing meta design systems, and you can watch it here:
As he wrote in a recent article:
Experience is no longer the product. It is enabled and catalysed by experience people have with various products and services. This is something that Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson live and breathe, and I can feel how the whole notion of Customer Experiences With Soul is becoming reality and the new playground for humanity’s expansion into the age of superabundance.
Jason shared his further thoughts about Customer Experiences with Soul in his review:
“This book is something that was missing in the area of UX Design and Customer Experience Design for years now. As a professional in the industry for over a decade, I would hint at something like this to many clients, but the subject would be rejected even in my mind. Why? Because, if there isn’t a book about it on the market, it’s not a ‘thing’. Now, finally, there is a book about something that has always been the missing link in the management science at large.
The fact that us humans are not just emotional beings, but we also have a soul and are spiritual beings that search for and want greater meaning in our lives. Similarly, companies ought to have a soul too. The talk about ‘purpose’ in management science so far has only been largely a lip service and something that is very surface level idea. Now there is a much deeper, comprehensive way to approach company strategy development and creating experience in a true purposeful way.
The people who wrote this book, Simon and Maria, are perfect authors for it. They don’t just know the subject, they also live the subject. This is crucial, as the book is written from the soul and heart of the writers who know what they wrote about both theoretically and practically. This book is an absolute must have for all current and future experience design practitioners.”
Both Maria and I are extremely grateful to Jason for the support for our book, and we look forward to his new book, Designed Company, when it is published early next year.
Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design is published by Holonomics Publishing, London, and is available via Amazon and all good book retailers.
