The Future of Customer Experience Beyond AI
Designing with Lived Experience
The next stage of customer experience is not about competing with AI, but about deepening our capacity to perceive and design with lived experience. Through Holonomics, Maria Moraes Robinson and I have focused on translating deep thinking into practical tools that help leaders and organisations bring meaning, relation, and authenticity into their strategies and practices.
Thirty years ago, I closed one of my earliest articles describing our pioneering customer experience design practices at BT with these words:
“In response to rapid technological change and increased global competition, service industries have undergone radical change. These were initially focused on reducing cost and time to market, but more recently have concentrated on ways of understanding and anticipating customer needs. We have adopted an approach we call ‘designing the customer experience’. At its heart was a programme of research into human needs. By bringing together Marketing and Human Factors with more radical perspectives such as semiotics and anthropology, creative and visualisation skills, and rapid technological advances, we have generated an environment for user-centred innovation.”
(M. Atyeo and S. Robinson, Interact ‘95)
That paragraph marked a turning point. Within BT’s Human Factors department in the mid-1990s, we fused semiotics and anthropology with human-centred design and emerging digital capabilities to create a strategic CX process, Designing the Customer Experience — not simply as a UX tactic, but as a strategic discipline. What followed in the market is now familiar: customer experience became a marketing agenda, then a function, then a technology category. Yet by the late 2000s, Maria Moraes Robinson and I could already see the limits of a practice that was in danger of collapsing into methods, dashboards and AI tooling alone. CX needed to evolve again — this time towards a deeper grasp of ‘lived experience’.
In 2010 we began shaping that evolution into what became Holonomics: a systemic approach that connects leadership, culture and strategy with the quality of experience people actually live — customers, employees, partners and communities. We based our philosophy on the following core belief:
Customer experience and design thinking will not advance by competing with artificial intelligence on speed or scale. Their future lies in a different direction: cultivating the human capacity to perceive and design with lived experience — where meaning, relation and authenticity unfold.
The Holonomics Approach is powered by ‘deep thinking’ and designed for practical results. It stands on philosophical ground, but it is not philosophy for its own sake. It is an active and conscious way of seeing and working that helps leaders transform how their organisations perceive, decide and act.
From semiotics to phenomenology: why perception comes first
Our journey took us beyond the explanatory lens of semiotics and anthropology into phenomenology and hermeneutics — traditions concerned with how phenomena appear and how meaning is encountered, interpreted and enacted. The most important influence here was Henri Bortoft, whose work on the dynamic way of seeing opened up a new way of understanding the nature of observation and how we actively participate in perception.
By following Henri’s articulation of the dynamic way of thinking, we come to develop a deeper sense of how we make sense of the world, the role language and thought play in how we construct our worlds, and how we can develop a more intelligent sensitivity to the lived experience of other people whose reality may well be extremely different to our own.
Studying with Bortoft shifted my attention from designing for abstract users to designing with experience as it unfolds — relational, contextual, affective, and always in motion. He urged us to take appearance seriously: not as surface gloss, but as the place where reality meets perception. If leaders are unable to perceive wholes, their strategy fragments; if teams cannot sense the lived meaning of their work, culture erodes; if customers are treated as variables in a model, experiences feel thin and instrumental.
This philosophical turn was not an academic diversion. It was the missing layer that explains why many organisations exhausted themselves optimising touchpoints while still missing coherence, dignity and soul. We needed a way to translate this richer seeing into everyday practice.
The Holonomics Approach and the Holonomic Circle
Holonomics is our name for that translation. To help people turn their ideas into action and elevate their brands, we created the Holonomic Circle—a framework for understanding the deeper, more human aspects of experience, be it customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) or what we call leadership experience (LX).
This is where the ‘soul’ of the title of our book, Designing Customer Experiences with Soul, truly comes alive. It’s also where branding joins forces with CX. The Holonomic Circle goes beyond data points and touchpoints to explore being, meaning and connection — designing experiences that resonate authentically and create genuine loyalty rather than just repeat business.
The Holonomic Circle is a simple but profound instrument that integrates three levels of work:
- Authenticity (the centre) — the alignment of say–mean–do: are we coherent? Do our actions reveal the values we claim? Authenticity is not a slogan but a practice of truthfulness over time.
- Tools & Techniques (the middle ring) — the visible practices of management and design: research, service design, strategy mapping, operating rhythms, measurement and improvement. These are the levers of change, but in Holonomics they are always in service of authenticity.
- The Transcendentals (the outer ring) — Being, Wholeness, Identity, Beauty, Truth, Goodness and Justice. Rather than abstract ideals, these describe the qualities of ‘soul’ and function as sensing lenses. They help teams notice what typically lies outside dashboards: honesty in decisions, elegance in solutions, care in interactions, fairness in outcomes, and a genuine regard for people.
The Holonomic Circle is simultaneously diagnostic (revealing misalignments), generative (guiding design), and developmental (shaping leadership). It gives leaders a way to work with the qualities of lived experience systemically — from perception and meaning to decision to action.
Five case studies: lived experience in action
1) Donatelli: lived mastery, purpose and computational sensemaking
In Deep Tech and the Amplified Organisation we documented how Paulo Fabre, working with Estúdio Nume, applied the Holonomic Circle with Donatelli, a Brazilian fabric design company seeking to reposition its brand. Fabre facilitated design sessions in which Donatelli’s leadership completed the Holonomic Circle canvas, aligning purpose, values and identity to lived practice.
Participants described how the Circle surfaced intangible strengths that had previously remained implicit — bringing clarity to Donatelli’s story and values. Fabre then undertook an immersive photographic study of the end-to-end craft process (from order intake to ateliers and delivery) to capture the lived experience of the artisans; Estúdio Nume used this material to create a brand book for LAB Donatelli. Donatelli and Estúdio Nume later emphasised that the Holonomic Circle “worked like a compass,” enabling a unified, values-led narrative.
Against this experiential foundation, our book introduces computational sensemaking — the disciplined combination of knowledge graphs and computational ontologies with codified lived-experience ontologies — so organisations can elevate analysis without flattening meaning. In practice this lets teams triangulate qualitative insight, lived narratives and computational signals to guide brand and service decisions at scale.
2) Walter Mancini: wholeness across place, brand and service
Walter Mancini’s work in São Paulo’s Avanhandava Street offered us a unique lens into how wholeness can be expressed through food, hospitality, architecture, music, and place-making. Using the Holonomic Circle, we analysed his creations to reveal how authenticity and transcendentals flow across these different elements — how Beauty carries meaning in textures and light, how Goodness appears in gestures of hospitality, how Justice is felt in who feels welcome and why, and how Truth shows up in integrity of sourcing and design.
Unlike conventional brand analyses that fragment richness into metrics or attributes, our approach revealed Mancini’s creative vision as a lived whole. He told us that, after so many years of being interviewed by journalists, no one had managed to capture his essence in the way we had done. Struck by this depth, he invited us to author a book about him — not as a collaboration, but as our own perspective on his work.
That book, Capítulo 8 (Chapter 8), expands on the Holonomic Circle analysis to show how his creative practice embodies lived experience and designed customer experience as wholeness.
Much of Capítulo 8 is also included in our interview with Mancini in Designing Customer Experiences with Soul, where we present his reflections alongside our own interpretation of his work. Our exploration of Walter Mancini’s accomplishments perfectly encapsulate how lived experience and wholeness can be perceived in practice.
3) The Deep Tech Manifesto: innovation as lived relation
Our Deep Tech Manifesto articulates how a dynamic conception of wholeness changes innovation practice. Rather than treating technology as a pipeline from lab to market, we frame it as a lived relation between people, problems, capabilities, and contexts. This shifts the question from “What can we build?” to “What wants to emerge responsibly here, in this system, for these people?”
We expressed these commitments in the form of a manifesto — not as abstract ideals, but as practical principles for responsible innovation.
The Deep Tech Manifesto
- Purpose. The purpose of Deep Tech is to use deep thinking to find profound solutions to complex problems.
- Balance. Deep Tech combines analytical thinking with artistic consciousness.
- Augmentation. Deep Tech creates augmented intelligence — the combination of artificial intelligence with conscious human endeavour.
- Ethics. Privacy and ethics are core elements of Deep Tech algorithms.
- People. Deep Tech is developed by talented people who come from a rich diversity of backgrounds.
- Values. The values of Deep Tech are the five universal human values: peace, truth, love, righteousness, and non-violence.
- Lived Experience. Deep Tech honours lived experience as the ground of what it means to be human in our world — helping us explore life in ever more meaningful ways.
The manifesto is not only about technology — it is about recognising lived experience and human values as the ground of strategy, design, and innovation.
4) Sustentare Business School: teaching the practice of perception
At Sustentare Business School we taught Holonomics as an MBA module, introducing students to phenomenology, systemic design and lived experience in ways that could be applied directly to leadership and strategy. Many participants arrived fluent in management methods but sensed that something essential was missing.
One of the exercises that proved most powerful was working with Goethe’s theory of colours, as taught by Henri Bortoft. Instead of analysing colour as an optical phenomenon, students explored it as the ‘coming-into-being’ of a phenomena, learning to attend to how perception itself unfolds dynamically. This shift in attention — from abstract explanation to lived encounter — opened the door to deeper forms of seeing, listening and leading.
By linking Bortoft’s teachings with the Holonomic Circle, students are therefore able to connect authenticity, values and tools with their modality of perception. The result is a tangible change in how they understand leadership: not as control or analysis alone, but as the capacity to explore environments in new ways, work with lived experience, and act in ways that sustain coherence across their organisations.
5) Maria’s transformation of Strategy Maps and the Balanced Scorecard
Maria Moraes Robinson has been an influential figure in the global Balanced Scorecard community, engaging directly with Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the originators of the methodology. The photo here shows her with Kaplan in Brazil, reflecting her global expertise in strategy execution.
The Balanced Scorecard was originally designed to translate strategy into measurable objectives across four perspectives: financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth. While this represented a breakthrough in the 1990s, Maria recognised that strategy maps could easily become static, freezing complex realities into linear cause-and-effect diagrams. Too often, the richness of organisational life was reduced to boxes and arrows, disconnected from the lived experience of employees and customers.
Through Holonomics she has redefined the Balanced Scorecard, introducing a dynamic conception of wholeness. Rather than treating strategy as a plan to be executed, she frames it as a living conversation that continually reflects authenticity, values and lived experience. By applying the Holonomic Circle, Maria helps leadership teams see whether their say–mean–do is aligned, and whether values are genuinely embodied in policies, processes and behaviours.
For organisations, this approach has transformed the Balanced Scorecard from a measurement tool into a practice of perception and dialogue. Strategy maps become stories that leaders utilise to help teams develop capabilities and to improve processes, leading to elevated performance.
From lived experience to measurement: computational sensemaking
A persistent challenge is how to measure what we truly value without flattening it into metrics, and how to embed AI governance into strategy so that safety, oversight and ethics become sources of competitive strength rather than afterthoughts. Our response is what I call computational sensemaking: the disciplined interplay between human perception and machine pattern recognition.
By combining computational ontologies with codified lived experience, organisations can scale reasoning without losing nuance or authenticity. In this way, AI becomes not a substitute for human intelligence but an amplifier of it — guided by deep thinking, and aligned with the lived realities of employees, customers and communities. In practice, this unfolds as follows:
- Human perception gathers lived signals: stories, gestures, atmospheres, breakdowns and breakthroughs. These are not “soft” extras; they are the earliest signs of meaning and risk.
- Machine pattern recognition — from simple analytics to advanced AI — helps surface patterns we might miss, especially across large volumes of unstructured data (language, images, interactions).
- Sensemaking loops connect the two. We do not outsource judgement to models, nor do we romanticise intuition. Instead, we triangulate: what we notice, what the data suggests, and what the system needs next. This approach resists the industry temptation to automate away the human. It keeps lived experience at the centre, while benefiting from computational speed and scale.
In practice, this yields hybrid dashboards. Alongside NPS or operational KPIs, we track indicators of authenticity and meaning: moments of dignity or friction; signals of care or indifference; instances where fairness is felt — or not. Leaders gain a richer picture of systemic health and can intervene earlier and more wisely.
Holonomics as the next stage of CX: tools powered by deep thinking
Today, much of CX still orbits around methods, templates and platforms. These are useful — until they become substitutes for perception and judgement.
When research is grounded in lived experience — through approaches such as Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis — our task is to uncover reality as it is disclosed in people’s individual lifeworlds. And as we grow in mastery as designers, we gain the ability not only to comprehend these realities, but to disclose new worlds to people: possibilities they could not previously imagine.
Holonomics offers something different to researchers, designers and leaders alike: systemic tools powered by deep thinking. Each framework is an operational translation of the philosophical ground we have described.
- The Holonomic Circle turns authenticity, meaning and values into design criteria, leadership practices and governance routines. It ensures that every programme — from digital transformation to service redesign — keeps its centre of gravity in how people actually live the experience.
- The Customer Centricity Strategy Framework aligns strategy with lived experience by connecting value propositions to the behaviours and relationships that make them true. It helps executives move from slogans to doable commitments that can be inspected and improved.
- The New 4Ps (Platforms, Purpose, People, Planet) reframes marketing’s classic levers for an era where ecosystems, sensemaking and sustainability shape competitive advantage. It prevents local optimisations that damage the whole.
- Elevated Value Propositions ensure that offers are not thin promises. They link what customers value functionally with what they value existentially: trust, belonging, beauty, fairness, care. This is not sentiment; it is strategy grounded in reality.
What makes these tools effective is not their novelty but their lineage. They arise from a way of seeing — Bortoft’s dynamic wholeness, phenomenology’s attention to appearance, hermeneutics’ discipline of interpretation. Because the tools are born from deep thinking, they produce deep results: coherence rather than theatrics, culture change rather than compliance, growth with integrity rather than growth at any cost.
Practitioner notes: working with lived experience tomorrow morning
For leaders who want to begin now:
- Start in the centre. Ask your team to name three gaps between saying–meaning–doing. Choose one and close it this quarter. Authenticity compounds.
- Name the values as lenses. Take a critical journey (on-boarding, complaint handling, service recovery). Look through each transcendental — Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Justice, Love — and write down what is currently present based on what you actually see. Act on one improvement in each lens.
- Reframe the map. If you use strategy maps or scorecards, add a layer for lived experience signals and the dialogues that keep values alive. Make the map a mirror, not a museum piece.
- Run a sensemaking loop. Combine one experiential dataset (front-line stories, call transcripts, open-ended feedback) with one computational tool. Convene a cross-functional group to examine what the combination reveals that neither could alone.
- Teach perception. Invest in the skill that amplifies all others: the ability to see. Create short practices in meetings: moments of silence before decisions, narrative listening, and “What is it that we are not seeing” check-ins.
None of this requires permission from a platform. It requires attention, language and discipline.
Taking appearance seriously
When I look back to that 1995 conclusion at BT, I recognise the seed of everything that followed. We sensed that experience could be designed, but we also knew that design without understanding would quickly become decoration. Over the last decade, working with Maria and our clients around the world, we have pursued that understanding wherever it led — to Bortoft’s philosophy of wholeness, to the dynamic way of seeing, to tools that keep values active and authentic, and to a form of measurement that honours what people live.
To take appearance seriously is to treat lived experience as the ground of strategy — not an afterthought. It is to notice that the most valuable transformations are achieved by implementing framework and methods that deep our capacity to see, interpret and act with integrity. That is what Holonomics was built to do: a bridge from theory to practice, from seeing to doing, from parts to whole.
The future of customer experience is not a new buzzword. It is the rediscovery of soul in how organisations meet people, moment by moment, across every relation, experience and encounter. And that future is already here — where leaders choose to see it.
About Holonomics
At Holonomics, we work with leaders to build customer-centric organisations that are future-fit and ready for transformation. By combining strategy with values, we help organisations translate vision into meaningful results. If you would like to explore how we can support your organisation, please contact us to start the conversation.
