When will the Major Consultancies Start to Talk about Soul?

I am always interested in what the world’s biggest business consultancies have to say about next-generation business practices. A new article from McKinsey&Company caught my eye, as it was titled The next-generation operating model for the digital world.

Authors Albert Bollard, Elixabete Larrea, Alex Singla and Rohit Sood introduce the article saying:

Companies know where they want to go. They want to be more agile, quicker to react, and more effective. They want to deliver great customer experiences, take advantage of new technologies to cut costs, improve quality and transparency, and build value.

The problem is that while most companies are trying to get better, the results tend to fall short: one-off initiatives in separate units that don’t have a big enterprise-wide impact; adoption of the improvement method of the day, which almost invariably yields disappointing results; and programs that provide temporary gains but aren’t sustainable.

The article cites two major shifts which a company will need to go through:

• The first part involves a shift from running uncoordinated efforts within siloes to launching an integrated operational-improvement program organized around customer journeys (the set of interactions a customer has with a company when making a purchase or receiving services) as well as the internal journeys (end-to-end processes inside the company). Examples of customer journeys include a homeowner filing an insurance claim, a cable-TV subscriber signing up for a premium channel, or a shopper looking to buy a gift online. Examples of internal-process journeys include Order-to-Cash or Record-to-Report.
• The second part is a shift from using individual technologies, operations capabilities, and approaches in a piecemeal manner inside siloes to applying them to journeys in combination and in the right sequence to achieve compound impact.

The article is actually pretty good, and makes the important case for the need for more systemic thinking and a better understanding of how business processes connect as a whole. Their model identifies five approaches and capabilities which will drive next-generation business operating models.

This is all great up to a point, but this model explicitly has been designed to include the design and implementation of customer experiences. What I would ask of this model, as I do of many, is where is the soul? Where is the recognition that to go beyond great customer experiences, we need to recognise our humanity, what makes us human, in order to offer customer experiences with soul?

It is for this reason that Maria and I developed our tool The Holonomic Circle, which we are using to help organisations make genuine paradigm shifts into new ways of being. At the heart is the trinity of authenticity. Without maximum coherence between what an organisation says, what they mean and what they do, no shifts into higher states of being are possible.

We do very much value the vast majority of business methods, and for this reason they are located in the middle circle which we term Tools and Techniques. The foundation of these are the five universal human values of peace, truth, love, righteousness and non-violence. When these human values are present in an organisation, the customer experience emerges naturally, with there being less reliance on rules and regulation.

A systemic approach to organisational and business design can only really be taken once there is a profound understanding of meaning, how it is created, communicated and evolved. Without this an organisation will forever suffer from a silo-mentality, and the customer experience will be limited by the frame within which the organisation understands it clients and customers.

The outer circle is termed the transcendentals, and these are the elements which constitute ‘being’ (inlcuding being itself). They come from Plato, and are not to be understood as discrete elements, but as interwoven elements in which we can find all other elements. While there is much talk of leadership in business, those businesses who manage to make the shift to next-generation operating systems will have a number of people who have reached the level of mastery in their domains.

Mastery for me is the ability to reveal new worlds, new ways of being, and this is where meaningful evolution will take place. At this moment in time there is still a lot of emphasis placed on doing — innovation for the sake of innovation, and this is taking place without a similar amount of reflecting on being — who we are, what exactly is our product and service, what is our organisation.

In October of last year Maria and I were invited to speak at Sustainable Brands Bangkok where we introduced Customer Experiences with Soul, which we created to help organisations apply our Holonomics approach to the area of customer experience design.

In our plenary presentation we introduced the framework and discussed purpose, values, authenticity, being and also a number of case studies in which we are applying this framework. You can watch our presentation in this video below:

We are now discussing our framework with a number of businesses and organisations, some global, some at the start-up phase, some which have social business missions, and some of which already offer amazing customer experiences, but which now need to take great care in nurturing their soul as they go through the next phases of expansion. At this moment in time it seems to me that the big consultancies are still very much in their comfort zones dealing with ‘hard skills’ and new business methodologies which make little reference to this notion of humanity, let alone the fact that our social systems are embedded in a wider ecological system

In April we will be publishing our new book Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design. At Sustainable Brands Bangkok we handed out a two-page introduction, which includes The Holonomic Circle. You can download a copy here: Customer Experiences with Soul

We created our tool with the hope that it will help shift businesses’ understanding of design, innovation, strategy, leadership and branding. It provides the guidance needed for developing, structuring and implementing customer experiences with soul, teaching entrepreneurs of the future how to build and grow authentic businesses and organisations which honour what it is to be human in our world. We hope one day this will be the language of the world’s largest business consultants.