How to Fix Your Culture Using the Experience-Suite
Leadership teams argue.
They argue over being data-rich but insight-poor, the cost of updating the “tech-stack”, the brand being lost in translation, the exhaustion of chasing quick wins, and complaints being up. All while Darryn from Accounts is betting his farm on AI to magically fix it all.
But if you’re like most executives, you’re probably looking at these problems all wrong. You’re trying to fix them by manoeuvring the functional building blocks of the business. That’s things like the strategy, finances, risk and operations. You’re moving pieces around the board, thinking a little of “this over here and that over there” will ensure everyone is happy and stays in their lane.
If your people aren’t happy, you’re missing the point.
Those building blocks are just that. They aren’t what gets sold to anyone. And there is no lane to keep them in.
Which means, the point you should be addressing is far bigger and more emotional. Because the biggest portion of what makes your business turnover its cash is how it feels, which is more about what you, your customers, and employees are willing to buy into. And right now, that is getting harder.
That means, your real focus, and the only way to stop internal turf wars is by focusing on the experiences the business collectively creates. And that starts with understanding the Experience-Suite.
Every organisation has an Experience-Suite, whether the leaders at the top are aware of it or not. In fact, a simple lack of awareness here often causes leaders to destroy the very thing they’re trying to build.
For example, the Chief of People & Culture isn’t trying to make life miserable when they mandate a new collaborative platform to boost engagement. But because they bought it in a corporate silo, their attempt to boost Employee Experience weaponised the rest of the Experience-Suite domains against their own staff.
Instead of feeling supported, employees feel micromanaged, paranoid, and constantly watched. Darryn from Accounts is now spending three hours a week reminding his team to jiggle their mice so their status stays "online”. Meanwhile the Chief of People is left scratching their head as to why culture scores dropped, entirely blind to the fact that their HR initiative just vandalised the company's daily psychological safety and productivity.
So what then is the Experience-Suite?
The Experience-Suite is comprised of seven domains: Brand, Product, Phygital, Digital, Consumer, User, and Employee Experience. And to say it again, every single business is comprised of the entire Experience-Suite.
On paper, it looks clean and sensible. In reality, it’s a mess of overlapping accountability. This is where the indecision, doubt and arguments happen.
Consider, for example, these questions:
Which leader owns the brand identity on a digital dashboard in a vehicle?
Which leader owns the P&L for a pair of augmented reality glasses?
Who owns a digital platform used only by employees?
When you don’t have clear answers to questions like these, your business touchpoints become sources of conflict rather than growth.
As a leader, your job isn't to measure these things after the fact, hoping all the adults on the team have worked it out for themselves. Your job is to deliberately design these moments of overlap and set the direction for how your team is going to work in and around them. That’s important because value in the culture is either created or destroyed specifically by what happens in those overlaps.
How you lead the Experience-Suite is the best predictor of how successful your team and your business will be. If you don't get this right, your people will forget about what actually drives innovation, growth and value and instead focus on tasks like creating another dashboard or implementing new software, just so they have something to add to their performance review.
This article is a summary of the ‘Experience-Suite’ methodology. Grab your copy of The Experience-Suite via Amazon.
