PART II

Insights and Possibilities

In Part I, “A Common Foundation,” we introduced concepts and frameworks helpful for shifting organizational perspectives from dividing and conquering to uniting and orchestrating. The recommended methods aid codifying your channels, touchpoints, ecosystems, and journeys as elements of a greater system. This sets the table for collaboration and change. But you can’t stop there.

As you move forward, it is critical to test your own hypotheses and challenge internal thinking of what customers need. You must get out of your work environment and take a deep dive into what people do, think, and feel in their journeys. You must uncover the barriers they face, the nuances of their context, and, ultimately, the value they seek. Your objective: build empathy and identify true opportunities to create positive change for your customers and organization.

Collaboration is also critical as you learn, reframe, and prepare for action. The next three chapters will prepare you to guide others through a three-step process. First, you will conduct generative research to better understand your customers’ end-to-end experiences. Next, you will synthesize what you learn into an experience map and experience principles. With these new insights, you can then identify and prioritize opportunities.

As you will see, this process is not a solo endeavor in which you report back what you have learned. It’s a facilitated group effort to build empathy and create alignment for addressing the needs of customers and your organization holistically. While this level of collaboration may seem radical, the trust it engenders in your colleagues is a key building block in creating better orchestrated experiences.

Let’s start with how to facilitate mapping experiences.

“There’s gold in them thar hills.”

—Mark Twain