Hello lovely people,

Got myself a new mouse for the Mac this week. Genuinely the most excited I've been in a long time. I've also been doing a series of discovery calls with senior P&C leaders, asking them directly what's keeping them up at night so what I'm building solves the right problems. If you want to be part of the discovery calls, get in touch at [email protected]

Also reading through early feedback on the SPIES principles, link at the bottom if you haven't seen them yet.

Today's piece is the sequence I use when designing a people strategy from scratch, built from a real engagement where three strategies had already failed before I walked in.

Today’s Focus:

• Why your P&C function would fail its own invoice test

• The portfolio overlay that turns a workshop into an intervention

• How to build a strategy the CFO will actually sign off

TL;DR: Most P&C strategies are written by people who assumed being in the room meant being worth paying for. Here's the sequence that finds out whether they were right, and what to do when they weren't.

People Strategy, Flat Pack Edition.

Strategy doesn't have to be complicated. It's a sequence, and if you follow it in order, most of the hard part takes care of itself.

Here's the sequence I use, and where it came from.

A few years back I was brought into a business where three strategies in a row had gone exactly the same way. Each one brought in, tweaked, presented, and quietly buried. By the time the CEO called me in, they'd stopped asking what was wrong with the strategy and started asking what was wrong with the team.

Here’s my approach to it and the order in which I do it, the order matters more than any single piece of it. Each step had more inside it than I've covered here, discovery, workshops, canvases, activities etc but none of that's the point, the order is

1.Leave the god damn building

We left it properly, not for an offsite or into the training room next door. But to a completely different space, with different chairs and no laptops open to email. Remember that building had three strategy launches' worth of history baked into the walls, same seats, same arguments, same person who sits near the door to leave early. You can't think differently about a problem in the room where you've already failed three times.

2.Become an external company

I made the P&C function pretend to be an external separate business operating entirely inside this organisation, whose only client was the business and employees themselves. Suddenly "we've always done it this way" stops being an answer, because an outside company doesn't have a "we've always." People who'd spent years inside the org chart started talking about it like someone else's problem, which for the next two days, it was.

3.Work out what game you're playing

Every function thinks it's playing one of three games, efficiency, partnership, or experience, yet most haven't actually chosen it, they've just drifted into whichever one felt closest at the time.

For example

Recruitment and Ops thought they were playing efficiency, time to hire, cost per hire, the usual. Reward thought they were playing partnership, trusted advisor to the leadership team on pay decisions. L&D thought they were playing experience, engagement scores, culture surveys, the lot.

Three functions, same building, three different games, and nobody had ever agreed which one HR was actually meant to be collectively playing and winning.

So we went back to the outside company from step two, and asked one question of each: if this was a separate business, selling what you do back to this company:

• Would they actually pay for it?

• Would your customer subscribe to it?

Reward's case for "trusted advisor" was a calendar of extra meetings. Would the business pay an invoice for that, on its own, with nothing else attached? It wouldn't get past the front door.

L&D's case for "engagement" was a happy sheet survey nobody outside HR had ever seen or cared for, which wouldn't get an invoice past finance and honestly wouldn't get repeat subscription from the employees.

Recruitment at least had a number, time to hire had gone down, but quality of hire, which nobody was tracking, had quietly gone the other way, so even that invoice came with a catch nobody had checked.

Every previous strategy here was written by people who'd correctly noticed they were in the room, and assumed that meant they were worth paying for.

4.Map your value chains and portfolios

Create your value chains and apply your portfolio over them, a portfolio is a mix of Services, Products, Interactions and Experiences (SPIES), all contributed by whichever parts of the function happen to touch it.

Take Slick Start, the chain covering how someone joins and gets up to speed. Recruitment has a slice of that portfolio. So does IT, facilities, payroll, and the new starter's manager. Five parts of the function, all contributing to the same portfolio, with no idea what anyone else had put in.

We got each part of the function to plot out its own contribution to Slick Start. Each one, on its own, looked fine.

Then we laid them all on top of each other, and that's when it stopped being a workshop and started being an intervention.

Two separate welcome emails landed in new starters' inboxes on day one, one from HR with the handbook attached, one from IT with login details, both written as if they were the only one, neither mentioning the other.

Someone in the room laughed, then stopped laughing, because everyone realised they'd been sending both for two years.

Then, for everything inside that portfolio, every product, service, interaction and experience, we asked three questions:

• Is this thing live, or is it just in a deck somewhere?

• Would people choose it, or do they just comply with it because they have to?

• If you switched it off tomorrow, would anyone outside this room actually notice?

The recognition scheme nobody in the building could actually name failed all three. Technically live, in that emails still went out. Nobody chose it, new starters just received it. And when someone asked what would happen if it quietly stopped, the honest answer was nobody would notice for months.

5.Check what should be flowing between value chains

We looked at the value chains again for example Slick Start, but from the other side this time, what should have been flowing into its portfolio from somewhere else, and wasn't.

Each value chain and its portfolio is built to compound value to the business and employees, each is supposed to generate value the next one can use, not just do its own job and stop.

Take Fond Farewell and Slick Start. When someone leaves, a good exit conversation tells you things, whether they'd come back, who else they know who'd be brilliant in this place, what they think the team actually needs next. Here, that conversation happened, got typed up, and sat in a folder nobody opened again.

Meanwhile recruitment was out advertising the same role, paying an agency several thousand pounds, for a person the leaver could have referred for nothing, or in a couple of cases, for the leaver themselves eighteen months later.

Same value, recreated from scratch, paid for twice, and nobody did anything wrong, the system was just never built to pass it on. Onboarding had an owner. The development chain had an owner. Neither job description mentioned the other.

Onboarding does the same thing in reverse. Everything someone tells you in their first week, what they're good at, what worries them, what they want next, usually gets written down once, in an induction form, and never looked at again.

Three months later the development conversation starts from a blank page, asking the same questions, as if day one never happened.

6. Build the measurement engine

Everything up to here had been diagnosis, useful, occasionally uncomfortable, but diagnosis. At some point you have to say it in numbers, something a CFO will sit still for, what this is costing and what fixing it is worth.

We tracked two different kinds of signal side by side.

The first is tracking behaviour of the people using our SPIES and asking how people said things felt, would they choose this again, not just put up with it. That's what I call the Subscription Score.

The second is what all of this was actually costing. The two welcome emails. The recognition scheme nobody could name. The agency fees for roles a leaver could've filled. Add it, chain by chain, and there's your number.

That's the Experience Leak score, and it's the one that gets you back in the room with the CFO, because it's an invoice for everything we've just walked through.

That invoice is also the justification. Nobody signs off a new strategy because the old one felt wrong, it gets signed off because the leak now has a number on it, attached to the value it can add if resolved.

7. Match the op model to what can be held

This business had been built entirely around centres of expertise, one team for recruitment, one for reward, one for L&D and so on. Each deep in its specialism and nothing else. You can't turn that into squads, ie cross-functional teams owning a value chain end to end, overnight.

The skills aren't there yet, and more importantly, the business doesn't stop running while everyone finds that out. Payroll still has to run and people still need paying at 2am, regardless of what the operating model slide says.

So we ran two gears at once. One gear kept the centres of expertise doing what they'd always done, the lights stayed on, still thinking the way HR always had, programmes, policies, initiatives.

The other gear was small, a handful of people pulled out to run Slick Start as an actual squad, with a backlog and real ownership end to end, and the first real chance to learn how to craft interactions and rituals, and design products and services, instead of running programmes.

That second gear wasn't the destination, it was how the rest of the function learned what a squad felt like, by watching one work, before being asked to become one.

Every time you propose this kind of change, the same objections turn up. This'll cause chaos, someone says, when the chaos is already there, just currently invisible.

We don't have the capacity, someone else says, when they're already spending that capacity firefighting the thing you're proposing to fix.

What if it doesn't work, is the last one, and with two gears running, you'll know within weeks, on one chain, without betting the whole function on it.

This business had spent three strategies and the best part of three years finding solutions to problems nobody had ever properly named.

The actual work, the bit that finally landed, took twelve weeks, and most of those twelve weeks were spent on steps one to five. Finding the right problem, working out whose problem it actually was, what SPIES were and how the value they produce either compounds or leaks.

Wrap Up

Every time I've run this sequence, the ratio's roughly the same. Seventy percent of the time goes on finding the right problem, thirty on solving it. Most P&C functions run that backwards.

Every one of those seven steps has more inside it than I've written here, workshops, discovery, canvases and specific activities, most of them never coming from traditional HR and more from strategy and innovation.

But none of that's the bit that matters. Get the order right, and the rest looks after itself.

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you

Speak soon,

Danny

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Hey beautiful people,

Couple of things from me before we get into today's piece a little longer but all important

My books are open. If you're a people leader who knows something in your function isn't delivering but can't see exactly where, I run a diagnostic that shows you where your experience and people strategy is leaking and what it's costing. Four weeks, clear findings and a plan you can act on. If that sounds relevant, ping me a email [email protected]

I also wrote a piece for CX Magazine recently covering how we are measuring Employee Experience is all wrong, and getting us to the right type of wrong answer Here

Finally my tone of voice might be about to change on you. The reason my podcast works and the reason customers tend to enjoy working with me is because I simplify things and talk like I'm in the pub. I've always held back a bit in the newsletter but given I am running my own business now it gives me a lot more flexibility.

But I don't want to spring it on you, so I've created a little 10-day email course, one email a day, about 300 words each, me bringing some of my SPIES principles to life in the way I'd actually explain it. It's a sneak peek into what the new tone would sound like.

There's a caveat though. If you sign up, you have to tell me which version you prefer. Either this newsletter tone or the micro course tone. If that's a deal, click here

Today’s Focus:

• Why efficiency is killing experience without anyone noticing

• The four moments where meaning gets designed out

• How to find where your organisation trades texture for throughput

TL;DR: Organisations aren't designing bad experiences on purpose. They're designing forgettable ones by accident, one efficiency decision at a time. The fix isn't less process. It's asking what the moment could be before you ask how fast you can run it.

Optimised Into Forgettable

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There was a traffic light in Lisbon that danced while you waited

The signal moved to music. It cost more to maintain, slowed the crossing slightly, failed every operational metric you could throw at it. Yet everyone who experienced it remembered it, photographed it, told the story to friends. It became part of how people remembered that city.

Then they optimised it away.

Wait times went down, Traffic flow improved and now nobody remembers any crossing in Lisbon, because every signal is perfectly, efficiently meaningless.

Organisations make that same choice hundreds of times a day, every time they reach for efficiency as the default answer to a people moment that was never really about speed in the first place.

Which is the corporate way of saying: we're turning work into a self-checkout. Faster for the business, lonelier for the human involved.

Now before we get into me being Anti AI let me be clear am really not, in fact I went through IBM ethical AI and design thinking in 2019. I love AI and how it can elevate the experience..

Right now, that pull toward efficiency is being turbocharged by AI. Every people function is using it to do the same things faster, automate the screening, speed up the review cycle, nudge people toward the learning platform. The thinking is sound. The problem is what we're pointing it at.

If you're not measuring the right things in the right way, the subscription strategy, the products, the interactions, the experiences, the services that constitute a a true value exchange, then AI doesn't make the experience better. It gets you very good at removing whatever is left of it.

Faster wrong is still wrong.

The mistake I keep seeing is that we're treating AI as the host of the party instead of the dishwasher we should be focusing on the interactions and experience and letting AI get on with the dishes

This week alone ive seen two examples of this, one where the thinking on AI and automation is good and one where it sent the business backwards

Here's what it looks like when we get that backwards.

Recruitment

The process is optimised for time-to-hire. Fourteen days, requisition to offer. Automated screening, templated rejection emails, a candidate journey that moves people through a pipeline without ever making them feel like a person, or in some cases ever meeting one. A well-known aviation company is doing exactly this right now and apparently sees nothing worth changing… interesting that it also has the name for being one of the worst culture going.

The best candidates get to the end and accept the offer. They arrive on day one having learned almost nothing about what it actually means to work there. They spend the first week doing mental gymnastics, trying to reconcile the employee values on the wall, "we care about people," with the experience they just had, which communicated something closer to: we care about throughput.

Performance

One of the emptiest processes in work is performance review season, the great mirage where, at best, people say things that should have been said six months ago. Fill in a template, rate against competencies and submit before deadline. Then sit through a forty-five-minute conversation that's supposed to make sense of twelve months of working.

The process ran efficiently, yet the human in that interaction felt invisible. They leave with a surprise score and no clear sense of whether they matter here.

Growth

The learning platform has four thousand courses an algorithm recommends the next one based on role and tenure. Completion rates are up thirty percent since someone added nudge notifications, and nobody can name a single course that changed how they think and act in their work.

The system serves content the way a vending machine serves snacks. Available, convenient, and completely lacking any of nutritional value. Press B7 for resilience. C4 for leadership. D2 for difficult conversations.

Then we scratch our heads and wonder why people aren't showing up the way we need them to.

Town halls

The quarterly town hall runs on polished slides, hits every talking point, and ends on time. Employees leave knowing whether the numbers went up or down. Nobody leaves feeling differently about why they work there. The town hall is a broadcast rather than a conversation.

It does the job of informing people while quietly confirming that nobody is especially interested in what they think.

Each of these is efficient on paper. Each works, in the way that a conveyor belt works. And each has had the meaning optimised out of it so gradually that nobody noticed when the experience moved from human to mechanical.

This is how it takes hold, not in one dramatic act of cost-cutting, but through a thousand sensible improvements that each make complete sense in isolation and collectively strip the soul out of the work.

It's self-reinforcing, one quarter brings a push to shave time off the review cycle. Next quarter, someone automates the learning recommendations. Each decision kills a moment the experience could have been.

You end up with systems that look world-class on paper while feeling dead in the room.

The person in the people seat is increasingly expected to justify every investment in commercial terms, link it to the P&L, defend it to the CFO.(rightfully so)

That pressure is real, and I'm not suggesting it shouldn't be. But here's what it produces when commercial thinking becomes the only design lens: every people product, interaction, and experience gets shaped for defensibility rather than impact.

The problem is less that leadership doesn't care, and more that we've built a system that can see cost instantly and meaning too late.

You can justify a learning platform with completion rates (wrongfully so) You cannot easily justify the conversation that changed how someone sees their own capability.

You can measure time-to-hire, you cannot easily measure whether the person you hired felt like they were joining something that mattered. When the numbers are the only lens, you strip the meaning out of your people strategy to make them look right, and they look great right up until the people who matter most stop caring.

Imagine your partner announces they've made a breakthrough.

"Good news. I've optimised sex. Twenty minutes down to ninety seconds. Productivity is up four hundred percent."

Technically efficient, yet completely misses the point.

That's the mistake. Some moments are supposed to be efficient. Others are supposed to be meaningful. The trick is knowing which is which, and the problem is that most people functions never stop to ask the question before they reach for the improvement, or are still measuring their strategy in programmes and feeling and not in figures and SPIES metrics

The two questions that cut through it are straightforward.

Is this a time well saved moment?

Where the goal is removing friction, getting it done faster, cleaner, with less effort, the kind of moment nobody should have to think about, Payroll running on time, Admin that just happens, Systems that work. Good. Optimise those hard and measure on service design principles

Or is this a time well spent moment?

Where the goal is creating meaning, The conversation that changes how someone sees their own capability the onboarding that tells a real story about what kind of place this is. The town hall where something unexpected happens and people leave feeling different about why they come in fantastic measure them on product, interaction and experience metrics (not completion rate…dont go there not today please)

Time well saved thinking when applied to a time well spent moment is how experience dies.

Most people functions are doing exactly that to recruitment, performance, growth, and connection. Running efficiency logic against moments that were always supposed to be human

Pick your most optimised people moment, the one with the best metrics. Ask the question have we killed a time well spent moment and turned it into a time well saved moment.

The answer will tell you whether you fixed the right thing, or just got very good at fixing the wrong one.

Wrap Up

Before you optimise anything, ask whether this is a moment worth saving time on, or a moment worth spending time in

Cheers

Danny

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Hello friends…

I’m typing this sat in my office sweating, not Thai prison levels but close. I do love the sun so I cant be too British about it… but it is hot though!

Last week was a busy one, I did a webinar about the SPIES model for people and culture functions and then wrote a piece for CX magazine. Todays piece is a deeper dive on the thoughts I shared here

Ps am trying something new this week under the TLDR is a audio version of the newsletter for them who like to listen… let me know your thoughts drop me a Y or N to: [email protected]

Today’s Focus:

• Why onboarding fails new hires before the first meeting ever happens

• The three fractures that show up in almost every onboarding journey

• Why a three-pound notebook outperforms a 250k platform

TL;DR: Your onboarding was designed for the organisation, not the person arriving. That's why it keeps leaking value, and why a £3 notebook fixes what a £250k platform can't.

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Your onboarding costs £3 to fix

Think back to the early days of a relationship, everything was new, full of nervous excitement, everything felt electric full of unknown

It was all about making extra effort because the other person hadn't made their mind up about you to fully invest yet.

Then fast forward, and BAU sets in.

Bills, routines, the same Tuesday evening on the sofa. Nothing terrible, just pretty ordinary. The effort that defined the beginning quietly stops and changes into something different mainly full of known knowns

It's around this time people start proactively putting dates in the diary, trying to inject back something they let drift.

Most organisations do exactly the same thing with their new hires

If you're lucky, the recruitment experience is high-touch, polished, persuasive, and the recruiter is super attentive and everything has a warmth to it. So when the offer lands you feel like the place actually want you.

Then day one arrives.

The laptop has not been set up, the manager is in back-to-backs until Thursday, and the first two days are compliance training dressed up as induction. The information keeps arriving. Ninety percent of it is the "just-in-case" type rather than the "just-in-time" type.

And yet none of it says anything about what it actually feels like to work here.

That's Experience Leak happening right at the start of your new hire's lifecycle.

It's like going on a cinema date with someone, wanting it to be fun, and then watching The Life of David Gale. (This happened to me. Needless to say, she never returned my call… Amy If your reading this am not angry just disappointed)

And this is the same with your new hires, nowhere does it do more damage than in the first 80 days.

Mind the gap

In customer experience, we have a well-established discipline around journey continuity. Which is where the experience shifts, where what a business promises is tested against customer reality. Usually, it's here that trust is lost and behaviours change.

Organisations spend so much on making sure the journey stands up for their customer but very rarely for their employees. Here's the thing you can often fix the majority of customer and employee journeys when you identify the three main fractures that show up.

Let’s look at the three fractures from an onboarding point of view.

Something both my readers in people & culture and customer experience can relate to

The Three Fractures

The first is continuity: Recruitment is one experience, then the first week often feels like a completely different company. The candidate who felt courted, considered, and genuinely wanted, arrives to find a checklist, a stack of forms, and a culture that is too busy to notice them. The emotional shift goes from feeling like you are joining somewhere to feeling like you are being processed

The second is cognitive load: Organisations front-load everything onto day one, most of it compliance-driven rather than care-driven. A well-designed journey staggers information, delivering what someone needs when they need it rather than everything they might eventually need all at once. That difference matters because information overload in the first week does not just frustrate, it signals to the new hire that this journey was designed for the organisation's administrative convenience, not for them.

The third is psychological safety: Organisations that intentionally build windows of discussion into the first thirty days, specifically asking for the outsider's perspective before that perspective gets absorbed and lost into the BAU get a different result. The ones that skip lose the most valuable thing a new hire brings: the ability to see clearly what everyone else stopped noticing.

Why first impression matter

There is a little principle I use when designing new experiences called Primacy Effect.

Basically, it's where we add disproportionate weight to the start of a journey, and everything else after it gets filtered through it

This is why the laptop not ready on day one is not just a small oversight. What you have actually done is signal their arrival wasn’t anticipated and you didnt real care. From that point on everything you do will feel to them, like your flying by the seat of your pants

Don’t believe me?

Ask any of your new hires who got something late on day one.

They will play back to you how everything felt like it was rushed together and the business wasnt ready for them…even if it was.

That signal is something they latch onto within hours, and the culture they were promised in recruitment gets quietly revised in their mind. Slowly they begin to shift from feeling like the main character to feeling like a new entry in the system.

When an organisation fails to signal that a person matters in the first week, the case becomes considerably harder to make after that.

The Psycho logical problem

A lot of the time if you ask how have you made the onboarding better?

you will get, we created a better induction portal, a shorter compliance module, or a 30-60-90 day plan with more touchpoints baked in.

While that does marginally reduce the friction, it usually only increases the benefit to the business, it doesn't necessarily improve the experience for the new hire. So when the score comes back as the onboarding being score as average guess what happens

The portal get refined!

Here is the question that never gets asked

Why do we assume more information on day one creates more belonging?

In my experience, the opposite is almost always true.

A new hire who spends their first day being told everything the organisation needs them to know leaves that day knowing a lot and feeling very little.

The brain remembers the frame, not the context, and when that frame from day one sets it as "you're here to receive information and not to belong", everything starts to fall apart from there

However the things that can shift this, cost next to nothing

Small things carry big weight

The most effective interventions I have rolled out when reimagining customer and employee experience is nearly always the ones that look least efficient from the outside.

Giving a new hire a choice on day one

• The colour of their notebook

• The configuration of their desk

• Mac or PC

Changes nothing about the job they have arrived to do yet the weighting of that first interaction changes something structural about how they experience arriving.

The internal narrative shifts from "I am being processed" to "I have agency here," and that shift compounds through everything that follows. Give someone a small, seemingly meaningless decision and you have given them something no induction portal can replicate: authorship.

The person who chose their setup on day one is already a different kind of employee from the person who was handed one.

A manager who blocks the first two hours of a Tuesday for a conversation with nothing on the agenda except getting to know someone is, by “spreadsheet logic” being unproductive.

But by experience logic, they are making the single highest- return of investment available to them, one that cannot be faked, automated, or replicated by any platform on the market. The message it sends is simple: the human is worth more than the output.

Language carries the same weight at near zero cost too.

A role responsible for welcome logistics is performing an administrative function. The same role framed as "Head of First Experiences" holds a completely different brief and attracts a completely different quality of attention. Same process but now with a completely different frame

The reframe costs nothing, and the failure to reframe costs considerably more than most attrition dashboards reveal.

Try it out with your hotel reception, your induction team, or even your SaaS onboarding team. Challenge them to rename themselves as head of first experiences and ask them what they would do differently

Trust me the outcome would be very different to what you have now

Asymmetry nobody talks about

A notebook colour, two hours of a manager's Tuesday, a job title rename. All cost almost nothing, and all of them return something no platform can manufacture.

Dont get confused here this isn’t about free swag, it is about the feeling a new hire gets when they get to make some choices. Nobody ever went home and said wow, the induction platform we have is so smooth.

What does happen, is they go home and tell someone about the little choices they made, how they got to pick a purple notebook over the bland corporate red, how they got to pick a Mac over a PC

When someone builds an experience that suits them, they are already invested and subscribed before the second week starts.

So while the rational answer might be to refine the onboarding platform, the human answer is to buy more coloured notepads

It sounds small, it sounds nonsensical, but little things make big impacts.

Your new induction platform might have cost a fortune for the business, but your people and customers don’t care about that, what they want is the feeling of choice and the feeling of being seen on a Tuesday afternoon by their new manager

Wrap Up

Pick one moment in your first-week experience, the laptop arrival, maybe the manager's first conversation, even the name of the first day, and ask:

was this designed for the person joining, or for the organisation processing them?

If the answer is the latter, you have found where your experience is leaking.

Every organisation has a journey it calls onboarding be it for the employee or customers, however very few have ever designed a first impression.

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you

Speak soon,

Danny

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This week, I'm handing the newsletter over to my good friend Vaughen Broderick. Our paths crossed many years ago when we both were in the Innovation space.

We had a conversation recently about why good ideas die inside organisations, and it stuck with me. The piece below is the result of that thinking. If it resonates, know that I contributed to the book sitting behind it, Innovation in Action (Wiley, July 2026). Pre-order at innovationinaction.com it's worth it.

Today’s Focus:

• Ideas don't fail at ideation they fail at implementation, which most frameworks quietly ignore.

• Building a coalition is a design challenge, and asking "who else belongs in this room?" early changes everything.

• The real cost of stalled innovation isn't a missed deadline, it's people stopping believing change is possible here.

TL;DR: Most innovation processes are brilliant at generating ideas and weak at making them land. The piece below shows you what to do about the half nobody else talks about.

Why Innovation Stalls After The Workshop

You know the feeling.

You've just wrapped up a workshop. The insights are gathered from actual humans, not assumptions in a boardroom. The team is energised and ideas are flowing. The stakeholders are nodding. Someone says, "This is exactly what we needed."

Six months later, nothing has changed.

The insights have been documented and soon forgotten. The idea everyone supported never made it into anyone's workflow, budget, or plan.

You did the right work. But the path from insight to actual change breaks down and innovation vanishes in the gap between ideas and implementation.

If you're trying to bring something genuinely new into an organisation or the world, this isn't an occasional frustration. It's a pattern. You've started to wonder if it's worth the effort.

It's not about you. It's a process failure.

The cost isn't just a stalled project.

It's the team that stops sharing ideas after seeing them overlooked too often. It's your credibility at stake when initiatives fade into the list of things that didn't change. It's another round of asking why innovation stalls.

And when it fails, you're the one explaining why.

The real cost isn't lost money or missed deadlines. It's the slow erosion of belief in the work, the process, and ultimately in you.

The root issue isn’t a lack of ideas, it's a failure of processes to recognise that implementation is a human-centred design challenge.

This isn't just our experience. Research by Kuratko et al. confirms the vast majority of innovation projects fail during implementation. Ultimately, with any change, we are asking people to change their behaviour in some way.

This is what most innovation frameworks fail to address. They’ve come from consultants whose process stops at "deliver" or "test." The challenge of making something stick by getting it resourced, supported, adopted, was never theirs to solve.

For you, the challenge remains.

So, whether you work in CX, EX, service design, product, or change, if your job is making innovation land, you're likely using a process not fully built for the reality of humans in a constantly disruptive and turbulent world.

The Implementation Gap

This is the gap that the DUCTRI model and toolkit was built to close. Not a theory. A field-tested system built from over ten years of doing this work in real organisations.

Christian Walsh developed the original framework. Over the last six years, working alongside Christian across health, social services, the public sector, and commercial organisations, we’ve field-tested it across 350+ projects and multiple sectors, refined it, and built out a set of practical tools that work in the real world. That process of doing the work, learning what lands and what doesn't in live organisational contexts is what eventually became Innovation in Action (published by Wiley, July 2026).

The DUCTRI model stands for: Discovering, Understanding, Creating, Testing, Resourcing, Implementing (plus Repeating).

The first four stages will be familiar to many, as they cover the curiosity and creativity side of things. But it's the final two stages where most frameworks fall short.

Resourcing and implementing aren't handover problems. They're design problems. They require the same human-centred thinking, the same creative rigour, the same curiosity about people and systems that you already bring to the front half.

So where do you start?

Here’s one place.

The Coalition Canvas

If your initiative needs more than your team can provide, but you're not sure who else to involve or how to get them genuinely on board rather than just informed, use this approach.

The Coalition Canvas maps the landscape around your initiative. Who else works in this space? What are they trying to achieve? Where do your goals overlap? You may be competing for the same scarce budget, leadership attention, or user goodwill without realising it.

The insight it surfaces is this: For complex problems, you don't want to launch something new that fragments support or confuses the people you serve. The tool helps you find allies, understand what they need, and build a coalition around genuine shared purpose - not just a stakeholder list to manage.

For example, in Canterbury's health system transformation, the coalition began with a small group of clinicians, consumers, and community leaders. They built around a shared persona - Agnes, an 84-year-old woman who represented everyone in the system's care. Everyone could relate to her. That connection became the unifying anchor. Over time, 3,500 people joined the showcase process. Then, 6,000 more participated. They built a social movement inside a cautious system - not through mandate, but through a deliberately designed coalition.

Try it on your current project. Draw the problem space in the centre. Map who else is active around it. Ask: What do they need? What do you need? Where could you be stronger together than apart? That question often reveals real blockers and enablers before you've wasted months finding out the hard way.

The person who walks into the planning meeting and asks 'who else belongs in this room?' is the person who just changed the conversation. For the leader accountable for the outcome, that question is the difference between an initiative that compounds and one that needs another post-mortem.

The Coalition Canvas is one place to start. But it sits inside something bigger.

Clarity of purpose - so your team is aligned around what actually matters before a solution is built. Clarity of communication - so the right story reaches the right people at the right moment. Open innovation - so you're drawing on the best thinking inside and outside your organisation. Crossing the chasm - so you understand the gap between early adopters and the mainstream and design for it deliberately. Building effective teams and shifting behaviour - because those are the human conditions that determine whether any of this sticks.

Innovation in Action was built with - not just for - practitioners. Danny is one of the expert contributors who helped shape it, bringing real-world thinking from the coalface of CX and EX innovation. Danny's contribution on idea selection alone is worth the price of admission. The result is a toolkit grounded in the kind of experience that doesn't just come from academic settings or consultancy decks.

It's the full playbook for turning ideas into impact. Built by people doing the work.

Your ideas are good enough. The process just needs to catch up.

Pre-order at https://innovationinactionbook.com/

Thanks to Danny and the Knot Another Newsletter community for the space to share this. If it resonates, I'd love to hear where your work is stalling and where it's flying.

Pre-ordering gets you more than a book: A sample chapter, free. Tool templates you can use immediately. Practitioner insight videos from contributors including Danny. Activation sessions with the authors.

Webinar 20th May

I will be a guest on a webinar hosted by Bayzat this weds title The HR subscription Model: Why your best people are quietly unsubcribing. I think the sign ups are closing tomorrow so if that sounds up your street you can register here

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you Speak soon, Danny

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Hello lovely people,

Them in the UK I hope you had a lovely Bank holiday and didn’t go back to an inbox full of cc’ed emails which are never that valuable. However its now 5:30pm of this short working week and hopefully this email is full of goodness for you

Today’s Focus:

• Employee Effort Score (EES)

• What it is

• How to use it

TL;DR: HR has sophisticated measurement for almost everything except the friction cost of its own services. Employee Effort Score fixes that. It gives you a number that maps directly to where people are working harder than they should to get what they need from HR, with a clear starting point for designing that out.

Four days to replace a laptop…

There's a metric that CX teams have been running since 2010, one that predicts loyalty better than satisfaction scores and points directly at where a service is costing people more effort than it should and yet HR has never applied it.

I find that gap interesting.

Not because HR needs to copy CX, but because the underlying logic is exactly right, the evidence behind it is fifteen years deep, and the version of this metric that applies to HR services doesn't yet exist in any meaningful way inside the profession.

I'm developing a broader approach to measuring HR and will share that in full over time. (one linked to the wider SPIES approach) Today I want to introduce one piece of it, the piece that matters most for how HR designs and evaluates its own services. It's called Employee Effort Score, and if you work in HR, there's a good chance you've never come across it.

A borrowed logic

In 2010, CEB published a piece in the Harvard Business Review that should have changed how every service function thought about measurement. The finding was counterintuitive: reducing customer effort predicts loyalty more reliably than delight does

They called the metric Customer Effort Score.

Its One question that gets asked after a service or interaction that simply asked to what extent do you agree with the following statement:

[Company/Function/Person] made it easy for me to handle my issue

or sometime it can be done on a 1-7 scale using how much effort it felt for them 7 being max effort 1 min no effort

Scored on a scale where the lower the number, the easier the interaction. The companies that built around cutting friction saw retention move. The ones still chasing satisfaction scores kept wondering why nothing was translating.

What EES actually measures

The question is the same logic, pointed inward. After any HR service interaction, whether a pay query, an onboarding step, a leave request, or an equipment replacement, one question: "How easy or difficult was it to get what you needed today?" Seven-point scale, where one is extremely easy and seven is extremely difficult.

As many of you lovely readers know, I believe EX and CX run on identical paths. Effort costs the same whether the person on the other side of the transaction is a customer or an employee, and friction compounds the same way regardless of which direction the interaction runs.

When a customer can't get what they need without working for it, they leave. When an employee can't get what they need without working for it, the same thing happens, just more slowly and with more compounding damage on the way out.

And here's what makes that worse. The person who spent four days chasing a laptop replacement doesn't come to their next HR interaction with a clean slate. They arrive already expecting friction. One bad interaction or services sets the temperature for everything that follows it, and that expectation doesn't show up anywhere on your current dashboard. It's doing damage before the next interaction has even started.

The broader measurement approach I'm developing looks at employee experience across a portfolio of SPIES. Services and Interaction sit at the centre of that portfolio, because they're where the gap between what HR believes it's delivering and what people actually experience tends to be largest.

EES is the metric that makes that gap visible and gives you a number to design, build and measure against.

When service friction compounds across an organisation, you're not measuring a inconvenience. You're measuring the early signal of Experience Leak.

Experience Leak = revenue leak

The talent that exits earlier than your retention data predicted

The leadership program people are forced to go on even thought your people are constantly sharing leadership is shocking and not human

High effort scores at the service layer are where that leak starts, and they're measurable before the business consequences show up in the numbers that actually get the board's attention.

The damage also isn't proportional, One high-effort interaction raises the perceived cost of every interaction that follows it. People don't experience HR services as isolated events. They experience them as a pattern, and one bad pattern sets the prior for everything that comes next.

It the reason if you sit down and do a perception test often they share HR is terrible then when you ask way they base it all of one interaction after all perception is reality.

Which means your onboarding effort score isn't just an onboarding problem. It's also a pay query problem, a leave request problem, and a manager support problem that haven't happened yet.

That gap is where HR loses people, usually not in a big dramatic cliff hanger but across a hundred small interactions that each ask more than they should.

Here's what that looks like in reality.

Someone needs to replace a broken laptop, there a “policy for it” so HR has technically solved the problem but the actual journey looks like this:

1. They search the intranet and find two documents written at different times

2. One of which links to a portal that no longer exists.

3. Turns out a new policy is stored on someone hard drive never shared

4. A colleague points them to IT.

5. IT tells them they need manager approval.

6. The manager takes a day to respond.

7. The approval form asks for an asset number they don't have.

8. They call the helpdesk and get sent back to the portal.

9. Four days later, they have a replacement laptop.

HR's dashboard: policy in place, request resolved, SLA met.

The employee's effort score for that interaction: probably a six or seven (high effort)

How EES is calculated

The calculation is straightforward.

• EES = The calculation is a straight average. Add up every score, divide by the number of responses, and the result lands somewhere between one and seven.

On a seven-point scale (1 being low effort and 7 being high effort)

• a score below three means the service is genuinely easy to navigate.

• Three to five signals friction worth looking at.

• Above five, something is costing people real cognitive load.

• Above six, that friction is systemic, baked into the process design itself rather than an occasional failure.

You can run EES at the level of a specific service, an interaction type, a team, or the function overall. The more specific you get, the more actionable the number becomes. A function-level score of 4.8 tells you something needs attention. An onboarding-specific score of 6.1 tells you exactly where to start.

Below is a example of what some of them questions could look like, obv these will need tweaking depending on the structure you take ie Likert, numeric, two survey emojis etc

Using EES as a diagnostic

The first thing I'd tell any HR leader running EES for the first time: don't make it a permanent metric yet. Use it to see what you can't currently see.

Pick three services or interactions with the highest employee volume, after the next interaction closes on each, send the one question and capture the score. Run it for thirty days. Then look at the distribution.

If a service is scoring above five, walk the process yourself, as if you were an employee going through it for the first time with no knowledge of where anything lives or who to call. Count every touch point, every redirect, and every place where the trail goes cold and yes the person who designed this should not walking it due to bias and internal knowledge.

What you find will almost always break down one of three ways.

The process has too many steps and unclear ownership, People can't find what they need because the information architecture is a mess. Or approvals and handoffs are adding delay without adding anything of value. Because EES is tied to a specific interaction, it doesn't just confirm that something is costing people effort. It shows you exactly where the effort accumulates, which is the thing twelve months of satisfaction data has never been able to do then you can link it some money metrics which every CEO loves

Here's the thing, that diagnostic pass tends to be uncomfortable. Not because the friction is new, since your people already know it's there, but because measuring it makes it yours to fix and if you own it exposes by light the flaws in it.

Using EES as a real time metric

Once you've run the diagnostic and started designing against what you found, EES earns its place as a tracking metric.

Re-measure the same services after changes and the score should have moved. If it hasn’t then the redesign addressed the friction HR could see from its side of the process, not the friction the employee actually experiences going through it. That distinction matters more than most redesign efforts acknowledge.

If you turned to your CEO and said "we've reduced the effort cost of our onboarding from a six to a two," that maps directly to productivity, cognitive load, and time recovered across every person who goes through it. Compare that to telling the same CEO your engagement scores went up three points.

One of those numbers creates a real conversation that matters, the other gets just gets a nice nod

Wrap Up

Why hasn’t HR asked this question before?

Well It's not a data problem but more a psychological one.

Satisfaction scores are safe to track because they measure how people feel about a programmes etc after the fact, and there's always somewhere to redirect the accountability when the number is low.

• The design wasn't right.

• The timing was off.

• People weren't ready.

Effort scores don't offer that easy get out, it point directly at interaction or services and says, this service or interaction it cost them this much in effort and frustration

The reality is satisfaction scores let you defend what you built, where effort scores hold you accountable for what it costs people to use it and most functions, when faced with that choice, pick the metric that defends them. Which is exactly why effort scores don't yet exist inside HR all that much and exactly why they're worth introducing.

A high effort score on your onboarding process doesn't mean onboarding is bad. It means it's hard to navigate, and hard to navigate is a design problem with a design solution.

That reframe, from "our programme is working" to "our service costs too much for people to use," is the one that finally connects HR measurement to what the business actually cares about.

There's more to say on measurement and the fuller measurement map framework is coming. But this is the right place to start and a simple place when it comes to measuring a service or interaction

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you

Speak soon,

Danny

P.S. todays article took me around 5hr to write it means alot if you could let me know how it was, if you extra loved it a share goes along long way 👇

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Hey lovely people,

So am back from seeing the parents in Spain, tanned yes, rested not really… I came back to my living room floor completely collapsed… what a time to be alive!

Big shout out to those who filled in the survey on what they would like to see more off and less off in the newsletter

Today’s Focus:

• What happens to leadership when AI doesn't remove people from their roles but drains the purpose out of them

• Which team shapes are most exposed, and why the people you need to worry about aren't the ones about to lose their job

• Five things you can do before the “Great Hollowing” starts

TL;DR: “Human-centric leadership” is everywhere on LinkedIn and nowhere in practice. It start with auditing your team and having the honest talk your team needs about them and the future. As leaders, your roles now is to be a Sherpa and protect them from the hollowing as much as possible

The Great Hollowing

When I first stepped into a leadership role, I lived by three basic rules.

1. Look after their pay.

2. Look after their holidays.

3. Make sure they're covered for development.

Three rules gave me a pretty happy team from the get go, and then it was a case of wrapping a human-centred approach around all of it. I carried those rules for years because they worked. People knew where they stood, you knew where you stood, and the whole thing held together because the basics were solid.

A few years back I wrote a piece called Team Accounting about how to assess the shapes on your team before you invest in capability. I-Shapers, T-Shapers, M-Shapers, X-Shapers, Polymaths. It became one of my most-read pieces, and most of the responses were variations of the same question: which shape should I be developing my leaders toward? That question made sense when I wrote it. Now I'm not so sure.

Because both the old rules and the shapes framework assumed the same thing: that the team has a shared reason to exist, that the people in it find meaning in the work, that leadership is fundamentally about developing humans who are growing, contributing, and building identity through what they do. AI is about to break that assumption for a significant number of your people. And the leadership model has no mechanism for what comes next.

The Great Hollowing

What's coming isn't instant mass redundancy, that's the version everyone is building frameworks for. First will be the harder yet quieter phase…The great hollowing

A majority of CEOs and senior leaders i’ve spoken to all have said in one way or another they are looking at how AI can flatten management layers. Similar to the article shared here

Over half of senior leaders plan to bring autonomous AI agents onto their teams this year. Every one of those decisions runs on the same logic: faster, leaner, cheaper. The addiction to efficiency has been hollowing out people functions for years, stripping texture out of roles in the name of optimisation. All AI has done is feed it the crack it wants.

The roles won't disappear overnight. The people will stay, the titles will stay, but the substance inside the work, the part that gave someone a reason to care about doing it, slowly drains.

• Your I-Shaper built their identity around deep expertise in one lane. When AI commoditises that lane, the person is still employed but the thing that made them feel valuable is gone.

• Your T-Shaper found meaning bridging their depth with curiosity across the team. AI handles that bridging faster and without the politics.

• Your M-Shaper is more protected because genuine depth across multiple disciplines gives them angles that are harder to flatten, but even they feel the ground shift when the domains they've spent years mastering start being synthesised by machines that didn't need decades to get there.

The person is still in the room the contribution that defined them has been quietly reassigned, or compressed in ways nobody prepared them for. Every time a human moment gets automated, a ritual gets cut for efficiency, or a development conversation gets replaced by a form, meaning is leaving the room. What AI does is accelerate that drain to a speed most leadership models were never built to handle.

This is where the leadership crisis actually lives, not in managing AI, but in managing the people whose work just lost its weight.

What the data tells us

The hollowing hasn't arrived in full yet, but the signals are already everywhere. Manager engagement has fallen to 27% globally. Trust in direct managers has dropped from 46% in 2022 to 29% in 2024 according to DDI global leadership forecast yet managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, even though many received limited formal training

These are the people supposed to navigate the most significant shift in what work means in a generation, and most of them have never been taught how to have a conversation about purpose, let alone rebuild it for someone whose role has changed underneath them.

Run a meaning audit…like now

The good news is you don't need to wait for the restructure memo. Take your team list and run a one question audit on each team member simply asking

If AI took the technical output of their role tomorrow, what would they point to as their reason for being here?

If the answer is their expertise, that person is exposed. If the answer is the way they connect ideas, people, or decisions that nobody else connects, they're more protected.

If you can't answer it at all, that's the most honest signal you'll get. This isn't a strategic exercise. It's a five-minute conversation with yourself that changes how you look at every development plan you're currently running.

Map your team shapes

Once you've run the audit, go back to the five shapes and be honest. I-Shapers are most exposed. T-Shapers are partially protected but vulnerable where their bridging role gets automated. M-Shapers are more resilient. X-Shapers are most protected because they operate at the intersection of human and technical contexts. Count how many I-Shapers you have in roles where AI will take the technical core within 18 months. That's your urgency indicator, and it's not for redundancy planning. The people who need you most right now are the ones about to lose the reason they cared, not the ones about to lose the job.

Change the conversation

Now you know who's exposed, you need a different conversation with them. Instead of "what skills do you need to develop?" ask: "what part of your work gives you the strongest sense of identity?" Write down the answer. If AI is about to take that part, you now have a specific, urgent, human problem to work through with that person before it arrives. If AI won't touch it, you've just found the anchor that will hold them through the transition. Most managers have never been trained to have this conversation. It will matter more than any performance review you run for the next five years.

Leadership evolution

Most of the advice circulating right now falls short in the same place. "Leaders need empathy and creativity." "Create Agent Manager roles." "Develop T-shaped leaders." Every one of those recommendations starts from the same assumption: that leadership is fundamentally about managing what people do. When meaning drains from a role, that assumption is already broken.

The leader's job shifts to something more specific: sitting with each person and rebuilding the connection between who they are and what they're still there to do. That means understanding which part of the work still belongs to them, which part has been absorbed, and what new shape their contribution needs to take. That's not a coaching framework. That's a human conversation most managers have never been trained to have, and it matters more right now than anything in the performance management toolkit. The leadership programmes running today are still built around performance conversations and development planning, all of which assume the person across the table has work that matters to them. When that assumption breaks, the entire toolkit breaks with it.

Identify your Xshape leaders now

The leaders best equipped to have these conversations already exist on your bench. They just haven't been identified yet. Who already operates across human and technical contexts? Who reframes problems before the room has finished describing them? Who connects things that shouldn't connect? Those people are your bridge through this transition. Protect them from bureaucracy. Give them the remit to redesign roles around meaning, not just output. If you don't have any, that's the gap to close first, and you won't close it with a workshop.

The honest conversation most leaders wont have

The worst version of this transition is the silent one. Roles quietly emptying out while everyone pretends nothing has changed. Leaders avoiding the conversation because they don't have a tidy answer, and people filling the silence with their own conclusions. Most will conclude that the organisation knows exactly what's happening and simply doesn't care enough to say.

That silence is where culture starts to come apart, not through one dramatic failure but fibre by fibre, as the shared story that held the team together stops making sense. This is how the Culture Thread unravels: not one bad decision, but a thousand small moments where nobody named what was changing, until the gap between the stated experience and the lived one becomes too wide to bridge.

Tell your team whats coming

Name the roles that will change. Acknowledge that you don't have all the answers, but that you're designing the transition together rather than doing it to them. The team that hears "I don't know yet, but here's how we'll figure it out together" will outperform the team that hears nothing until the restructure memo lands. Every single time. If you're the leader reading this, the permission to be honest starts with you.

Wrap Up

Let me be clear, this isn't another end-is-nigh piece about AI. I'm pro AI. Always have been.

What this is about is giving weight to the bullshit LinkedIn posts where people are talking about “human-centric leadership" (bullshit term) and yet shying away from being actually human-centric.

Team Accounting was a diagnostic for where your team is now, but this is about where it goes next. You can map every shape on your team perfectly and still lose the people if nobody is holding the meaning together while the work changes underneath them.

Running the audit will allow you to capture the AI exposure early and get ahead of the wayfinding and development conversations, allowing you to have an honest conversation before the silence does the damage for you.

Your people are going to need you to Sherpa them through the storm and help guide them to finding meaning.

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you Speak soon, Danny

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Hello, or should I say Hola, as I am writing this in sunny Spain. As much as I would love to say am in fully holiday mode, am really not. In fact and helping my parent with their home renovation… DIY Dan here to help

Anyways…

Today’s Focus:

• Why a decent EX budget can still produce flat returns

• Five lenses that change where you spend and what you cut

• Why yesterday's wow becomes today's broken expectation

TL;DR: Five lenses that tell you what to fund first, what to fix, what to cut, and why your wow moments keep dying on arrival.

Our leaking taps

You've got an £800k employee experience budget. Your programmes are running, your team is sharp, your engagement scores sit somewhere between respectable and good.

The team proposes three SPIE’s (Services, Products, Interaction and Experience) A surprise recognition programme. A personalised work anniversary programme. Maybe you paint some car spaces purple for special moments. An HR systems upgrade.

You approve the recognition programme first. Highest emotional impact, best culture story. Then the anniversary programme. The HR systems upgrade gets partial funding.

I've watched this exact thing go down even at board level. The exciting thing wins first because it's the easiest to sell internally. The foundational, often structural, thing gets the scraps because nobody gets promoted for fixing payroll, right. Eight months later, the budget's spent but the return hasn't compounded.

Results review. Engagement scores are flat. HR queries about payroll errors are up 12% with tickets open for six weeks. While 0.0001% of employees are receiving personalised anniversary messages.

The SPIES were good. The sequence was wrong, and the return on that £800k is nothing but a pipe dream.

This is what happens when you treat every investment as if it sits on the same curve. The investment is fine, the sequence is what's killing the return. And there's a framework that shows exactly where.

The Five curves

The reality is not all SPIES are equal weight, even if our individual bias and solution seduction might say they are. They're not.

Our people and customers' needs operate on five fundamentally different satisfaction curves. No, I'm not talking about hierarchy of needs (thank the lord), however once you see them you will overnight start to validate the value and see the sequence of how it should work.

I use five lenses for this. Three tell you what kind of need you're investing in. Two tell you whether to keep it or change it.

Familiar Firsts: are the things employees expect to just work. Payroll, reliable equipment, psychological safety, clarity about what success looks like. Think about taps in a public bathroom. Nobody praises working taps. But non-working taps ruin everything downstream. When these are present, they don't increase satisfaction. They prevent its opposite. The moment payroll breaks, the punishment is immediate and total.

Brilliant Basics: are the next layer: taking those familiar things and making them faster, smoother, more predictable. The tap works, but the water takes five seconds to warm up and the spray is so weak you're basically rinsing one finger at a time. It technically works. You're still frustrated. More responsive HR support, faster onboarding, better quality feedback. More in, more out, up to a point. This is the lever most People teams pull first because it makes sense on a slide and it feels like progress. The problem is it feels like progress even when the familiar firsts underneath are falling apart.

Micro Wows: are the unexpected things above standard. The taps work great, the water's warm, and now there's a shelf above the splash zone where you can rest your phone. You didn't expect it. You didn't need it. But it made you smile. These are the surprise recognition moments, the gestures that cost little but mean a lot. They create the stories people tell at dinner. Which is exactly why they get funded first.

Here's where the sequence breaks down, even in organisations that are investing well. The employee feels the recognition, then hits a payroll error, and the delight is wiped out instantly. A purple car space means nothing when you can't trust the number on your payslip.

Each curve responds to investment differently, and treating all three identically is the reason most People budgets generate activity without the return compounding.

What happens over time

Micro Wows don't stay Micro Wows. They decay into Brilliant Basics, then into Familiar Firsts. This is what most organisations miss entirely.

Free hotel WiFi was a genuine Micro Wow in 2010. Now it's a Familiar First. If it's absent, you're furious. The curve changed completely, and most organisations never update their budgets to reflect the shift. They're still funding yesterday's wow at yesterday's prices while it quietly becomes an expectation that generates zero edge.

The same thing happens inside organisations. The flexible working policy that felt groundbreaking three years ago is now table stakes. The wellbeing app that wowed at launch is now expected infrastructure (to be fair it's probably still not being used). All of these are now a Familiar First, and removing them triggers fury. When did you last go wow when someone said you have access to Headspace? Offer them Netflix instead and you'll get a bigger wow moment. I remember a conversation with a CPO who said "why don't we give our people a swimming pool?" Because it'll be like your gym, a dead zone. Wow can be led with good intent but still not be wow.

This is the treadmill. You have to continuously innovate your Micro Wows because yesterday's wow becomes today's broken expectation. But you can't run a treadmill on a cracked foundation, because nothing compounds when the familiar firsts aren't solid.

Where the use actually is

Get Familiar Firsts wrong and nothing else lands. I've seen organisations pour millions into recognition platforms while their people can't get a straight answer about how their own pay and reward scheme works. As useful as a chocolate teapot.

Brilliant Basics are worth funding, after the familiar firsts pass the threshold. The mistake is treating them as the starting point rather than the second floor.

Micro Wows create the stories people tell at dinner. Worth designing for. They just can't carry the whole experience on their own.

The last two lenses are about what to cut and what to open up.

Feature or Flaw. Before your next budget cycle, audit every initiative with one question: is this actually improving the experience, or did we add it thinking it would? Think about a motion-sensor tap that only activates when you wave at it from the wrong angle. Someone designed it thinking it was an upgrade and a cost saving, and instead you're stood there flapping like a tasered pigeon only to give up and use the thing they want you to stop using, the paper towels. In EX terms, the mandatory engagement platform nobody asked for, the wellness initiative that creates more admin than relief. If it's not landing, strip it out. Run this check quarterly.

Pick on Purpose. When designing any programme, ask: are we giving people one route or a choice? One tap, one temperature, one pressure, everybody gets the same water whether they wanted warm or cold. Put a mixer tap in and the person controls the experience. Same cost, completely different outcome. Create choice. Not unlimited, but enough that people feel personalisation rather than compliance. Apply this at the design stage, not after launch.

The reality is, most HR budgets still go to Brilliant Basics and Micro Wows while Familiar Firsts are inconsistently met. Psychological safety differs wildly by team. Equipment doesn't work. What counts as success is ambiguous.

Where do people actually leave? They leave where they didn't feel safe, where pay was unfair, where they couldn't do their job with basic resources. Nobody has ever resigned because the anniversary card wasn't personalised enough. They leave because the taps didn't work this is where Experience Leak lives.

Here's how to sort any initiative into the right curve.

Here's the measurement problem, A 6/10 on a Familiar First is catastrophic, it means 40% of your people are experiencing broken 101 fundamentals.

A 7/10 on a Micro Wow is fine. The same number means completely different things, and most measurement systems can't tell the difference.

Wrap Up

Map every SPIE to its curve. Run the removal question. If people would be angry because something they depend on just broke, that's a Familiar First. Fund it before anything else touches a slide deck.

Check for features that became flaws. Strip them. Build in choice where it matters. And stop funding yesterday's wow at today's prices.

A wow moment built on unreliable familiar firsts is just a very well-designed disappointment.

Every budget cycle is a sequencing decision. Get the sequence right and the return compounds. Get it wrong and you're decorating a building with dodgy plumbing.

Fix the taps first.

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you

Speak soon,

Danny

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Hello Hello…

Happy Bank holiday Monday (and the sun is out)

Grab a coffee (or tea) for this one as it long, today we are looking at why your values aren't landing, and why communicating harder will never fix it.

TL;DR: Values don't fail because they're wrong, they fail because nobody designed them to be lived and felt.

Veneer Values

I was on a call with someone who'd just been handed a culture programme. Four behaviours crafted by leadership before he arrived. His job was to "make them land" across the organisation. He read me the first one. "Act with ownership." I asked him what the other three were. He laughed and said…Vanilla, vanilla, vanilla, vanilla.

He wasn't being cynical, just accurate. He'd been in enough organisations to know what happens next. The values get printed, they get put on everyone's screensaver, get mentioned in a big town hall supported by lots of nodding heads.

Then Monday morning arrives and nobody behaves any differently, because nothing about the experience of those values ever touched them…at all.

I've sat across from enough CPOs and People Directors to know this is one of the most common frustrations in the building. You've got values, principles or what not. They're on the wall, in the handbook, on the careers page. They sound right, they probably are right to be fair and yet nobody gives a shit about them.

In my experience most employees can't name their values, let alone share how the values align to them on any given day.

The instinct that makes it worst

The instinct is to communicate harder with better comms, maybe even a quick leadership alignment session or a values ambassador programme if you're really going for it.

None of it works, the Edelman Trust Barometer has been telling us for years that employees don't believe what their employers tell them. You're trying to “tell” people into caring about something they've never felt, and they've already stopped listening..

What feeling a value looks like

I once worked with a tech scale up. They had a set of principles, one of which was "Own The Mistakes." A good principle that nobody lived. After running a diagnostic across the org, one of the friction markers was "value veneer," people walking past the poster saying own the mistake to go and blame someone else.

So we rented a space, put cameras everywhere and invited all the leaders and put them into mini squads.

In each station was a little envelope which simply said, bake a cake with the ingredients laid out, your ovens are already heated, your timer starts now.

What we didn't tell them was that we'd swapped some ingredients. Self-raising flour gone, one egg instead of two. Every cake was going to fail, not because anyone messed up, because the conditions made success impossible.

And then we watched.

The second a cake didn't rise, the blame started. "Bob, you didn't put the flour in." "That was your fault, you put it in too early." Instant and reflexive, nobody paused. Nobody said, "Hang on, maybe the conditions are the problem." They just pointed fingers, because that's what stress does when accountability hasn't been felt.

Then once the timers stopped and the blame hit its peak, we got each person to write down in an envelope who was to blame. Nobody would see it but them. Then we played back the videos. Told them the truth, that nobody was ever going to succeed because the ingredients were rigged. The room went quiet. We asked them to open their envelope, for their eyes only.

This was the moment. This is where they could see themselves doing the exact thing the principle was supposed to prevent.

They saw the gap between who they thought they were and how they behaved when conditions got hard. That's behaviour change through designed experience. And that silence did more for accountability than any workshop or toolkit ever could.

That's what I call the difference between intending a value and living it. Most values programmes operate entirely at the level of intention.

Here's the value, here's what it means, crack on. But intention without a why is wallpaper.

The missing layer

Micro experience design is often the missing layer. Instead of real experience design many orgs opt for BS team-building days, escape rooms or trust falls. Fun, absolutely, but designed to make someone live the behaviour the value describes, they are not.

I've seen this work with communication values too. Get two strangers, put them in a space that strips away the professional armour, armed with a few real human questions like:

• What's the thing you're most proud of that nobody here knows about?

• What did you want to be when you grew up, what stopped you?

• What's the one thing the young version of you would be so proud of you for right now?

The value you spent six months trying to cascade through toolkits happened in six minutes because the environment did the work. You didn't teach communication. You built a moment where communication was the only thing that could happen.

These don't have to be big production moments. During Covid, I ran a little experience for my LinkedIn network. Ten people, no brief, just click the link. They cracked a code, picked a number, gave me their address. Something arrived at their door. A pottery kit, a paint set, a pink flamingo. Because it wasn't about the object, it was about the feeling of someone going, here, I thought about you. Experience design doesn't need a big space and hundreds of leaders.

Sometimes it just needs a pink flamingo and the right question

The two tests your values are probs failing

There's a simple test you can run right now.

1. Remove the company badge from your values

2. Read the value out loud, could any company in your industry say the same thing?

If yes, what you have isn't a value. It's a generic sentence your competitors are also saying. "Act with ownership," "act with integrity," "put people first." All corporate bullshit and marketing. I once remember working for a large HR director who summarised their values as propaganda. He was dead right. Your people know it, which is why they nod politely and carry on doing whatever they were doing before.

Second test is more brutal simply ask:

If this value disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice?

If no, or not until performance time then it's nice to have. And nice to have is the death of culture, because nice to have means optional, and optional means invisible.

Values as a subscription

When I talk about experience of work as a subscription, values are the currency, because your culture is the thing people subscribe to when they choose to stay. The reason someone thinks twice before taking the competitor's offer. But if your values could belong to anyone, if removing them would change nothing, there's nothing worth staying for. An extra hundred quid a month and your values won't even enter the conversation.

This isnt a solo HR/PX problem

When your values are wallpaper, you haven't just got a culture problem. You've got a strategy problem. Values are supposed to be a lens for how you make decisions, set direction, and hold a transformation together when things get messy. When nobody feels them, nobody uses them. Your strategy has no thread running through it. Every transformation becomes a set of instructions people follow until the pressure hits, then they default to whatever they were doing before. Values that live on a wall can't hold anything together, but values that live in the experience of your people can hold everything together and be used to hold each other to account in all directions.

So what can you actually do?

Stop communicating values and start deconstructing them. Take "act with ownership." Start with the word. What does "act" look like? What is "ownership," what does it look like, how does it show up, what words live inside it?

Responsibility, follow-through, initiative, accountability. All building blocks hiding inside one word that nobody has ever unpacked for the people expected to live it.

Now take it across someone's whole life, the full version of them, their "work self" and their "weekend self." What does ownership look like personally?

Imagine your child is watching you. How would you demonstrate it as a role model? It might look like keeping the promise you made, even when it's inconvenient. Being the one who says "I got that wrong" before anyone else has to point it out. In your family life, picking up the thing that's been sitting there for a week because it's yours to deal with. Now professionally. Stepping into the gap when something falls between teams. Saying "that's mine" when nobody's assigned it yet. Completely different behaviours attached to the same word. If you hand someone one word and expect them to live all of that without ever pulling it apart, you're dreaming.

Take it even further

How does ownership shift when the situation and state changes? A manager who's calm, rested, and backed by their team will show ownership one way. That same manager under restructure pressure, half their team gone and a board presentation on Friday, will show it completely differently, or won't show it at all.

The value hasn't changed but the situation and state have, and that gap is where leadership hypocrisy comes from. Leaders aren't liars. Nobody designed for what happens to the value when the pressure changes. When your senior team drops the behaviour the moment things get hard, everyone else sees it. And the cynicism that follows isn't about wrong values, it's about unsupported ones.

Then thread it into everything. How does this value shape the questions you ask in interviews? How does it show up in onboarding, in performance reviews, in how you handle someone's first mistake, in how someone re-enters the building after maternity leave? The value can't live in a handbook. It has to be woven into how you hire, how you develop, how you recognise, how you let someone go. Attraction through to exit. If it's not threaded through your value chains, it's not part of the experience. It's floating above it.

I've run strategy workshops where we spent hours identifying and validating values then threading them into the strategy as a lens for direction. Mapping them into the value chains so they show up in how the business operates. Without that work you're asking people to live something that has no structural home.

And the experience has to come before the toolkit. Someone builds a beautiful set of resources and nobody uses them, because there's no emotional weight behind the thing the resource supports. Design the feeling first and the resource follows.

Wrap Up

If your people can't feel it, they can't live it. And if they can't live it, you're just decorating walls and honestly they painter and decorators can do a better job

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you Speak soon, Danny

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Hey,

Hello beautiful wonderful people, I thought I would change up the day of sending this week as a few mentioned it gets lost in their inbox on a Monday.

Today's focus:

• Why your measurement captures every interaction but misses the layer that drives commitment

• The subscription test that reveals which programmes your people would cancel tomorrow

• Where the leaks hide between your steady-state design and your people's actual reality

TL;DR: Experience Leak is what happens when organisations design for process and strip out everything that makes the experience worth subscribing to. This piece explains where it comes from, how to spot it, and what it's actually costing you.

Your Experience Leak

Most people teams are measuring more than they ever have before, be it sentiment surveys, lifecycle listening, pulse checks, social and ambient listening. Some even do one-question feedback loops after every HR process.

• How was your check-in?

• How did it feel to give feedback?

• How was your onboarding?

With all of this data, most HR still can't tell the board exactly where their people's commitment breaks, or where revenue is lost from a PX point of view. They can tell you how people felt about the feedback process, but whether the experience of transformation and growth is actually happening, whether someone is becoming more capable, more connected, or more certain they're in the right place, that's a completely different question.

Every one of those questions measures the interaction, not the experience. A specific moment, a single touchpoint, a process in isolation. The layer that actually drives commitment sits underneath all of it and is completely unwatched.

Engagement surveys capture sentiment at a moment in time and are at best a rear-view mirror insight. An employee can feel generally positive about their job and simultaneously be losing trust in the system that runs it. Those two things coexist right up until they don't, and the survey catches the first one while missing the second entirely.

HR can point to engagement scores and say "people are satisfied." But satisfaction isn't the same as commitment. Satisfaction means "I'm not actively unhappy." Commitment means "I'd choose this place again." The gap between those two is where your best people quietly disengage, stop volunteering for stretch projects, stop referring friends, stop investing discretionary effort. They're still employed, but they're no longer thriving.

Your people are subscribing and unsubscribing every day

Since 2019 I've been thinking about people experience the way a product company thinks about subscriptions. Your employees are subscribing to the experience you give them, every single day. Your strategy, your products, your interactions, your experiences and services, all of it is a value exchange between the business and its people, and yes while pay matters we are no longer in the 1950s. Pay is more just the price of entry to join, not the reason why they stay.

The real question is whether the experience is something people would actively choose to keep subscribing to daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. Here's a simple reframe for you:

• If your people had to pay for your leadership programme, how much would they subscribe for?

• If they could unsubscribe from your performance review process, would they?

• If your wellbeing app was a personal subscription instead of a company perk, would they pay for it out of their own money?

The programmes they'd unsubscribe from tomorrow morning are your leaks. You're spending money on things that aren't creating enough value for anyone to choose them freely. Most HR will never admit on record that they have built an entire portfolio of programmes that look right on paper, score fine in surveys, and would survive all of about thirty seconds if employees had an unsubscribe button or had to pay out of their own pocket.

Congratulations.

You just built the world's most efficient way for people to not give a shit.

People don't often leave organisations in one dramatic moment, unless it's something pretty horrific. Often they just get fed up of living Groundhog Day and slowly but surely stop feeling the value exchange between them and the business until one day they decide to cancel the subscription and the resignation comes in hot.

Their reason to stay is the sum of value they get across five layers of the experience: the strategy behind it, the products built for them, the interactions they have every day, the experiences that shape how they feel, and the services that hold it all together. When that sum drops, or when another employer offers more of the one thing that matters most to them, they switch. And most of the time, what pulls them across isn't a bigger salary but the one part of the experience you stopped investing in because nobody was measuring it.

There's a version of this that's even harder to spot. Silent attrition, the employees who haven't left but have stopped investing anything beyond the minimum. By every metric they're fine, but they stopped renewing the emotional subscription months ago. When someone finally offers them something that re-ignites the spark, they leave, and the organisation is genuinely surprised because every indicator said they were engaged. Being present and being engaged are two very different subscriptions, and most organisations can't tell the difference between them.

Your Experience Leak

The measurement gap, the silent attrition, the programmes nobody would pay to keep, they're all symptoms of the same structural failure. I call it Experience Leak. Experience Leak is what happens when an organisation over-designs for process, doesn't see their culture as a collection of value-compounding SPIES, and strips out everything that makes the experience worth subscribing to.

Every leaked moment is a renewal point your people didn't choose to come back from. Experience Leak is revenue leak. It happens in three ways: through what you're not measuring, through what you're not designing for, and through situations and states you never built to flex for.

Plug the leak in the experience and you plug the leak in the P&L. Replacement spend, productivity drag from people who are present but have stopped investing, the premium you're paying to hire because your reputation is slipping, all of it traces back to an experience nobody would choose to subscribe to. Most organisations have never added those numbers up, which is exactly why the people strategy and the business strategy keep talking past each other.

And here's the part that should keep people leaders awake. There's a 35 to 40 point perception gap between what leaders think they're delivering and what employees actually feel. That gap is the subscription illusion: the organisation believes the experience is earning loyalty because the metrics are green, while the workforce has already mentally cancelled and is waiting for a better offer to land in their inbox. Only 32% of employees trust their engagement survey accurately captures how they feel. The instrument designed to catch the leak is leaking too.

Where the leaks open

There's something around how we design experiences that most people strategies miss entirely, and it has to do with situations rather than steady states. Your system is built for the default version of someone. A new hire on day one is in one state. That same person on day 21, when they still don't know who to ask when something goes wrong, is in a completely different state with completely different needs.

Your experience only knows how to handle the steady version. The moment reality shifts and the experience can't shift with it, the subscription lapses.

When I ran a diagnostic at a previous client, everyone assumed onboarding was the problem. It wasn't great, but the real experience leak was happening between day 12 and day 37, in the gap between the induction ending and the person actually feeling like they belonged somewhere. Nobody had designed for that situation because nobody was looking at it.

That's what I call a Friction Market, an unserved situation where the current experience doesn't flex for the reality someone is actually in. Your competitors haven't found theirs either, which means every one of those gaps is an edge waiting to be claimed.

Your strategy needs a new subscription lens

This is where most people strategies get stuck. You spot a leak and fix a programme: better onboarding, a new wellbeing initiative, a revamped performance process. Each one solves the thing it was designed to solve, and the experience still leaks because the fixes were never designed to work as a system.

Your people strategy is a subscription architecture where every layer either compounds value or quietly drains it. Treat it as a collection of programmes sharing a budget and the leaks keep opening.

I use a framework called SPIES to map these layers: Subscription Strategy, Product, Interaction, Experience, and Service. Every organisation delivers all five whether they realise it or not, and every one of them is a renewal point in the subscription. Most measurement sits at the Interaction layer. The other four go completely unwatched. Fix one renewal point in the right place, where the subscription is actually lapsing, and the value compounds across the whole system. Chase the wrong fix and you pour resource into a programme that was never the real problem, just the most visible one.

The subscription lens forces you to stop auditing individual programmes and start designing a portfolio that earns its place across all five layers. Map your current people strategy against those five layers and be honest about how much of it is process and programmes, and how much of it is a subscription people would actively choose to keep paying for.

Pick your highest-investment programme, ask a cross-section of people inside it the subscription questions, and let their answers tell you what your strategy is actually worth.

Wrap Up

This week's wrap up is pretty simple, pick your highest-investment programme, ask a cross-section of people inside it the subscription questions, and let their answers tell you what your strategy is actually worth.

If the number makes you uncomfortable, you've found your first leak.

Speak soon,

Danny

The Insightful Innovator: How to level up your PX using product thinking

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Hey amazing people,

I'm writing this full of man flu and yes, before you say anything, it's absolutely a real thing. Women just call it a cold. Anyway, let's get into it. This one's a longer read, but its one ive been building toward for seven years.

Today's focus:

• Why being right seven years early can feel like being wrong

• The system problem hiding behind a $438 billion number

• 7 Red flags your HR/PX strategy is already cooked

TL;DR
People experience has always been a system problem, not a content or programme problem. Your people are subscribing to the experience of work, and every SPIES touchpoint is a renewal moment. This piece includes 7 red flags and 5 assumptions to check whether the system problem is already inside your organisation

Cassandras Curse

2019 What I saw coming

It's 2019. Organisations are pouring money into engagement platforms, learning content, and shiny employee experience projects. The language is optimistic, the intent is good, and nobody is doing any of it badly on purpose.

And I'm saying something far less comfortable.

The reason employee experience and L&D keep underdelivering has nothing to do with effort or intent, it's that organisations are designing for the wrong problem entirely. They're investing in content consumption, training sessions, and programmes using the same capabilities that got them here in the first place. The puzzle they're trying to solve has always been a system problem dressed up as a content problem, and it's only going to get more complex.

What they actually needed was a completely different lens to look at the experience of work and HR, one that looked at Strategy, Products, Interactions, Experiences, and Services, what I call SPIES. Design, product, and system thinking wrapped around a skillset based in experience and services design. The kind of ownership that comes from treating people's time as something worth designing for, not just filling.

If you were working in people strategy back then, you might remember the feeling. Something about the direction didn't sit right, but the language to challenge it didn't exist yet. A handful of people could see it. Most couldn't. That was the position I found myself in

The curse

There's a story from Troy most people know loosely. Cassandra was given the gift of seeing the future clearly. When she refused Apollo's advances, he cursed it: she would still see what was coming, but no one would ever believe her. When the Trojan Horse appeared at the gates, she warned them. When the city was about to fall, she warned them again. Nobody listened. They smiled, reassured themselves, and brought the horse inside.

She was right the whole time, and it made no difference.

That's a particular kind of lonely, the kind that comes from being right before anyone is ready to hear it. Being early doesn't look like insight from the outside, it looks like noise. And if you've ever sat in a leadership meeting knowing the strategy was solving for the wrong layer while everyone else nodded along, you know exactly what that feels like.

Those who listened in 2019 are ahead of the industry now.

Those who didn't launched the programmes, rolled out the platforms, created the content and unknowingly watched the horse make its way inside the city.

Its now 2026

Fast forward to 2026.

The horse is inside the building

If you've been investing in people strategy, people transformation, and employee experience for the past few years, you already know something isn't landing the way it should. The investment went in and the programmes launched, and yet the managers most organisations rely on are overloaded and stuck in a loop where every initiative adds complexity without removing friction. Purpose isn't missing because nobody talks about it, it's missing because the system around it was never designed to hold it.

Here's the thing most organisations still haven't grasped: people experience works like a subscription. Your people are subscribing to the experience of work. Every product, interaction, service, and experience across your PX/HR strategy is a renewal moment, a point where someone either quietly recommits or quietly disengages. People don't leave organisations in one dramatic moment. They stop renewing, one broken interaction at a time, and nobody notices until the pattern is already set.

The consequences are showing up in the numbers, poor experience and engagement across the organisation is showing up as an estimated $438 billion in lost productivity not because anyone stopped caring, but because the backstage systems that hold the people experience together were never built to match what the frontstage promised to customers, clients, and guests.

I've been running this work for seven years because nothing else was solving for the system layer, and that's still where the gap is. If you're a CPO or CHRO who's invested heavily and still watching the same patterns repeat, the issue probably isn't your people strategy itself, it's that nobody designed for what breaks it under pressure.

Seven red flags your cooked and the horse is already inside

You might not even need a full experience audit to see this, though what a proper diagnostic reveals usually runs deeper than anyone expects. If you recognise three or more of these in your organisation right now, the system problem is already visible.

1. Your managers can describe what they deliver but not why it matters to the people going through it. The operational layer is running, but nobody can articulate the experience it's supposed to create or the value it adds in terms of the time people are giving you.

2. Every new initiative adds a layer but nothing gets removed. Your people strategy has become an archaeology dig, and the teams on the ground are buried in it. None of it is aligned on a value chain, and nothing compounds because each initiative sits in isolation rather than building on the last.

3. Your engagement survey says one thing, your exit interviews say something completely different, or nothing at all. The measurement is capturing satisfaction, not the actual experience of work.

4. You've redesigned onboarding in the last two years and the first 90-day attrition rate hasn't moved. The programme changed, but the system around it didn't. New starters are still scoring their team experience low, which means the lived experience around them stayed exactly the same.

5. People across the business can name your values but not a single moment where those values shaped a hard decision. The culture thread is on the wall, not in the work.

6. Your transformation hit every milestone, yet the people it was designed for can barely remember it and was never part of the designing it. Delivery was complete, and the experience was forgettable by design and your people say nothing changed

7. When things go wrong, the system has no way to recover gracefully. The process was designed for the steady state, and real life isn't steady.

If you're sitting at four or five, that's the first punch…Now here's the second.

Why those flags exist, five assumptions keeping you stuck

The red flags above are symptoms, these are the assumptions underneath your strategy that are producing them. If any of these sound like how your organisation still operates, the system problem goes deeper than the symptoms suggest.

1. You still count headcount, not subscription health. Your planning and measurement architecture treats people as capacity to be filled. Workforce planning asks "how many do we need" rather than "how many are actively choosing us, and what does their renewal behaviour look like across every touchpoint."

2. Your value exchange is still time for money. The implicit contract says: give us your hours, we'll give you a salary. Everything else, culture, development, purpose, career, sits on top as a perk rather than being the core product your people are subscribing to. But if experience is a subscription, the product IS the experience of work, and pay is just one component of the value delivery.

3. You treat loyalty as a pay problem. When someone leaves, the first question is "did we pay enough?" Real subscriber loyalty looks more like superfans, people who stay because the total value delivery across every SPIES touchpoint compounds into something they can't replicate elsewhere. Pay plus purpose plus the quality of every product, interaction, service, and experience they touch.

4. You still talk about "the business" and "employees" as two separate audiences. But a CPO's people strategy IS a business strategy. The people subscribing to the experience of work are the same system that delivers the experience to your external customers. Two subscribers, one system, and the failures underneath are identical.

5. You measure with traditional KPIs instead of building a measurement engine. Engagement scores and annual attrition rates instead of something closer to how product teams measure their subscribers: Lifetime Experience Value, activation rates, renewal signals, churn prediction, and experience quality across every SPIES touchpoint. The measurement infrastructure most PX teams rely on belongs in a different era.

If the first set of flags showed you what's breaking, this set shows you why. The system problem isn't just operational, it's conceptual. The model most organisations are using to think about people experience was built for a world that no longer exists.

Wrap Up

well done you made it to the end

If you've made it this far, you're probably not someone who needs convincing that the problem exists. You've felt it. You might have been saying it yourself for years and getting the same polite nods Cassandra got.

What changes from here is what I'm writing about and who I'm writing it for. This newsletter is going to go deeper on the strategy and transformation layer that sits underneath people experience, and the capabilities needed to actually deliver it. The SPIES lens, the subscription model, the diagnostic tools, and the thinking needed to build teams and functions that can do this work, not just understand it.

If you're a CPO, CHRO, CEO, or people leader who's invested in transformation and knows something still isn't landing, this is where that conversation happens.

The smoke was visible in 2019 and it is now, the question now is whether you’re still reassuring yourself the horse is a gift

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you Speak soon, Danny

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Hey,

Today is about something I call HR Cancel Culture the slow, quiet way systems neutralise every new CPO or CHRO who walks in with the right thinking. This is based purely on my experience of helping new CPOs, CHROs, and heads of people try to drive real people experience transformation, and watching them hit the wall of the old guard.

Today's focus:

• Why the 1% can't beat the 90%

• The 1 / 9 / 90 problem and why most transformations fail

• How virus logic changes what argument never can

TL;DR: Stop trying to convince the system, Instead you need to infiltrate it with people who think outside it. One person operating with outcome logic beats fifty trying to convince through argument

The system didnt fail you, the numbers did

A CPO I know had already done the hard part. She'd mapped the function, built the business case, redesigned the operating model, and got the board behind a full people experience transformation. The thinking was right. The skill set was real. The ambition matched the mandate.

Within ten months, the system had cancelled her out completely.

Not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the board lost faith. Because she was one person with the right thinking surrounded by the 90% running the old one, and the function did what it always does: waited, absorbed, and outlasted her. She didn't lose the argument. She never got to have it.

The 1 / 9 / 90 Problem

Here's the maths nobody talks about. In any HR function going through people product, experience transformation.. roughly:

• 1% have the right thinking,

• 9% could be moved

• 90% are running the old logic.

The 1% can't change the 90% directly, that's the mistake almost every CPO makes. The 1% changes the 9%, and the 9% changes the 90%.

Most CPOs walk in believing they can skip the middle step and convince the 90% directly. They assume that if the vision is clear enough, the argument strong enough, the deck compelling enough, the organisation will move.

It won't and it doesnt

What they walk into isn't a function waiting to be transformed, It's a system built over years to protect itself, because the people inside it built their careers, budgets, titles, and identities around the current model.

Leaders in their own bubbles, teams measuring their own scores.

The 90% are protecting the thing that gives them relevance, safety, and power, and most of them don't even realise they're doing it. Every silo has its own definition of value and its own reasons why the old way still makes sense. The reporting lines, the KPIs, the job descriptions all reinforce the same logic, so even the people who want to change get pulled back by the structure they sit in. The nodding heads in the meeting is agreement its patience

The instinct that keeps failing

The instinct is to convince…more meetings, better decks, bigger vision statements, stronger business cases.

But you can't argue a system out of rules it built to survive. You can't outargue a function whose entire identity, budget, and power structure depends on staying exactly as it is.

❝

You can't be angry with a function that produces what it was built to produce. The system is running on the inputs it was given. - The Insightful Innovator

This is HR cancel culture at its most costly. Using the same language, the same frameworks, the same change playbook that the old guard already knows how to handle. The old thinking knows how to absorb the old approach. What it doesn't know how to handle is something it's never encountered before.

Flood the system with thinking it cant absorb

The flood that changes things is never more HR expertise or another change programme, it's thinking the function has no existing language for.

Here's the thing most CPOs get wrong about the 9%. They try to convert the people already in the function. More training, more offsites, more workshops on "thinking differently." It rarely works, because you're asking people to unlearn the very thing that got them hired and promoted.

In practice, you've got three routes to building your 9%.

Bend talent from other functions into the people team, pulling in product thinkers or CX minds from elsewhere in the business. That works, but it's hard because the situational shift is enormous and most people underestimate it.

Build it through capability uplift, which means intensive work with existing leaders to rewire how they think. I've done this with C-suites and trust me anyone who says this is doable in a a 3 day course is selling you snake oil. Based on my experience of doing this many times now, You looking at weeks of structure deep work and coaching depending on how deep the shift needs to go.

Buy it by hiring from outside, bringing in people with the thinking and skill set already baked in. However finding these unicorns are hard, and when you do find them the first thing you do is put them into a traditional HR interview then scratch your head as to why they dont make it in.

They is also Bot, but thats one for another day

What you need is product thinkers who frame every problem around what the person actually needs. Experience strategists who measure whether something changed someone, if it time save, spent or invested not whether it had bums on seats. CX minds and service designers who see the end-to-end system instead of the silo they sit in. Business model and adaptive strategy thinkers who connect people strategy to commercial outcomes.

These people don't speak the old language because their disciplines never taught it. They measure by what actually changes, not what the function produces, and that is what the old guard cannot fight.

Think of it as a language.

The 1% speaks a different language and the function ignores it. But when the 1% brings in outside thinkers who speak that same language, the 9% starts picking it up. In meetings, in deliverables, in the way they frame problems.

When the 9% is fluent, the 90% starts hearing it everywhere. That's when the old language starts to sound like the past.

The old guard has been absorbing internal challenge for years. They smile, agree in the meeting, and quietly strangle it in the corridor. That's why your 9% has to come from outside, from people who have never worked inside a people function.

They don't arrive with a change agenda or political history. They have no existing enemies, no favours to repay, no history the old guard can use against them. They just operate differently, and without realising it, the people around them start to shift.

This is the virus logic.

A virus doesn't argue with the host, doesn't present a business case, and doesn't ask for permission. It replicates until the system is running different code. The old guard can't neutralise it because it didn't emerge from inside the system. It has no history to attack. It spreads because it works, not because it was sold.

The function never got convinced, it just woke up one morning speaking a different language.

What the CPO actually does

It starts with the new CPO sharing the direction and having the hard conversations nobody else will have. Sometimes that means ring-fencing a dedicated people transformation team that operates outside the old rules entirely.

The shift that follows starts with mindset and capability. Once you start measuring in experience, services, and products, business value linked to strategy becomes visible. The old logic can't get you to the new world, and that becomes obvious to everyone, not just the 1%.

You're not trying to convince the 90%, you're building the 9% through bending, building, or buying the right thinking into the function, then letting the 9% carry it into every room you'll never be in.

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you Speak soon, Danny

FAQ

Q: Why do most people transformation programmes fail?
A: Most people transformation programmes fail because they attempt to change a system using the same language and playbook the system already knows how to neutralise. The old guard agrees in the meeting and quietly strangles the initiative in the corridor. The approach fails not because the thinking is wrong but because it's delivered in a form the function has learned to absorb.

Q: What is the 1 / 9 / 90 problem in people transformation?
A: In any function going through transformation, roughly 1% have the right thinking, 9% could be moved, and 90% are running the old logic. The 1% surrounded by the 90% loses every time, not because they're outargued but because they're outnumbered. The system waits, absorbs, and outlasts. The fix is the 1% focusing on the 9%, building a critical mass of different thinking that then shifts the 90%.

Q: What is Best Practice Blindness and HR Cancel culture?
A: Best Practice Blindness is using the same change language, frameworks, and playbooks the old guard already knows how to neutralise. When you frame a transformation challenge in HR terms, you hand the existing system something familiar to absorb. The fix is thinking the function has no existing language for: product thinking, experience design, CX logic.

Q: What does outcome over output mean in an HR context?
A: Traditional people functions measure outputs: programmes delivered, content produced, policies written. Outcomes measure what actually changed. When you bring people into the function who measure what changed rather than what was produced, the gap between busy activity and real impact becomes visible. You can't unsee that gap once it's in the room.

Q: How does virus logic work in organisational transformation?
A: A virus doesn't present a business case. It enters the system and replicates until the system is running different code. One person thinking in outcomes, situations, and design enters the function. Someone nearby picks up the language, then another, then another. The old guard can't neutralise it because it didn't emerge from inside the system. It has no political history to attack. It spreads because it works.

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Today I want to share something I've been writing about in my knowledge base for a while. Fair warning: I've tried to condense about 6,000 words into something readable, hopefully the only thing that got lost in the process is the waffle.

Today's focus:

• Friction Markets. The decisive moments inside every experience where someone's actual state meets the organisation's response and why hidden growth lives here.

• State Shifts. When someone's internal condition changes and your experience can't flex with them, causes experience leak opens.

• Opportunity Markets. The unidentified situations revealing themselves through friction, where people have recurring needs nobody is serving because nobody noticed the situation existed.

• Experience Leak. The silent loss of memory and meaning that compounds when organisations design for efficiency instead of experience.

TL;DR

Friction Markets are the moments of tension already inside your experience, the situational shifts and states nobody's designed for. Inside them sits invisible growth and an edge that's genuinely hard to copy. The organisations that win stop designing for personas and start designing for the situations and states people are actually in.

Friction Factor

Last week Wix charged me £611 for a two-year renewal on a site I hadn't used in months. My domain had moved, there was no traffic, and an advisor agreed to refund it. Eight hours later, a policy team overruled him.

To recover some cost, I worked around the system and downgraded. They kept roughly £200 for a product I wasn't using. When I asked to delete my account, I was told it couldn't happen until 2028. After four rounds, they agreed as a "goodwill" exception.

Wix filed to identify my Situation and State and ultimate lost a growth opportuntity

I wasn't just a customer leaving I was in a situation transitioning away, my circumstances had changed and my needs had evolved from what they were offering.

I was in a state: frustrated, undervalued, wanting a clean exit. That situation and that state combination describe a unidentified and real market. Customers in transition who need help moving on, white-glove offboarding, graceful exit support, a service that turns a churn moment into a loyalty moment.

Instead, Wix lost a customer permanently, extracted £200 from someone they had already lost, and missed an entire hot spot in the process

That's Experience and revenue Leak and its finest all from a single moment they couldn't read.

The dangerous assumptions buried in modern business

Buried deep in the way most organisations operate is an assumption that has quietly become a belief…friction equals waste.

If friction is waste then meaning is waste, and if effort is failure then growth is failure.

Think about it, A relationship with no tension has no honesty, a trip with no uncertainty has no lasting story, and an education with no challenge has no real transformation.

Friction isn't the opposite of good experience It's one of the mechanisms that gives experience weight. The problem isn't friction itself it the fact most organisations can't tell the difference between the kind that destroys value and the kind that creates it, so they sheep dip the shit out of it and remove it all.

Bad friction is real, terrible returns processes, phone tree loops that make you want to throw your phone, a first day at work where nobody knew you were coming all these need to be removed without hesitation.

But there's another kind of friction, the kind that makes someone pause, lean in and pay attention. A moment of vulnerability where a service provider responds with something warm and off-script or a moment of cultural stretch where a traveller encounters something unfamiliar and feels their world expand. A moment of truth where an employee sees how an organisation handles pressure and decides whether to do whats right or be right.

These moments are uncomfortable and they can't be automated, and they are the moments people remember, not because they were pleasant, but because they were real.

What are Friction Markets?

Friction Markets are the decisive moments inside every experience where someone's actual state meets the organisation's response.

A state is the mindset, condition, or emotional reality someone is in right now. It’s where a confident traveller becomes jet-lagged and anxious, or when an engaged employee survives a restructure and quietly reassesses everything or in my case a hobbyist customer becomes a business owner and needs the product to evolve with them.

These are state shifts, when they happen friction emerges and that's when people are paying the most attention to you as a business and the experience you give them be it customer or employee. It’s here when they're deciding what you are, how you show up, whether you see them or just the category you mapped them to.

Friction Markets work in two dimensions.

The first: the charged moments that already exist inside every journey, billing disputes, service failures, first weeks, sign-ups. Most organisations try to eliminate or bury them in policy, and both approaches miss the point. Design these moments well, with clarity, care, and some basic humanity, and loyalty compounds. Design them badly and trust erodes faster than any marketing campaign can repair.

The second: the state shifts nobody designed for. The hobbyist who became a business owner, the confident person who became lost, the employee navigating parenthood. The customer whose entire situation changed but is still being served the same journey they were mapped to three years ago.

Most organisations miss these entirely because they designed for the static version of a person. If your journey only serves the version of someone who signed up, you are blind to the state they're actually in, and you are leaving value unclaimed every single day.

What are Opportunity Markets?

Opportunity Market are the unidentified situations that reveal themselves through friction and contexts where people have recurring needs that no one is serving because no one noticed the situation existed.

A situation is what someone is actually experiencing. Transitioning away, learning something new, recovering from failure, navigating competing demands, managing a life change alongside work.

Situations repeat, millions of people transition away from products every year, millions return to work after time off and millions navigate unexpected changes daily in their experience as a customer or employee

The situation creates a state, someone in transition feels frustrated, undervalued, or relieved. Someone returning to work feels behind, overwhelmed, or refreshed. Someone navigating a major life change feels divided, stressed, or quietly resilient.

So why does all this matter?

Well organisations that pay attention to friction discover the situations hiding inside it. They ask what situation is this person actually in, what state are they experiencing, and whether there's a whole market of people in this same situation that nobody is designing for if so, that right there is untapped growth and revenue opportunities.

The tactics with designing greater experiences isnt to eliminate friction, its to read what it's pointing to, and what it points to is a market nobody else has found or catering to yet.

How Friction Markets show up in CX,EX and travel and tourism

In CX, the charged moments are easy to find sign-up anxiety, onboarding confusion, service failure, the moment someone's situation outgrows the product they signed up for. The organisations that design these moments with humanity and emotional care build trust that competition can't copy. When they pay attention to what the friction is pointing to, they find markets they weren't looking for.

In Employee Experience, most people functions don't talk about Friction Markets. They talk about engagement, retention, culture. But the moments that determine all three are identity flashpoints, the messy first week, the first real conflict, the first time an employee sees how the organisation handles pressure and decides whether this place is real or performative. Design these moments with intent and you earn commitment that lasts years. Miss them and you create a quiet cynicism that spreads through a function without ever appearing on a dashboard.

In tourism, the meaningful friction is often what people remember long after the itinerary fades. The alley you almost didn't walk down or the ritual that made you uncomfortable before it made you feel part of something. Destinations that over-fix for convenience sterilise this, they replace the arrival moment with an airport express and the cultural encounter with something curated that asks nothing of the visitor. What they lose is the friction that made the place matter.

Three different contexts, the same pattern.

Wrap Up

The Wix advisor who agreed to the refund had it right. He read the situation, saw the state, and responded like a human. The policy team saw a process and overruled him. They didn't just lose a customer, because they were already losing the customer. What they lost was the question the friction was asking: who else is in this situation, and what would it take to serve them well?

That question is where every unidentified market begins. Most organisations never ask it.

The organisations that win aren't the ones who removed the most friction. They're the ones who learned to read it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is a Friction Market?
A: A Friction Market is a decisive moment inside any experience where someone's actual state meets your organisation's response. These are the charged moments already inside every journey billing disputes, service failures, first weeks, sign-ups plus the state shifts nobody designed for. When you read them instead of remove them, you find growth nobody else has claimed yet.

Q: Is removing friction always good for customer experience?
A: No. There are two kinds of friction. The kind that destroys value confusing processes, unnecessary barriers, broken systems should be removed. But there's a second kind that creates meaning: the moment of vulnerability, the cultural encounter, the moment of truth. Removing all friction removes the moments people remember.

Q: What is a State Shift?
A: A State Shift is a change in someone's internal condition in response to a situation change. A confident traveller becomes jet-lagged and anxious. An engaged employee has a new baby. A hobbyist becomes a business owner. When State Shifts happen and your experience can't flex with them, the leak opens. Most organisations only designed for the version of the person who first signed up.

Q: What are Opportunity Markets?
A: Opportunity Markets are the unidentified situations that reveal themselves through friction. Every time a customer or employee hits a gap your system wasn't designed for, that friction is pointing to a situation a whole market of people are in. The first organisation to design for it captures the growth. A customer trying to exit gracefully is an Opportunity Market. Nobody designed for them.

Q: How do Friction Markets connect to Experience Leak?
A: Experience Leak is what happens when organisations over-index on removing friction without understanding what that friction was holding. When you smooth away every charged moment, you remove the memory and meaning those moments were capable of giving. Friction Markets are where the signal lives that points to both the leak and the growth hiding inside it.

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you

Speak soon,

Danny.

The vault is open: The same tools I used to drive aweome experiences and transformations at Dyson and GSK and many more are now your all free

These tactics have powered millions in EX and CX wins.

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Last week, we brought to life the Ignition Behaviours which are part of the behaviour stack

• Nurture

• Curiosity

• Playfulness

This week, we’re focusing on the behaviours that help teams explore, adapt, and evolve the cultural signals that keep you learning instead of going into solution seductions to soon.

Today’s Focus: The Exploration Behaviours

• Selection of examples how the Exploration Behaviours are lived

• Tips on how to bring these into your working world

As a quick reminder this behaviour set is you in full explorer mode here, your doing everything you can to find new stimulus and stop you from going straight into this I know the answer and solution mode as a reminder

I like to see Novelty as a anti compass, if bau is a straight line your goal is to use this novelty compass to understand the direction but go wider to the left and right of the straight line.

The beginner mind set is there to remind you to continue being the newbie, ask why a 100 times, to find the other thing experts may look over.

Finally we have Realness which if we stick with the explorer anaology its your field notes, your field journal if you like this help you test, record and bring to like that you find

Feel free to go back over older posts to here for a deeper explanation, but today here is how a few other companies bring them to life

Real-World Examples: Novelty

Look outside your world to inject new thinking

IDEO’s “Tech Box” and Field Trips: Renowned design firm IDEO take the direction from a kids toy box to help adults think differently. These ‘tech boxes' have a collection of objects, artefacts and products from various industries. This is used to help them no get stuck in their typical bau thinking. Let’s say they are working on a new office design. The might pull out an audio guide from a recent Alcatraz tour. This piece of stimulus tied to office redesign instantly provokes you to look at it differently

IDEO, KNOT and ?WhatIf! are all big advocates of safaris, simply put this is a field trip of a say a toy shop, hospital theme parks etc something unrelated to the the project with the goal to spark some novel metaphor or approach that inspire the design toward the challenge

Starbucks took a novel approach to creating its orginal cafe concept, later down the line they look outside to the digital tech companies when coming up with their concept of the mobile app. This drive Starbuck to be as much a tech innovator as much as a coffee shop…now if they can just get me in to redesign the coffee shop experience that would be great… speak of coffee

Capital One’s Cafés: A financial services looked at coffee shops and asked what if a bank felt more like a coffee shop? Taking inspiration from coffee shop culture they created Capital One Cafés that are 50% part Peet’s Coffee and 50% part bank branch. This novel concept (bank meets cafe) attracts younger customers in a non-banky atmosphere and has been quite successful in branding and engagement.

Where to start

Cross-Industry mood Boards: When designing your next people product, service or experience first give the team a task of of researching how how completely different industries tackle a similar challenge and build a mood board of who and how

Field Trips & Safari Days: Literally go on tours to some of the above but also visit innovative startup if you’re a big company, bank etc go to a museum exhibit together, attend a conference unrelated to HR, or shadow a team in a different department go wherever your inspiration takes you

Encourage Stealing with Pride: Create a culture that proudly adapts ideas from elsewhere (do it with credit and name check of course) You might start a meeting by saying, “Who’s seen a cool idea we can steal this week?”

Where it fits:

Novelty is useful everywhere, from how you select your people through to how we attract and particularly useful in candidate experience & selection (where doing something novel can spark curiosity and entice people in) If your in the UAE or Saudi for example and your goal is to create a a local program stop everything your doing and set up a pop up shop in a coffee shop watch what happens

Real-World Examples: Be the newbie

Keep learning, especially when you think you know the answer

Give your kid the challenge your facing and watch how they see it differently, your goal is to be that kids no matter that your job title is.

Reverse Mentoring at GE: Back in the day General Electric’s then-CEO Jack Welch instituted a reverse mentoring program to drive fresh eyes and fresh learning. Realising his board may have got stuck in their ways he made all top executives learn about the internet from junior employees. At the time this was a pretty new concept and ultimately turn his board into a bunch of apprentices to a a group of 20 year olds

It wasn’t only a fast upskill for the execs but also sent a legit signal through the business that learning trumps hierarchy… While at TalkTalk we design and rolled out a similar project with massive success

Personal Example Adobe’s Kickbox Program: Adobe gave employees a red box with a $1,000 prepaid card and some instructions, encouraging anyone to pursue any idea. Interestingly, in the instructions it emphasises adopting a beginner’s mindset: assume you know nothing about the problem and go learn from scratch users, market, etc.

Where to start

Fresh Eyes Onboarding: Leverage new team members’ fresh eyes. In their first weeks, explicitly ask newcomers to note things that don’t make sense or could be improved for the last few weeks ive been ask a peer who’s had new team member how they are finding their new role, their manager etc… not to get intel on how the manager is but ultimately they will share gaps in whats missing for them.

Rotate Roles or Projects: Push experts out of their comfort zone occasionally. For example, have your HR analytics person spend a week with the recruiting team, or your L&D specialist shadow the marketing team’s campaign launch.

Love/Bugs/Idea: one of my roles in dubai is driving change in the HR team from how we talk, think, operate, build and ship people product moving a traditional HR function into a people product one is a big lift but It doesnt have to be done alone. Recently I put up a loves bugs and ideas board up on the HR with minimum direction the board start to fill up with what they love (this gives me a steer on what to crank up) Bugs (this give me a steer on what to blockers to smash through) ideas (This gives me buckets of stimulus and idea I may never have come up with)

Where it fits

Apprentice Mindset is crucial in Growth & Development and Leadership phases of the employee journey from CEO down it underpins a culture of continuous learning. It’s also valuable anywhere you fear “expertise trap” might occur.

Real-World Examples: Realness

Use scrappy happy to bring to life concept idea early by making them tangible and something people can see, feel and play with

Amazon’s “Two-Way Door” philosophy: Amazon encourages teams to make reversible decisions quickly in practice to do that they run a lot of small experiments in order to present back real life insights. When Amazon considered a major redesign of the Prime onboarding flow, instead of debating for months, a team built a simple alternate flow and A/B tested it on a tiny percentage of users. It gathered real data with minimal risk a two-way door, because if it failed they could roll back easily. They simple ran what I call a simple 4S approach: Sketch it, Show it, Scale or Scrap it

IBM’s Early Design Mock-ups: When IBM overhauled its performance management system a few years ago, the HR design team created low-fidelity prototypes paper mock-ups of a new performance feedback app and put them in front of employees and managers for input. They didn’t wait to code a full app. That early feedback led them to remove some features and add others long before any serious resources were spent displaying the value of what a true human centered/design thinking approach can bring

Government Digital Services: Even bureaucracies are learning to “show, don’t slide.” The UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) famously rebuilt many public services by rapidly prototyping digital forms and websites with real citizens, rather than writing long specs.

Where to start

Prototype Every Idea: Adopt a rule: no idea moves forward without some kind of prototype or tangible demo. It could be a sketch, a mock website, a role-played scenario, or a storyboard.

Test and Learn: Set up smalls experiments with clear hypotheses. E.g., “We believe offering a peer buddy in week one will improve new hire retention by X%. Let’s test it with the next 10 hires and see.

Apply in EVP Design: In EVP (Employee Value Proposition) design, Realness is gold. Instead of wordsmithing a lofty slogan and printing posters the classic slideware approach, prototype the EVP. For example, if part of your EVP is “We invest in growth,” randomly select a small group of employees and give them £1,000 learning budget and some time (a mini version of the promise) and see what happens.

Where it fits

Realness is needed wherever an idea needs to prove itself. It shines in talent acquisition & employer branding e.g., A/B testing job ad wording or career page layouts in real campaigns, in EVP design as mentioned, prototyping your promises, and in any new program roll-out. If you hear “we’ve been planning this for a year” that’s a red flag

Wrap up

Exploration behaviours help kill of stale thinking, mistakes and the good old group think. The move you to have a more flexible, open and evidence based approach. If your redesign a process, designing your EVP or building a new people product, service or experience the last thing you want to do is lock in early instead explore widely

Next week we will go over the Execution Behaviours (Courage, Commitment, Momentum, and Cool Clues)

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Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you Speak soon, Danny

🙋‍♂️ About the Author

I’m Danny Seals. I help teams design employee and customer experiences people actually remember want and need. For the last 15+ years, I’ve blended design thinking, service design, innovation strategy, and behaviour change to help organisations rethink how they work, what they offer, and how they show up. I’ve led projects like launching a People Experience Lab in a bank, redesigning EVP for a global brand, building new HR strategies, and running capability sprints that stick. You get the experience of a big agency without the price tag, the fluff, or the ten layers of sign-off.

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Two weeks back, I introduced the Behaviour Stack a set of behaviours needed to turn typical HR functions into People Product Functions. These behaviours are vital to creating new people product, services and experiences (if you haven’t read that post please read it first)

Anyway, someone sent me a email reply asking a great questions

“Where do these behaviours actually show up in the real world?”

So this week, we’re answering that with stories and tactics you can try tomorrow.

Today’s Focus: The Ignition Behaviours

These behaviours help teams kickstart new products services and experience and build creative momentum for anyone shaping Services, Products, Interaction, Experience and Subscriptions (SPIEs)

Below is some real life example of organisations who live and breath these values and also tips on how you can instantly apply them

Ps: I have a favour to ask at the bottom of the email please dont skips it 💜

Nurture

Pixar protects rough ideas in their “Braintrust” sessions. Early storyboards are met with supportive candor the team’s goal is to improve the idea, not flunk it is like putting a greenhouse over the new fragile idea until it get the energy to grow

Amazon encourages teams to write “Press Release from the Future” documents for new product ideas an exercise in dreaming big without immediate feasibility checks.

Tech Startups: Many startups pivot from an initial idea to a better one because their culture doesn’t punish changing course. For example, Slack began as a failed gaming company; the team’s willingness to nurture a side idea an internal communication tool without immediately dismissing it led to a $26 billion business.

Where to start:

Idea “Greenhouses”: Set up an idea incubator or sprint where all ideas are welcome and none are shot down in the first phase.

Dream & Distill Mode: “Dream vs. Distill” as mentioned in The Insightful innovator approach in the initial dream mode, the team generates and explores ideas freely only in a later distill mode do you critique and select

Mentorship for Ideas: Assign an “idea mentor” (not just for people!). For each fledgling idea, pick a team member to champion and refine it, almost like a project sponsor.

Where it fits:

Nurture is especially critical at any stage of the people product lifecycle, or whenever you’re in early brainstorming

Curiosity

Netflix attributes part of its success to asking bold questions e.g., “What if we could predict what people want to watch using data?” That curiosity led to their groundbreaking recommendation system.

The Golden State Warriors (NBA) Outside the corporate world, this basketball team’s management embraced curiosity by questioning conventional wisdom about how to play. They asked, “What if we shoot three-pointers at an unprecedented volume?” This contrarian curiosity, backed by data, revolutionized the game and led to multiple championships. In HR terms, it’s analogous to questioning a long-held policy or process and experimenting with a novel approach.

Airbnb’s “Elephants, Dead Fish, Vomit” Meetings: In scaling their culture, Airbnb leaders held open meetings where anyone could bring up elephants in the room, things that felt “off” (dead fish), or just vent (vomit). This oddly named practice signaled every question or concern is valid.

Where to start

Chief Questioner: Make it a norm that in project discussions someone plays the role of chief questioner. Rotate this role. Their job is to pose probing questions

Slack Off Time: Give your team structured curiosity time, give a bit of slack time for me to schedule for self-directed exploration

Challenge Convention Sessions: When kicking off a project dedicate a session to unlearning and list all the “standard” practices and challenge it ask is this truly valid or just industry lore

Where it fits:

Curiosity is a foundational behaviour during employer branding and recruitment (to question how you attract talent), and in growth & development phases to continually explore better ways to upskill employees. It also powers EVP design

Playfulness

LEGO uses play in corporate innovation. They developed LEGO Serious Play, a workshop method where employees build metaphors of business challenges with Lego bricks. This playful approach unlocks new insights and equalizes the room…who doesn’t love building with Lego?

Southwest Airlines is known for its playful culture flight attendants cracking jokes in safety announcements, etc. That same spirit extends internally they’ve used improvisational comedy training for staff to improve customer service.

Google’s Office Spaces Google outfitted many of its offices with playful elements from bean bag zones to Lego walls and ping-pong tables. While cynics see perks, the intention was to blur the line between work and play, sparking casual interactions that often lead to creative breakthroughs the famed “watercooler effect”

Where to start

Physical Props: Don’t underestimate the power of toys at work. Keep some Play-Doh, puzzles, or Nerf balls around. In workshops, give people pipe cleaners or Lego to fiddle with during discussions it can spur creative thinking

Apply in Alumni Networks: Even in something like an alumni network, playfulness can apply. Consider hosting fun, gamified alumni events trivia nights, innovation hackathons for alumni instead of just staid networking sessions.

Where it fits:

Playfulness is powerful during onboarding (first impressions matter a touch of fun can make orientation memorable and show your culture’s personality) and in alumni relations to keep former employees engaged. More broadly, infusing play at the ignition stage of any project when you need to break the ice and spark creativity

The Rub

These Ignition Behaviours Nurture, Curiosity, and Playfulness set the tone for everything that follows. They're not just culture buzzwords; they're practical, repeatable moves that help teams explore new ideas without killing them on arrival.

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Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you Speak soon, Danny

🙋‍♂️ About the Author

I’m Danny Seals. I help teams design employee and customer experiences people actually remember want and need. For the last 15+ years, I’ve blended design thinking, service design, innovation strategy, and behaviour change to help organisations rethink how they work, what they offer, and how they show up. I’ve led projects like launching a People Experience Lab in a bank, redesigning EVP for a global brand, building new HR strategies, and running capability sprints that stick. You get the experience of a big agency without the price tag, the fluff, or the ten layers of sign-off.

Future State Thinking Takeover

I chatted with Vaughen last week about innovation and design thinking. It was a great conversation, and it’ll appear in his upcoming book, He decided to turn our interview into a newsletter post for his newsletter. Now I’m sharing his newsletter in my own newsletter. It feels like newsletter inception, but I love it. Enjoy!

How to Design Innovative Experiences

Read time: 3.2 minutes

Imagine This…

You're deep into a service redesign project. The journey maps are complete, the pain points are known, and your team has just prototyped a new onboarding process.

Yet a few months after launch, the frustration remains real. Not much has changed.

People still leave early. Adoption is patchy. Stakeholders, whose expectations were high, now quietly start questioning the value of the work.

What's going on? It's clear that a new approach is needed.

According to Danny Seals - an experienced design expert and author of The Insightful Innovator - the answer lies not in the service but in the system surrounding it.

This edition explores how Danny uses systems thinking, co-design, and behavioural insight to create meaningful, lasting change in complex organisations.

You can also find more insights from Danny on LinkedIn.

(Vaughan Cheat Sheets and Infographic PDFs, the vault is at the bottom of this email along with where to sign up for the DUCTRI Playbook)

Build Your Future-state By Learning:

• Why systems thinking is critical for innovation (if you want innovation that sticks)

• How to make better decisions by sense-making and mapping consequences (avoid unintended results)

• Why co-design and stakeholder alignment are critical (not optional extras)

Move from Rescue to Root Cause

"You're pulling kids out of the river - but who's throwing them in upstream?" - Danny Seals (referencing Chip & Dan Heath, Upstream)

Systems thinking has gained prominence since the 1960s, but many innovation and change teams still treat it as a side note.

Danny sees it differently: it's the first move.

When redesigning anything from EVP (employee value proposition) to onboarding, Danny begins with three layers of sense-making:

• Human: what are people feeling, doing, avoiding?

• System: What feedback loops reinforce the status quo?

• Service: how is the experience playing out?

This perspective avoids the trap of surface-level fixes. It also keeps us from falling into what he calls "solution seduction"—where shiny ideas trump structural change.

One of his most potent metaphors is drawn from Upstream: it's not enough to keep saving drowning children - you have to find out who's throwing them in the river.

That shift in focus - from rescue to root cause - is the essence of upstream thinking.

(Want a proven way to deeply understand customers needs? Consider joining 225+ other smart innovators on the waitlist for The DUCTRI Playbook)

Making Sense of Humans, Services and Systems

"Innovation doesn't happen in isolation. It lives inside messy, dynamic systems where feedback loops, lag and unintended consequences often rule the day." - Danny Seals

Danny's approach includes four principles every innovation leader should have on speed dial:

1) Feedback loops are everywhere.

Reinforcing loops (e.g. overwork rewarded → burnout → more overwork) and balancing loops (e.g. burnout → wellbeing initiative → temporary recovery) shape the behaviours we see. Spotting them changes how we intervene.

2) The lag is real.

Systems don't change overnight. Think of planting a tree - no one expects fruit the next day. The same goes for culture and behaviour. There's always a delay between cause and effect.

3) Small tweaks can spark big shifts.

Systems are nonlinear. Move a desk, and two colleagues start collaborating. Redesign a form, and complaints vanish. Don't underestimate tiny interventions.

4) Incentives shape reality.

As Danny puts it, "Incentives shape behaviour more than any vision statement does." For example, consider the infamous Vietnam rat bounty - where rewarding handing in rats tails led people to breed rats for cash.

Without checking second and third-order effects, even good intentions can backfire.

To make this practical, Danny uses the Consequence Tree tool. You map a decision at the trunk and branch out into first, second and third-order consequences - positive, negative, or neutral.

It's a structured way to stress-test an idea before you commit.

And as Danny says, "Sometimes you realise you're solving the wrong problem altogether."

(Want a proven way to deeply understand customers needs? Consider joining 225+ other smart innovators on the waitlist for The DUCTRI Playbook)

Co-Design Isn't Just an Activity. It's a Mindset.

One of the strongest through-lines in Danny's approach is co-design - not as an activity, but as a mindset.

From early immersion (even getting up at 5 am to join workers for breakfast) to late-stage prototyping, Danny involves people at every step.

He draws a clear line: "if you do discovery with someone, bring them back into design. Their insight is not a one-off. They're part of the process."

He also uses a concept called naive experts - people who have your problem but not your context. Like a nurse helping with service design in banking. Or the Swinger's Club (yes, really) that sparked ideas about onboarding language and symbols.

"If everyone in your session looks like you, you're doing it wrong. You're designing in bias."

He also stresses early alignment with stakeholders - not just to tick a box, but to build trust and expose hidden assumptions.

His "Dare Canvas" (found in his book) helps project teams design arelationship experience first - what we're here to do, how we'll show up, and what happens if things go wrong.

Because without alignment, even great ideas will stall in the shadows.

Practitioner Insights

1. Map one feedback loop in your team or organisation. Ask: "What's being rewarded? What behaviours are reinforcing that?" You might be surprised where it leads.

2. Run a Family Consequence Tree for a new initiative. Sketch the first, second and third-order effects. Tag them as positive, negative or neutral. Then pause: are you solving the right problem?

3. Use signalling when sharing an idea. Don't just present. Say: "I'd love you to bounce this around - not critique it yet." Let the dreamer speak before the distiller arrives.

The future of innovation isn't in more ideas.

It's in designing better systems.

And if you want your change to stick - go upstream.

That's all from me today.

See you next week.

Here to spark your future-state thinking.

Vaughan

​Future-state Thinking​

Helping 35,230 smart people learn human-centred innovation

Follow me on LinkedIn and X​

P.S. Want to really unlock your innovation and impact potential even more?

​There are a few ways we can help:

• Grab your practical, proven resource. Join 225+ smart innovators on the waitlist for The DUCTRI Playbook, a simple and proven way to unlock human-centred innovation. Available mid 2025.

• Adapt to constant disruption and fast-paced change. Join the waitlist for the new DUCTRI Master Course. Where driven professionals become skilled human-centred innovators and change-makers. Available late 2025.

• Need help now? Contact me here for design thinking consulting, workshops and training (limited availability).

Vaughan's Vault:

P.P.S... As promised, click the button for my cheat sheets on innovation, strategy, and more!

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Final Note:

I hope your enjoyed Vaughan newsletter takeover, for me its one I look forward to every week and recommend to anyone interested in innovation

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you Speak soon, Danny

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This week, I’m sharing the Innovative Behaviour Stack, 10 innovative behaviours I that are vital when doing innovation capability workshops, or when designing new people product, customer and employee experiences.

In today’s email

• Why your onboarding fails before it even launches (and what to do instead)

• How to get your team out of idea mode and into delivery mode

• The #1 behaviour every People Product team overlooks

100+ Tactics to design progressive People Products

^{Want to design better products, services, and experiences for your customers and employees? Want to move faster from problem to product? The People Product OS digital deck is perfect for you, its all my tips and tricks for designing services, products Interactions and experiences for the likes of Dyson, HSBC, and TalkTalk}

The Innovative Behaviour Stack

The difference i’ve observed between companies that have great ideas and them that have great solutions… isnt how they come up with the ideas its how they behave to get them.

Getting great ideas isn’t a problem, having great behaviour is

In People Product Innovation, it’s easy to obsess over frameworks and new ways of saying the same thing. But what makes or breaks your onboarding, EVP, or internal mobility redesign is how your team behaves while building it.

I’ve spent 15+ years redesigning people products onboarding, alumni networks, growth, and hiring. The teams who deliver high-impact work? They don’t just run better sprints. They act differently. You can feel it in the room.

These are what I call The Behaviour Stack 

Ten observable behaviours that turn good ideas into people experiences that land.

This isn’t theory It’s field-tested, and it works… because I have ran this with companies from start up through to large FS and Tech around the world.

Ignition Behaviours

These behaviours create the spark. They set the tone, open the mind, and give early ideas a fighting chance.

1. Nurture: Protect fragile ideas

Most people ideas don’t fail because they’re bad. They get killed too soon.
Smart teams treat early thinking like seedlings wobbly but full of promise.
They hold back judgment, even if it breaks “the way we do things.” by applying the dream vs distil mindset discussed in The Insightful innovator.

2. Curiosity: Ask better questions, give autonomy

When curiosity is missing, teams rebrand old stuff and call it new.
Curious teams interrogate assumptions and explore what’s really going on.
If no one’s asked, “Is this even the right problem?” lately, you’ve probably stopped being curious as a team.

3. Playfulness: Let go to go further

Play opens the room. It disarms fear.
One team ran onboarding like a music festival, lanyard, playlists, headline talks. It stuck. Fun isn’t fluff. It’s emotional memory. The idea of a music festival onboarding wouldn’t have come about. If playfulness wasn't in how we design from the get-go

Exploration Behaviours

These behaviours stretch the thinking, invite new perspectives, and start to make the abstract real.

4. Novelty: Look outside your BAU world

Great teams borrow from everywhere product design, museums, theme parks.
They bring in new metaphors, new mechanics. If your idea feels familiar, it probably is. We need to do more safaris to tap into all three tiers of ideation. Adding a tinder swipe mechanism isnt innovation.

5. Apprentice Mindset: Be the newbie

You maybe heard the quote 

“In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, and in the expert's mind, there are few”

Experts repeat what worked last time where Apprentices explore and challenge the legacy thinking by asking why, why not, how can we, why couldn’t we.
The best teams know when to switch roles. How do you know when your applying this mindset when you hear something like

“I don’t know let’s learn”

It beats “here’s best practice” every time.

6. Realness: Show, don’t slide

Ideas die in PowerPoint its a facts
Real teams prototype early, test fast even if it’s scrappy. They make the idea feel real as soon as possible. Tactical prototypes beat ideas on paper every time be buy what feels real.

Activation Behaviours

This is where momentum builds, risks are taken, and teams start making it real , together.

7. Momentum 

Keep it moving, Innovation dies in backlog the best team believe simply in test one thing, ship a rough version and get feedback.

Repeat

Good is better than perfect nearly every time

8. Courage

Real courage calls out gaps between words and actions and builds something better some time it to say what others won’t.

Some time it can sound like

• “this doesn’t feel like us”

• “Team I think we have this wrong”

• “I dont think we understand the challenge enough”

“I think we are all in group think”

No courage? No progress.

9. Commitment

Own it, even if it’s not yours
You don’t need full agreement. You need ownership.
“I didn’t suggest it, but I’ve got it.” That’s the glue. Amazon have a disagree and commitment policy… ie I disagree with what your saying but not to be a blocker I will commit on driving the solution, outcome

Culture Building

One behaviour to shape them all. The quiet architect of trust, tone, and traction.

10. Cool cues: Show people how you want them to show up

Culture isn’t your values on the wall.

It’s how people behave when the pressure’s on.

 Signalling is what leaders, facilitators, and teammates do , intentionally or not , to set the tone. If you say “be creative” but punish half-formed ideas, you’ve just signalled the opposite.

One People team I worked with did this brilliantly.

They began every sprint by co-designing “how we’ll behave” feedback styles, playfulness levels, bravery zones. It changed everything. Signalling is the difference between lip service and lived culture. Get it right, and every other behaviour stacks stronger.

One behaviour is good, The stack is better.

Each of these behaviours matters on its own.
But the real power? Comes when they stack.

• Playfulness without Courage? You’ll have fun, but no breakthroughs.

• Courage without Commitment? Ideas spark, then fizzle.

• Curiosity without Realness? You’ll spin in circles, never landing anything.

High-performing people teams layer these behaviours intentionally.
They know which ones come naturally, and which ones need nudging.

The stack becomes their default operating rhythm, baked into how they think, design, and deliver.

Self-Check: Which Behaviours Are Missing in Your Team?

Ask yourself:

• Are you still designing the same onboarding product expecting a different result (You probably need more Novelty)

• Do we prototype fast or plan endlessly? (You’re probably missing Realness and Momentum)

• Do we keep things safe and polished?  (Where’s your Courage?)

• Is your team full of experts but nobody learning? (Apprentice Mindset is likely dormant)

Are your behaviours signalling creativity or fear?

Where This Stack Fits in People Product Innovation

This framework works across your entire people product lifecycle below are some blends ive found work really well, again though they should all be at play:

• Talent Acquisition & Employer Brand: Curiosity, Realness, Signalling

• Candidate Experience & Selection: Courage, Novelty, Commitment

• Employee Onboarding: Nurture, Playfulness, Momentum

• Growth & Development: Apprentice Mindset, Realness, Curiosity

• Turnover & Reengagement: Courage, Commitment, Novelty

• Alumni Experience: Signalling, Momentum, Playfulness

• EVP Design: Realness, Curiosity, Signalling

Whether you’re fixing something broken or building something bold , this stack gives you a behavioural blueprint for doing better work, together.

I use this stack to build innovation capability and people product in HR, EX, and People teams especially when they’re designing onboarding, EVP, or end-to-end people journeys.

If you’re thinking, “This is what we need but don’t know how to apply it internally, then lets chat via a reply here or a DM on LinkedIn

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you Speak soon, Danny

🙋‍♂️ About the Author

I’m Danny Seals. I help teams design employee and customer experiences people actually remember want and need

For the last 15+ years, I’ve blended design thinking, service design, innovation strategy, and behaviour change to help organisations rethink how they work, what they offer, and how they show up.

I’ve led projects like launching a People Experience Lab in a bank, redesigning EVP for a global brand, building new HR strategies, and running capability sprints that stick.

You get the experience of a big agency without the price tag, the fluff, or the ten layers of sign-off.

Get my book

Read The Insightful Innovator the go-to book for leaders in employee experience, customer experience, innovation, and people product design.

Click here to learn more

Get Tactics

Use The Digital Deck the go-to toolkit for HR teams serious about innovation, employee experience, and people product design.

Get ahead now

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Motorway service stations are stuck in the past overpriced food, slow charging, and a travel experience that feels more like a chore than a break. Meanwhile, EVs, automation, and smart tech are reshaping the roads, leaving service stations in the dust. It’s time for a radical rethink.

In Today’s Email:

• The EV Charging Trap: Why just adding more charging points won’t fix the problem.

• From Pit Stop to Destination:How service stations can transform into places people actually want to stop.

• The Future of Seamless Travel: Imagine a world where service stations recognize you, charge your car automatically, and make waiting time worthwhile.

Things that caught my eye

• Is the Dimmer switch, the top secret to managing life

• A debate between Gary and Dan on diary of a CEO about economy recovering

^{Want to design better products, services, and experiences for your customers and employees? Want to move faster from problem to product? The People Product OS digital deck is perfect for you, its all my tips and tricks for designing services, products Interactions and experiences for the likes of Dyson, HSBC, and TalkTalk}

Radical Rethink: Motorway Service Stations

When you think about motorway service stations across the UK today, what immediately springs to mind?

Overpriced coffee, slightly depressing queues, patchy Wi-Fi or that moment of despair when you realise the least terrible food option is a £7.99 soggy sandwich.

We’ve all been there. Despite being critical nodes in our travel infrastructure, motorway service stations have barely evolved since the 1950s.

They’re like relics of a bygone era, stubbornly resisting the future while we charge into it sometimes literally, if you’re an EV driver stuck in a queue.

For me, we’ve moved past the point where a rethink is a nice to have it’s now a must-have, especially as we brace for transformative shifts in travel over the coming years.

So let’s dive deep into a future that’s less about incremental tweaks and more about a total reimagining of the motorway service station experience.

The Real Pain: Service Stations are Stuck in the Past

Ever found yourself in a service station at 2 AM, staring at a vending machine like it’s a Michelin-starred restaurant? Yeah, me too. And that’s when I realized this entire experience is frozen in time.

The way we travel is changing fast EV adoption is skyrocketing, autonomous tech is accelerating, and yet, service stations still feel like they belong in a 90s road movie.

We don’t need more of the same. We need a radical rethink.

The Electric Revolution: Why “More Charging Points” Isn’t the Answer

The rise of electric vehicles (EVs) is brutally exposing just how outdated our service stations truly are.

Limited charging points, endless queues, and prolonged waiting times have turned simple pit stops into endurance tests. We can’t keep bolting charging stations onto existing structures and calling it innovation.

We’ve tried it, and frankly, it’s starting to buckle under the strain.

Imagine a world where “range anxiety” isn’t a thing anymore. Where pulling into a service station means instant access, not a frustrating wait.

Autobots & Subscriptions: Making Charging Instant & Effortless

Imagine this near-future scenario: autonomous robots glide smoothly around the car park, automatically connecting your EV to chargers as soon as you park.

No fumbling for apps. No cables. Just drive in, and your car takes care of itself.

Or even better battery swaps. In the time it takes to grab a coffee, a robot could replace your drained battery with a fully charged one.

Sound far-fetched?

Qatar’s Hamad Airport is already trialling autonomous robots, and NIO is successfully implementing battery swaps across Europe.

This isn’t sci-fi it’s a realistic next step.

Now, let’s take it even further.

What if service stations embraced subscription models?

Picture this: You pull in. No app. No fumbling for a card. Your car is recognized instantly. A premium lounge unlocks for you. Your car is charged before you even finish your coffee.

Welcome to the motorway service station that works for you.

The Motorway Passport: Personalising the Road Ahead

Right now, motorway stops are transactional, impersonal, and frustrating. But what if we turned them into seamless, tailored experiences?

Enter The Motorway Passport a digital identity directly linked to your vehicle registration, driving license, and personal preferences.

Through smart IoT technology, connected motorways, and integrated apps, drivers could:

• Pre-book charging bays before arrival.

• Reserve family-friendly parking so you’re not circling aimlessly.

• Order a meal from a local food vendor that’s ready when you arrive.

• Even book a 20-minute VR cinema experience to make the stop actually enjoyable.

And payments? Forget cash, cards, or even your phone. Just walk in, grab what you need, and go biometric recognition takes care of the rest similar to Zayed airport

No queues. No stress. Just a travel experience that actually works for you.

Designing Meaningful Dwell: Turning Wasted Time into Valuable Moments

With EV charging inevitably increasing dwell times, we’re faced with a choice: Do we see this as wasted time or do we innovate to make it valuable?

Imagine arriving at a motorway station where autonomous robots handle charging while you relax in a sophisticated, immersive space.

• Need to unwind? Step into a wellness pod for a quick yoga session.

• Travelling with kids? Drop into an AR gaming zone or interactive play area.

• On a long drive? Catch a short movie in a private cinema booth.

• Need to work? Fast, reliable internet and quiet workspaces replace the frustration of battling for a plug in a noisy café.

This isn’t utopian it’s practical innovation.

Emerging Charging Hubs & Autonomous Retail: The Next Evolution of Service Stations

Traditional petrol stations, designed for quick refuelling, must evolve into charging hubs that accommodate longer stops.

Retail and entertainment will increasingly integrate into these hubs, with companies like Walmart, IKEA, and even Tesla developing unique offerings like Tesla’s diner in Los Angeles, where you can watch a movie while your car charges.

Autonomous retail options, such as Juxta’s self-contained convenience stores and Amazon Go will also reduce the need for extensive staffing, creating streamlined and efficient hubs.

The future of service stations isn’t just about charging. It’s about turning them into places you actually want to stop.

Mobile Service & Sustainability: The Smart Stations of the Future

Companies like Ford and Spiffy are pioneering on-the-go vehicle repairs and software updates, reducing reliance on fixed service stations. Instead of waiting for a breakdown, cars could proactively receive maintenance wherever they are.

Meanwhile, sustainability will drive even bigger changes.

Solar-powered charging hubs, wind-assisted energy, and bidirectional (V2G) charging will allow EVs to feed excess energy back into the grid.

Instead of being just a stop, service stations could become smart energy hubs balancing demand, reducing strain on the grid, and even rewarding drivers for sharing power.

This shift isn’t just about convenience. It’s about making service stations part of a cleaner, smarter, and more efficient travel ecosystem.

Creating Destinations, Not just stops

How many times have you glanced around a rural service station and thought, “It looks nice here”?

Yeah, me neither.

But there’s a huge opportunity to turn these mere transit points into destinations inviting travellers to linger, enjoy the local scenery, and engage with regional culture.

Inspiring Experiences: What If Service Stations Were Designed Like…

• Theme Parks? Where waiting isn’t a chore, but part of the experience.

• Cinemas? Blending entertainment with retail and dining.

• Cruise Ships? Offering short-stay accommodations, wellness areas, and immersive experiences.

Imagine applying this mindset to service stations:

• Short-stay accommodations offering a “cruise-like” relaxation experience for overnight travellers.

• AR-based vehicle health checks that make routine inspections interactive and engaging.

• Stations celebrating local culture with food, art, and experiences unique to each region.

The Road Ahead: The Journey Should Be Just As Good As The Destination

For decades, service stations have been a necessary evil. A place you stop because you have to, not because you want to.

But what if stopping became something to look forward to?

What if service stations weren’t just functional but enjoyable?

What if the future of road travel wasn’t just about getting from A to B, but about actually enjoying the journey in between?

Because that’s the real goal: To transform travel from a frustrating necessity into an effortless, seamless, even delightful experience.

That future?

Well It’s all a little closer than we think.

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you Speak soon, Danny

Psst...whenever you're ready, there are a few ways I can help you:

People Product OS Pack

The Book

Consultation

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Misalignment. Unclear expectations. Decision making chaos. These issues don’t announce themselves. They sit beneath the surface, quietly draining momentum.

The worst part? Leaders often don’t see the problem the same way their teams do.

In today’s email

• Why most team dysfunctions go unnoticed until it’s too late.

• How a structured CP Scan can reveal misalignment before it causes real damage

• The difference between quick fixes (painkillers) and long-term solutions (vitamins).

Things that caught my eye

• If you a long time reader of the newsletter you will know am a fan of experimentation, i’ve wrote about various times so when Seth talk about it I listen here

• Speaking of experimenting here a great article from Anne-Laure Le Cunff asking what type of experimentalist are you here

• I bang on about listening to your people a whole lot, having set up various continuous discovery & listening strategies so when I read there’s a increase in employee thinking their leaders are lying to them of course I was gonna geek out here

^{Want to design better products, services, and experiences for your customers and employees? Want to move faster from problem to product? The People Product OS digital deck is perfect for you, its all my tips and tricks for designing services, products Interactions and experiences for the likes of Dyson, HSBC, and TalkTalk}

My Approach to Diagnosing and Treating Teams

Every team operates as a living, breathing system, constantly reacting to external pressures, internal frictions, and the behaviors of those leading it.

Like any system, teams can suffer from chronic stress, misalignment, or dysfunction. Left unchecked, these issues erode trust, slow decision-making, and turn work into an exhausting grind rather than a productive flow.

To prevent this I turn to my TeamOS: CP Scan a diagnostic-first approach, much like a doctor would when assessing a patient's health

(Playing the part and dressing up is a non negotiable as its a clear signal to the team this is something different and meaningful and links to the tricky trio mentioned here)

The Diagnosis - The CP Scan

Before prescribing any treatment, I begin with a comprehensive CP scan. This isn't just a casual observation. I run structured health assessments, first with the manager and then with the team, without the manager present.

Why? Because teams don't always share the same symptoms their leaders see. More importantly, some issues remain unspoken when leadership is in the room.

In the past when running different version of my CP Scan I have found having a manager there may help later on maybe in their 3rd of 4th health check when fear of consequence has gone but at the start I isolate them

I assess fifteen key health markers, critical indicators of how well a team functions and where potential breakdowns might occur.

Some of the most common markers include:

• Psychological Safety. Do people feel safe enough to speak their minds without fear?

• Decision-Making Clarity. Does the team know how and where decisions are made?

• Accountability Health. Is there a culture of ownership, or do responsibilities get lost?

• Resilience Levels. Is the team running on fumes, or do they feel engaged

• Managerial Awareness. How aligned is the leader's view of the team's health compared to reality?

• How the team spend time together and so on

Once both assessments are complete, I cross-compare the results, identifying where the manager's perspective diverges from the team's lived experience.

below is a snap shot of how widely different a team feels compare to the manager

It's here that the burning platforms start to reveal themselves for example on Q5 which is focused on ownership both the team and the manager are aligned, however on Q2 which is focused decision making they couldn’t be future apart if they tried.

Its here where we focus and look at the misalignment we can start to diagnose deep rooted issues that, if left untreated, will continue to weaken the team's performance, culture, and morale

Important note: throughout the whole CP check, we are constantly capture verbatim, because their hidden insight into the words and emotion shared in the health check that often goes unidentified

The Treatment Plan

Once we understand the symptoms, it's time to treat them.

It here where we take a consultant-like approach, tailoring recommendations based on the specific challenges the team is facing.

Like any good treatment plan, the prescription is a mix of painkillers and long-term health solutions.

Painkillers offer immediate interventions that address urgent dysfunctions. Think of these as instant relief solutions to stop the bleeding. This could be targeted behavior experiments, specific TeamOS tactics, or Culture Crafters interventions designed to quickly stabilize the team.

Vitamins and minerals focus on longer-term strategies designed to strengthen the team's resilience, alignment, and performance. These include embedding new team rituals, refining decision making frameworks, and reinforcing psychological safety mechanisms so the team doesn't just recover but thrives.

Through this approach, we ensure teams don't just survive today's challenges but become more resilient against future disruptions.

Top Tactic

Nearly every time I run a heath check thats part of TeamOS, a common ailment emerges: misalignment and direction

Teams often assume they are on the same page. But when we look under the hood, we find disconnects in vision, values, decision-making, and expectations that cause friction, slow progress, and create unnecessary tension. I mean look at the misalignment mentioned above.

You can't improve what you don't measure. Yet, most teams only measure outcomes, not effectiveness.

Performance metrics like sales numbers or project completion rates are important, but they don't tell the full story.

A team might hit its goals while experiencing burnout, conflict, or disengagement behind the scenes.

To get the real picture, teams need to track both qualitative and quantitative factors.

For that, I turn to one of my many tools in TeamOS: A modified version of the Team Canvas. But let’s be clear this isnt the solution. Its just one of several ways we help teams surface issues and align on how to fix them

Rather than imposing solutions from the outside, The Team Canvas allows the team itself to co-design a shared agreement on how they will work together. It does this as a great workshopper, though just a heads up your going to need a mix of a great workshopper, consultant and coach to run this effectively.

Top tips: never have a team member run it

This isn't a theoretical exercise. It's a practical, structured conversation that reveals blind spots, aligns expectations, and ensures that every team member has a voice in shaping how they operate.

The result is a team that not only understands its challenges but is actively engaged in solving them.

When teams co-create their own working agreements, buy-in is no longer an issue. Ownership is.

The Team Canvas is a structured framework designed to align teams, surface hidden tensions, and create shared agreements on how to work together.

It's a practical tool, not just a theoretical exercise. It helps teams uncover misalignment, set clear expectations, and build a strong foundation for collaboration.

Lets breakdown each section

• People & Roles: This section isnt just about titles, it about actual contributions, who owns what

• Common Goals: This asks what are we building, success needs to be clear else it all becomes a guessing game

• Personal Motivations: This needles into what drive the people in the team, what their purpose and yes we are not just talking about their work

• Values & Principles: This pushes you to answer how you operate, it anchors you together and with clear expectations, without them you get chaos creep. This can often end up opening a whole different conversation around have you identified them already or not. if you havent then, you need to pause the canvas and look at what is your values how do you codified them how do they show up day in day out (This often ends up being a whole different piece of work)

• Strengths & Weaknesses: Where are the gaps, having self awareness fuels how the team means, however if there blindspot the drive friction

• Needs & Expectations: What is it we are need to drive us, your team will need different thing, a sheep dip approach helps nobody but farmers… so dont be a farmer get specific now to avoid resentment later

• Rules & Activities: This asks how do we do we work together whats the cadence, how do we communicate this is where team patterning and ways of working comes in this is all about clarity across the team

• Purpose & Impact: Why does it all matter is the question asked here, without meaning and purpose work can start to feel pretty empty pretty quick

Why it works

The Team canvas isn’t a silver bullet and in many of my TeamOS workshops it never actually comes out, however when it does the power of The Team Canvas is in its ability to surface what is often left unsaid.

By working through its sections, teams gain clarity, alignment, and stronger working relationships.

It moves teams away from assumptions and toward intentional collaboration, shared ownership, and mutual accountability.

For any team struggling with misalignment, confusion, or unclear expectations, The Team Canvas is one of the many ways to do this in the fastest time possible to reset and create a stronger foundation for success.

Immunisation & Resilience - Verbatim

A quick note on why capturing verbatim comments in the health check and workshops while doing the canvas is one thing, the conversations are another, when you start to truly listening to the words used, tensions shared you can start to create something much richer than just a canvas.

Over time ive tried and tested many different ways to share this back, in the end I found the best way is to do it through ha culture mirror playback shows

Showing the business other unidentified MOOs (Moments of opportunity) along with potential conflicts in whats been identified

Ultimately when you run the team canvas, if the only thing you get coming out of it is a canvas you left a lot untapped insight and opportunity on the table.

Unfortunately, I cant share client details due to confidentiality. But at the end of a CP Scan, you won’t just have a canvas, you’ll have a full medical scan report that includes

• A misalignment report (where leadership and team views differ)

• Verbatim insights that expose hidden tensions and blockers

• A playbook of tactics and interventions (not just discussions, but actions)

• A burning platform analysis—identifying critical issues before they escalate

• Practical, tangible next steps that ensure follow-through

If you walk away with only a canvas, you’ve focused too much on output and the the real outcomes that matter

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you Speak soon, Danny

Psst...whenever you're ready, there are a few ways I can help you:

People Product OS Pack

The Book

Consultation

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Teams obsess over goals and KPIs but miss the invisible forces that actually determine success or failure. The truth? Most team dysfunctions come down to five DNA blocks often missing to make a team effective

In post two I will share how I typically run my TeamOS, with team across of the whole of a business from C-suites to Call centres and everything in between

This was suppose to be one post however to make this more scanable and easier to read it needed two…sorry!

Things that caught my eye

• If you’ve read the insightful innovator you will know I value curiosity so when I read they are “three styles” of curiosity of course I was gonna read it - here

• The legend that is Seth Goldin sharing truths, Its a nice reminder to ask yourself have your “thought leaders” done what they are sharing - here

• Maybe it pays off to be a bit of a ass, if the end goal is deeper convos - here

^{Want to design better products, services, and experiences for your customers and employees? Want to move faster from problem to product? The People Product OS digital deck is perfect for you, its all my tips and tricks for designing services, products Interactions and experiences for the likes of Dyson, HSBC, and TalkTalk}

Most teams focus on the obvious: goals, roles, KPIs. But the real reason some teams thrive while others stall?

The unspoken dynamics. The invisible forces shaping collaboration, decision-making, and trust.

For HR, L&D, and design professionals, understanding these hidden elements is essential.

You can't fix what you don't see, and traditional team assessments rarely go deep enough and struggle to turn insight into action.

Understanding Team Effectiveness

Every company says they want high-performing teams. When you ask what does that even mean you get the typical response… it about delivering results.

While that isn’t wrong it also often isnt the full picture

A team can be hitting its targets but still be ineffective. If work feels forced, ideas get shut down, or stress levels are through the roof, something is off.

Great teams don't just produce great work. They create environments where people feel safe, valued, and motivated to contribute

The best way to achieve this is through Intentional design. Effective teams aren't built by accident. They are shaped through strategy, structure, and shared values that show up every single day.

Various “thought leaders” have developed team effectiveness models, each offering different strategies for improving collaboration.

Patrick Lencioni's model focuses on overcoming dysfunctions like lack of trust or accountability which tends to do the rounds every other year on LinkedIn

Bruce Tuckman's golden oldie of forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning model tracks how teams evolve through these key stages

Jon Katzenbach and Smith model links personal growth, accountability, and skill-building to team success.

Googles Model which is less about the who and more about how a team is effective and how they work and add value

No matter the framework, it’s clear to me that teams don't just become effective. They need to be crafted to be effective and need a mix of some key personalities

Understanding this is the first step. The reality is there's 5 DNA blocks that need to exists in every team.

Factors of team effectiveness

Every struggling team thinks their issues are unique. But nearly every team dysfunction comes down to five key factors

Psychological Safety: The Permission to Speak Up

A quick litmus test for this is answer these questions:

• When was the last time someone in your team admitted a mistake without fear.

• When did your or a team member take a risk or challenge the status quo

• When was the last time the team had a open debate with good intentions

If you answer the questions above with never or rarely then perhaps you have a low level of psychological safety

How it often looks is silent meetings, slow decision making, small issue bubbling up in the background next to no educated risk taking or new voices and ideas being shared

Team with high psychological safety make the jump from playing defence and reactive and move to playing more creative attack

High ROD (Ride or Die) Energy aka Dependability:

ROD energy simply put is about trust and reliability it about can each of the team trust that one another will deliver on commitments and look out for each other when they need to and ultimately have each others back

This means playing each other's critical friend giving feedback positive and constructive when needed. it means each other being clear on expectations and hold each other to account.

When this is missing, commitments are broken, deadlines get missed and the buck is passed, over time this erodes trust and drive frustration along with client whispers of bitching about your peers

Dependability isn't just an individual trait either It's a team culture. And it has to be reinforced daily from your manger to the team and also the team to the manger

Structure and Clarity: Who's Doing What and Why?

I imagine we have all worked in a team where nobody knew who owned what, in fact when I run TeamOS this is often one of the top things that come out, along with the relaxation of waste in resource and duplicate effort.

This lack of structure and clarity is a killer for effective teams it drive chaos, unspoken frustration and disengagement it also makes it easy to hide from ownership and accountability usually with… Oh I thought (insert other team member name here) was doing that

Team need clear roles, empowerment or defined decision making processes along with clear objectives

The most effective teams ive worked with remove ambiguity. They align expectations early and revisit them often and when it get confusing the realign fast

Meaning: Why This Work Matters

When meaning is missing you can look around and see people just delivering output over outcomes and being honest you see the sparks has gone in their eyes.

When people lack meaning disengagement slides in fast, we deliver things that don’t align to a strategy do turn into a nice group of nodding Churchill dogs

People don't just work for payday, they work because they want purpose, growth, and impact they want to feel they are adding value be it big or small

Effective teams connect daily mapping tasks to the bigger picture, helping people see the why behind their work

When meaning is clear, motivation has a nice big hockey style tick, but without it, even the best crafted strategy will fail.

Impact: Seeing the Results

Nothing kills motivation faster than feeling like your work doesn't matter.

Effective teams ensure that progress is visible, achievements are celebrated, and contributions are recognized.

If people can't see the impact of their work, they disengage. It's that simple.

Great teams make success tangible they highlight wins, share progress and learning and ensure that every team member feels valued.

The best teams don't just focus on the obvious they pay attention to what's unspoken. Trust, alignment, and collaboration dynamics

Great teams aren't built by accident. They are designed.

In our next article, I will share with you a typical high-level approach to TeamOS. I will share my doctor inspired approach to culture and performance using my TeamOS: CP scan to reveals hidden misalignments between managers and teams, and discover the power of a tactics that I nearly always end up using because the issue come up time and time again.

We'll explore how to move beyond surface-level fixes to create lasting, meaningful change in how teams operate and collaborate and I will share some example from the last TeamOS I ran in December.

Here a little hint at the impact it can have

Thanks for reading if you’ve got thoughts to share just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you Speak soon, Danny

Psst...whenever you're ready, there are a few ways I can help you:

People Product OS Pack

The Book

Consultation

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Think your employee journey is seamless? Think again. Most candidates face jargon, distractions, and clunky systems that derail their path before it even starts and being completely honest customer are a lot more like Zig and Zag then we would like to admit (aka all over the place)

What You'll Learn Today

• Why employee journeys are rarely as linear as they seem

• How to design for zigzags, not perfection

• Simple ways to reduce friction

^{Want to design better products, services, and experiences for your customers and employees? Want to move faster from problem to product? The People Product OS digital deck is perfect for you, its all my tips and tricks for designing services, products Interactions and experiences for the likes of Dyson, HSBC, and TalkTalk}

The Great Journey Map Deception

Why Journey Maps Lie

Your customer journey map is lying to you. Not because it's badly designed, or because we design and present it as a linear journey. I even did that in The Insightful Innovator because it's easier to tell a story and because I only had limited white space.

However, most journey maps lie because they assume perfection. They imagine a world where customers breeze effortlessly from one touchpoint to the next, following a straight, logical path like clockwork.

☝️ But real journeys dont look like this

People don't move in clean lines. They zigzag. They jump ahead, circle back, abandon tasks midway, and reappear when you least expect it. Life gets in the way confusion, distraction, poor signaling, and emotions all play a role in shaping what people do next.

The problem isn't the map itself, the problem is how we design journeys, treating them as idealised narratives rather than fluid, unpredictable experiences.

A tale of two journeys

Lets imagine two journeys, one being a potential customer, the other being a potential candidate for a job opening

Customer Journey Expectation

• Customer is browsing the web stumbles across an amazing ad in instagram discover the product and clicks add to card

Customer Journey Reality

• The customer starts browsing see your ad, but halfway through reading about it, they get interrupted by a phone call

• An hour later, they return, but now they're on their tablet instead of their laptop, and they can't find the ad or item they'd saved Frustrated, they give up

• Days later, they see an Instagram ad for your product and decide to try again, but this time, their password doesn't work because they've forgotten it

• Finally, they complete their purchase, but not without bumps along the way

Candidate Journey Expectation

• The candidate wakes up in the morning not wanting to do another day in their current roles and see a job posting on Linkedin, they hit apply now and wait for the interview to come in

Candidate Journey Reality

• They look at the job posting on their mobile, read the Job spec and get lost in your jargon

• They run it through ChatGPT and ask it to explain it to them like a 5 year old

• ChatGPT tells them they have the skills, but just as they are about to apply, they receive a WhatsApp from their work mate it a crying gif because they have to go in work

• After addressing the message (with another gif) they get ready for work

• Days later, they see an employee of the company share the job on LinkedIn

• They save the post and quickly check Glassdoor

• The reviews look good, so they decide to apply but then, they hit Workday

• It asks them to upload their CV and manually enter all their data again

• Frustrated, they bail. Maybe they will apply later that night... spoiler: they never do!

The Emotional Journey

Emotions are the invisible thread running through every customer journey. Frustration, confusion, delight, relief these feelings shape decisions far more than any rational, simple step by step logic. Yet, most journey dont capture them or the flatten these emotions into surface level actions like "click" or "apply."

Using sentiment analysis and tools from the people product OS like empathy maps, and emotional maps allow you to add narrative to the journey and visualize what customers and employees are thinking, feeling, and experiencing along with the influences around them during key moments.

Most importantly, listen to the voice of your customer (VOC) and the voice of your employee (VOE). This ongoing feedback will reveal emotional highs and lows, helping you identify where to create moments of delight or reduce frustration but this data is only valuable if you're going to do something with it.

Designing for reality - The zigzags

Real journeys are messy. People zigzag jumping ahead, circling back, abandoning tasks midway. Life gets in the way, distractions, poor signals, and emotions all shape what happens next.

A great journey map doesn't just show the ideal path it accounts for alternate routes. It asks:

• "What happens if the customer stops here?"

• "What if they come back later?"

• "What if they skip a step entirely?"

By planning for these alternative scenarios, you create a more resilient and adaptable experience. A great tactic to use when mapping and asking these questions is the consequences tree

Turning Flaws into Opportunities

For Customers

• Recognize returning users and show previously saved items

• Streamline password reset flows to reduce frustration

• Include direct links to carts in Instagram ads

For Candidates

• Embed simple layman language explainer videos in job postings

• Create quick FAQs under the job posting addressing common questions everything from job expectations to company culture, so candidates don’t need to leave the page to find answers.

• Implement WhatsApp follow ups for incomplete applications along with the Glassdoor score and links to real employee stories

• Enable one click LinkedIn applications with working auto population

Feedback Loops

To ensure the journey evolves over time candidates and customers who drop out are sent a quick, anonymous survey to ask about their experience. Over time, the company notices a trend people abandon applications during the manual data entry stage. Armed with this insight, they streamline the process even further, eliminating unnecessary fields and focusing on what really matters.

The Takeaway

The messiness of customer journeys isn't a problem to solve it's an opportunity. Every zigzag, pause, and detour reveals where you can innovate and build trust.

When you design with the understanding that people will step off your perfect path, you create experiences that feel flexible, forgiving, and human. You build systems that adapt to your customers instead of forcing customers to adapt to you.

Great customer journeys don't come from chasing perfection. They come from designing for the zigzags: the unpredictable, emotional, and sometimes messy realities of real people.

By layering in emotional data, listening to your customers and employees, and designing for alternate paths, you create something far more valuable than a perfect map. You create experiences that work in the real world no matter which direction your customers decide to go.

Of course, this is just scratching the surface of journey mapping. There's a whole world of quantitative analytics, service blueprints, cross channel orchestration, and journey governance that we haven't even touched on. But sometimes the best way to start improving journeys is to acknowledge the simple truth humans aren't robots, and their paths will never be perfect.

Thanks for reading. If you've got thoughts to share, just hit reply I always enjoy hearing from you.

Speak soon, Danny

Psst...whenever you're ready, there are a few ways I can help you:

The Pack

Consultation

The Book

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