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:

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.

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.

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