Journey-led transformation and where to go next when you’ve mapped your customers’ journeys

Christian Bason, the CEO of the Danish Design Centre asked the following question in his LinkedIn post:

As design thinking is deployed not only in the context of new product and service development, but also as an integrated part of strategy development, how do we design for the next step, implementing and creating behavioral change?

It’s a topic very close to our hearts. At Horizon Strategy, we are driven by a desire to make human-centred advice actionable in a commercial context. This, it would appear, is easier said than done and many design-focused interventions are not as effective as they could be.

Take something relatively innocuous such as customer journeys. They should pretty much be in the arsenal of every design thinker-practitioner, right? As a basic tool or concept, they are pretty straightforward to wrap your head around and are now being used by countless organisations, big and small.

Customer journeys are a good means of diagnosing customers’ experience and devising new versions of it — ones that not only help to elevate the company in the eyes of the customer (B2B or B2C) but also help to optimise how the business operates (e.g. portfolio optimisation).

Now, here’s the thing, we’ve found, working with a Fortune 50 business, that they can also be used to significantly influence strategic conversations and shift organisational culture in a relatively organic, bottom-up way. There are, however, several conditions that need to be met for this to happen. In a sense, some of those conditions point to a certain injection of commercial reality into what is traditionally rather empathetically driven, design conversation.

Firstly, the actual tool of customer journeys needs to be elevated analytically and made truly actionable and commercially relevant to the stakeholders in the organisation. We’ve found that quantifying customer journeys, together with specific channel selection insights, helps the executives imagine how change can be actioned (e.g. online vs. offline channel emphasis post-COVID).

Secondly, customer journeys need to be seen as a means to an end. Getting to a point where a significant business unit or a part of the business sees an impact on their commercial goals is not easy, nor immediate. When it does happen, however, it turns that business unit into a true advocate of the design-centric approach and, in our experience, can instigate a chain reaction spurring others to follow suit.

Thirdly, and we’re talking here about a large organisation, the top-level takes notice of those efforts and starts building on their success. Making sure that some of the recognition and credit for the positive impact goes to a closer alignment with the needs of the customers through a design-centric approach of customer journeys (in our case), ensures the broader culture takes notice and realigns around the underlying principles and values.

To sum it up, in order for design, design thinking, or design attitude to help make a strategic shift a reality (and that includes culture change), we can look to the following:

1. Infuse tools/methods/approaches with commercial reality (we call this commercial empathy)

2. Create pockets of utility throughout the organisation where the approach is bringing tangible results

3. Capitalise on the strategic narrative being built around the success of those efforts in order to highlight the benefits of the human-centric and design-centric way of changing the culture

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