It’s a big story, one filled with hopes, dreams and especially aspirations. But so often it comes with trepidation, hesitation, and doubt. We tend to need help for our efforts to have any chance of yielding significant change.
For enterprises the world over, this is an opportunity: to get into the business of transforming people (customers, employees and leaders) by helping them achieve their aspirations. Enterprises should recognize the economic opportunity offered by the transformation business, in which they partner with people to improve some fundamental aspect of their lives – to become a more authentic you.
Offering transformation means understanding the why behind what people buy from you – their aspirations for improving aspects of their lives – and then bringing together the resources to make that outcome happen. Taking this approach doesn’t mean you have to stop what you’re doing now. You may be doing well by making goods or providing services. But it does mean you need to realize that whatever you sell today is a means to an end. So focus on going beyond the benefits people currently receive and do whatever else it takes to offer the results your customers truly desire: achieving their aspirations. For there is no greater economic value you can create than to guide your customers in becoming who they want to become.
So how can your company create lasting value by helping customers reach their greatest aspirations? To start you must answer the fundamental question, What business story are we really living now? Doing that intelligently requires understanding the history of economic progress.
Virgin Money: Selling the Transformation, Not Just the Bank Account
On paper, Virgin Money’s product is straightforward: retail and business banking. A person opens an account, uses cards, takes loans, saves. That’s the good-and-service economy at work — a transaction with a defined start and end.
But look at what Virgin Money actually delivers, and the story gets bigger. The bank doesn’t end its relationship at onboarding — it explicitly frames its purpose as “Making you happier about money.” That’s not a marketing flourish. It’s a structural choice about what business Virgin Money believes it’s in.microsoft+1
Every piece of the offering reinforces it. Digital tools help customers manage cash flow, plan for life events, and avoid the “poverty premium” that penalizes those with fewer resources. The bank sets public aspirations: by 2030, no Virgin Money customer should be paying a poverty premium; by 2025, at least half of affected customers should be identified and offered solutions. Its digital onboarding overhaul didn’t just speed up applications; it was designed to make people feel in control, respected, and supported as they move toward goals like home ownership, financial stability, and travel.alida+3
None of this replaces the banking. Virgin Money still offers current accounts, credit cards, loans and savings — the goods and services of a bank. But the why underneath the products isn’t “hold your money.” It’s closer to: become the person who feels confident, secure, and happier about their financial life — and we’ll stay in the story with you while that unfolds. The account is the means. The transformation is the end.microsoft+2
That’s the tell for any enterprise trying to locate itself on this spectrum. A business selling commodities sells wheat. A business selling goods sells bread. A business selling services sells a bakery’s convenience. A business selling experiences sells the smell of the bakery and the ritual of visiting it. But a business selling transformations — like Virgin Money — sells the person you become by having gone through it, and it stays accountable to that outcome long after the transaction closes.
The Progression of Economic Value
The figure below illustrates how the creation of economic value has changed over time. In the beginning there were commodities: the fungible stuff we raise on the ground, pull out of the ground, or grow in the ground – animal, mineral, vegetable – and then sell on the open marketplace. Commodities were the basis of the Agrarian Economy that lasted for millennia. In 1776, the year Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, over 90% of people in Britain worked on farms. Today it’s down to 1.5 percent. What happened in the past 250 years? Agricultural output skyrocketed! Thanks to vast technological and productivity improvements, it simply takes fewer and fewer people to produce more and more output.
So people moved from farms into factories, where they used commodities as raw material to make or manufacture physical, tangible things. These goods became the basis of the Industrial Economy, which overtook the Agrarian one in the early part of the twentieth century. Commodity extraction still employed about 40% of the workers, but the success of mass production soon vaulted goods manufacturing into the position of economic engine of the country (and soon after that, the world).
As the Industrial Economy progressed, however, it became less and less of a job creator, as once again massive technological and productivity improvements meant it took fewer workers to produce more output. So people moved out of factories and into office jobs, retail, fast food and restaurants, maintenance and repair, childcare, finance and numerous other service occupations where companies deliver a set of intangible activities on behalf of individual customers.
Over time, the Service Economy displaced the Industrial Economy, with services becoming the primary economic offering. Eventually, thanks to the ‘gales of creative destruction’ identified by economist Joseph Schumpeter, the number of jobs created swamped the number of those displaced at higher levels of salaries and wages.
Commoditization
As we shifted deeper into the Service Economy, manufactured goods often became commoditized, meaning buyers treated them like commodities, purchasing them primarily on the basis of price and convenience. When faced with commoditization, companies lose much of their ability to control prices, which drop down toward marginal costs and become subject to the vagaries of the marketplace.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with a commoditized business; you can still make a lot of money in it. Generally, however, only one or two companies in any industry prove successful at doing so. And it is not a very fun situation to be in, as you must relentlessly focus on costs by, among other things, automating tasks and getting rid of as many people as possible. That’s why so many manufacturers have shifted into the services business – repairs, leasing, warranty plans, equipment management, and so forth. Today many, if not most, manufacturers make as much, if not more, money from offering services as from making goods.
But services can be commoditized as well. For example, no industry has commoditized itself more than banking, as managers started to view customers coming into their banks as costing them money. So they pushed people out of branches to use ATM’s, then the internet and finally phone apps. Eliminating human contact is a surefire way to commoditize yourself.
Customization
Customization is the antidote to commoditization. Commoditization is like the law of gravity; if you do nothing to counteract it, it will just drag you down year after year. Customization, on the other hand, lifts you up. You cannot help but be differentiated if you tailor to each individual customer.
And when you customize your physical goods, you automatically turn them into services. Consider the classic economic distinctions: goods are standardized, while services are customized – done on behalf of an individual customer. Goods are inventoried after production, while services are delivered on demand, when the customer says this is exactly what they want. Goods are tangible, while services are intangible. Part and parcel of customization is the intangible service of helping customers figure out exactly what they want. Meanwhile, mass customization – efficiently serving customers uniquely – means giving people exactly what they want at a price they are willing to pay.
The Motley Fool: Turning Generic Advice into a Personalized Investment Journey
The investment advice market is a textbook case of commoditization at work. Countless sites offer free tips, stock picks, and generic “how to invest” articles. Most compete on traffic, SEO, and volume — a race to the bottom on attention and price.
The Motley Fool took a different path. Rather than just publishing more articles, it built a suite of services that meet investors where they are in their personal hero’s journey: from nervous first-time saver to confident long-term portfolio owner. Paid subscriptions, model portfolios, coaching, and community are structured not as one-off tips but as ongoing guidance tailored to different goals, risk tolerances, and time horizons.
That single decision quietly performs the goods-to-service transformation your text describes. A free article is inventoried, tangible, identical for every reader — a good. A personalized plan, ongoing check-ins, and a community that supports behavior change over years is delivered on demand and exists because that specific customer asked for help — a service, wrapped around content.
The market rewarded it. Against a sea of free, commoditized finance content, The Motley Fool grew a global membership business by focusing on outcomes: helping people actually stick with a plan, learn, and feel more capable with money. That’s not a slogan about stock picks. It’s a claim about relationship over transaction — the intangible work of figuring out exactly what the customer needs before anything gets recommended.
From Services to Experiences
In the same way, when you customize your services, devising and delivering exactly what an individual wants or needs in a specific situation at a particular point in time, then you can’t help but make that customer go ‘Wow!’ You turn it into a memorable event – you turn it into an experience.
DeadHappy: When Life Insurance Becomes a Conversation About Living
The life insurance market is often a race to the bottom on price and features: term length, coverage amount, premium. Many providers treat customers as policies, not people with stories.
DeadHappy, a UK-based life insurer with “Dead” in its name, deliberately changes that conversation. Instead of hiding behind euphemisms, it uses bold, sometimes provocative creative to make people talk openly about death, money, and what they want to protect. The brand’s stance is not “buy our policy” but “let’s have an honest conversation about what matters to you and the people you love.”
That shift turns a standardized product into something more personal. A standard term policy is a commodity: same coverage, competing on price. DeadHappy’s approach — frank messaging, human storytelling, and a focus on the why behind coverage — makes the purchase feel like part of a larger life story: providing for family, funding dreams, or ensuring that a partner isn’t left struggling.
A broker selling a policy is customized service. A brand that helps someone articulate what they’re really protecting, and frames insurance as part of their hero’s journey toward security and peace of mind — that’s no longer just a service. It’s a story the customer becomes a character in. It’s the difference between “we sold you cover” and “we helped you clarify what you’re living for, and made sure that’s protected.”
Here we define experiences as memorable events that engage each individual in an inherently personal way. As the Progression of Economic Value shows, experiences are built atop services, just as services are formed around goods and goods are made from commodities. With experiences, a company uses goods as props and services as the stage to engage guests in a personal way. Those are exactly the right terms: where commodities are extracted, goods are made, and services delivered, experiences are staged. And where commodities have markets, goods users, and services clients, experiences have guests.
Recognize that experiences are a distinct economic offering, as distinct from services as services are from goods. Where goods are tangible and services intangible, experiences are memorable. If you do not create a memory within your guests, then you did not stage an experience. Further, while goods are standardized and services customized, experiences are inherently personal. No two people can have the same experience, even if they are in the same place at the same time, for the experience actually happens inside of them, in reaction to the events staged outside of them.
And where goods are inventoried after production and services delivered on demand, experiences are revealed over a duration of time. You cannot have an instantaneous experience; it must rise up to a climax and come back down again. With experiences, what customers value is the time they spend in the company’s (physical or virtual) place. In fact, people want both goods & services to be commoditized – to be bought at the lowest possible price and greatest possible convenience – in order to spend their hard-earned money and their even harder-earned time on the experiences they value more highly.
That is why according to Pine & Gilmore we live today in an Experience Economy. It has supplanted the Service Economy, which displaced the Industrial Economy based on goods, which overtook the Agrarian Economy based on commodities. Experiences have become the predominant economic offering, effectively causing services to be more and more commoditized, just as goods were before.
Beyond Experiences
But experiences can be commoditized as well. The second time you have an experience, it may not be as engaging as the first, and the third time not as good as the second. Pretty soon customers are saying ‘Been there, done that’ – the hallmark of a commoditized experience.
Trupanion: When Pet Insurance Becomes a Lifelong Care Partnership
Pet insurance started as a simple risk-transfer product: pay a premium, get reimbursed for vet bills. In many markets, it’s increasingly treated as a commodity: compare quotes, pick the cheapest, hope for the best.
Trupanion, founded in 2000, entered the market with a different story. From its first policy on a dog named Monty, the company positioned itself not as a claims processor but as a partner in pets’ lifelong health. It worked closely with veterinarians, focused on lifetime coverage, and emphasized high reimbursement rates so owners wouldn’t have to choose between cost and care.
That novelty is precisely what turned Trupanion into a phenomenon. Early on, few insurers offered this combination of transparency, vet alignment, and long-term orientation. But as the format scaled and competitors copied pieces of it, the risk grew that “pet insurance” would become just another line-item expense — a commoditized experience.
Trupanion’s response has been to deepen the relationship: tools that help owners budget for care, education that makes them better advocates for their pets, and a brand promise that centers on trust over decades, not just at claim time. The first Trupanion policy was a “Wow” — a new way to think about pet care. But once the format became repeatable — enroll, pay, claim, renew — the format itself risked becoming the product, and formats can be copied, anticipated, and eventually shrugged off.
Fittingly, the company’s next moves focus on strengthening the lifetime partnership: more proactive support, more integration with veterinary practices, and more emphasis on helping owners feel confident they can always do right by their pets. That solves the operational headache of “just paying claims,” but also quietly doubles down on the one structural feature that made the original experience hard to commoditize in the first place: a genuine, long-term care relationship.
So using the heuristic that customization is the antidote to commoditization, what happens when you customize an experience? When you design and stage an encounter that is tailored to an individual at exactly the right moment in time, you can’t help but turn it into a life-changing experience that transforms them in some way. Here, companies use experiences as the raw material to guide customers to change, to help them in achieving their aspirations, to become who they want to become. That is, economically, a transformation.
The Transformation Business
Many enterprises are naturally in the transformation business: health-care systems, counselors, fitness centers, financial firms, educational institutions, spiritual organizations, and coaches of all stripes, to name a few. They all work on personal transformations; many other enterprises are naturally in the business of B2B or organizational transformations, including management consulting, employee training and outsourcing, as well as much of technology, accounting and finance.
However, far too many view their offerings as mere services and fail to compete on guiding their customers in truly achieving their aspirations. Think of retail banking. Why do people choose one bank over another? Is it because of the interest rates? No, those are the commodities; every bank has similar rates, more or less. Is it because of apps, cards, and other banking equipment? No. How about transfers, payments, and other activities banks deliver. Not that either. Certainly, the in-branch experience, digital tools, and rewards – particularly trust and support – have a great deal to do with it. But fundamentally people go to a bank to gain control, security, and possibility; to have a better financial life; to increase their freedom; to make their hero’s journey to a new you. They choose a bank to be transformed.
As Virgin Money’s leadership has effectively declared through its purpose and aspirations: “We’re not just in the banking business. We are in the transformation business. We expect everyone who banks with us – whether for everyday transactions or major life events – to be transformed by the experience. We want people to look back on their time with us as something that significantly influenced their financial confidence and possibly even their entire life.”
That’s a different story, a different mindset and a different economic offering. And impact is a great word for it, for without an impactful change there is no transformation.
Ttansformation distinctions
Transformations are effectual outcomes that change individuals in a lasting way. Where experiences are memorable, transformations are effectual. Commodities, goods and services have no lasting consequence beyond their consumption, and even the memories of an experience fade over time. But buyers of transformations seek to be guided toward some specific aim or purpose. Without a change in values, behaviors, purpose, or some other fundamental aspect of self, no transformation occures. The transformation affects the very being, the identity, of the buyer.
Where experiences are inherently personal, transformations are fundamentally individual. While experiences happen inside of us, transformations change us from the inside out, whether we are talking about a consumer or a business. People value transformations above all other economic offerings because it adresses the why, the buyer’s aspiration. That’s also the reason companies that guide transformations ideally shouldn’t refer to their customers as users, clients or even guests, but rather as travellers.
And were experiences are revealed over a duration of time, transformations are sustained through time. Suppose you go to a nutritionist for a six week program to gain healthy eating habits, but three months later, you are back to your old habits. Or suppose your business hires a consulting company to stop wasteful practices, but the changes never really take. If the results fo these offerings prove impermanent, then there was no transformation but merely a momentary uptick (or downtick, as the case may be) along the same old journey. Transformations must last.
In sum, with transformations the customer is the product. Nothing you do for a customer matters unless the person achieves their aspirations and gets their desired outcome. That’s what it means to be in the Hero’s Journey business.
Of course, you cannot guaranteer your customers achieve their aspirations. All you can do is create the conditions under which travellers transform themselves. Therefore the economic funciton for transformations is guide. You are an experience stager but a transformation guider, leading customers along a journey from who they are today to who they want to become. Think of every transformation as a from/to statement: from out of shape to fit, from sick to well, from living paycheck-to-paycheck to being financially secure, from home cook to chef, from worker to manager, from employee to pensionado. Every one of these shifts is an aspiration that’s difficult to accomplish well – and in some cases at all – without a guide to help.
There is no greater economic value you can create than to help customers achieve their aspirations. That is the reasing the forthcoming Hero’s Journey Economy already comprises a large share of employment and GDP, not to mention a large share of customer’s desires, needs and aspirations.
It’s about Time
One reality underlying the Progression of Economic Value: the most precious resource on the planet is the time of individual human beings. That’s always been the case, and it’s a big reason people prefer buying food rather than growing it, or paying someone to sew their clothes or fix their cars rather than doing it themselves. Moreover, as people live longer and value experiences and transformations more highly, they value their time more highly.
After all, we have only a limited time on this earth to experience all we’d like to experience and become who we want to be and as that time is used, it can never be recovered.
What customers want from commodities, goods and services is time well saved: for someone else to so somehting so they don’t have to. Many companies, however, waste their customer’s time. Consider how contact centers intentionally reduce the time service representatives spend on the phone by compelling people to spend more time talking to machines. Or how retail stores staff their checkouts for the least personnel cost, not for the greatest customer demand – or offer self-checkout, commoditizing themselves by violating the basic contract of service companies: do activities for me.
Experiences offer time well spent: what people value is the time they spend with a company, having the experience it stages.
And transformations go beyond even that to guide time well invested. Travellers invest their time, with the help of the transformation guider, to achieve their personal and corporate aspirations, reaping dividends now and into the future. Companies that guide transformations should of course still concern themselves with time well spent – for we are all the products of our experiences. Through transformative experiences we gain much greater value from the compound interest of time well invested. For when you guide customers to achievetheir aspirations, you help them wisely spend that most precious resource, their time.
There are very few transformations that happen all at once. The real transformation almost always takes place after someone spends time reflecting, making meaning out of the experience, and integrating it into their life or work. In other words, many transformative experiences are required after the allegedly life-changing one. Yet many people do not reinforce their shift with subsequent pursuits and end up in the same place as before.
To avoid that result, someone’s investment must build on each experience, one afte the other, to yield the achievement of their aspirational desire. Such investment also creates greater economic value. Whether selling commodities, goods, services, experiences or transformations, the amount of money you can charge can only be as great as the value you create for customers, which is dependent on your effect on their time.
Value created = functionality provided + net value of time
In the formula’s last variable, when you waste your customer’s time, the net value of time is negative; in one way or another you have to discount your offerings to entice customers to buy from you. Time well saved essentially puts the net value of time at zero, a neutral result. Time well spent has a positive value, and time well invested in an even greater value enabling companies that guide transformations to gain a significant price premium.
What Business Are You Really In?
So if you want to get into the transformation business, recognize that it’s about time. It’s about ensuring your customers – your travellers – progressively gain time well invested with every ongoing encounter, each one contributing to the hero’s journeys they undergo.
Recognize, too, that it’s about time not only for your customers but for the people employed in your company whose time can likewise be wasted, saved, spent, or invested in creating economic value for the enterprise and personal value for them.
And it’s about time you determined once and for all what business you are really in. For those who decide they do not want to merely provide time well saved or stage time well spent, but rather to guide time well invested, the answer is to get into the transformation business.
Focusing on time well spent and time well invested enables you to shift up the Progression of Economic Value to offer experiences & transformations, respectively. If you do it well, and do it fully, then you can go beyond goods & services and shift the business you are in. Doing so forestalls the forces of commoditization, enables you to provide much value for your current as well as an entirely new set of customers, and thereby creates greater economic value for your enterprise.
That doesn’t mean you have to stop selling your current offerings; you can subsume them into transformations.
Short of directly being in the Hero’s Journey business – service providers – experience stagers as well – can supply those who are. Each economic offering is built atop the one below, so the hero’s journey guiders require the lower-level offerings to create their own economic offerings. They must therefore integrate experiences, services, goods and sometimes even commodities into one cohesive solution to determine and guide hero’s journeys. As with any business, there is a make or buy decision on which elements they create themselves and which they purchase from other enterprises.
Note that travellers – people as well as businesses – can act as their own general contractor and ‘hire’ everything they need. Think of a goal to live a healthier lifestyle. An aspirant could seek out organic foodstuffs, self help books, fitness-tracking devices and apps, fitness centers and a personal trainer, each one supporting them on their hero’s journey. This is in fact the way most hero’s journeys occur today.
Increasingly, however, travellers seek outside help from those who know how to do it better than they do. That is the core opportunity as hero’s journeys closely follow experiences as the basis of the economy, an opportunity best captured by charging explicitly for transformations.
You Are What You Charge For
While you can charge premium pricing with transformations, a business ultimately defines itself by what it charges for. If you charge for undifferentiated stuff, you’re in the commodities business. If you charge for tangible things, you are in the goods business. If you charge for the activities your people do, you are in the service business. So, economically, you are in the experience business if and only if you charge for the time customers spend with you. That means using an admission fee, a membership fee, or some other way of putting a price on a customer time. It’s not the ‘time and materials’ fees of so many service providers, which add up the hours workers spend on tasks, but customer’s time, for that is what they value with experiences, time well spent. You would not imagine, for example, entering the venue of any traditional experience – movies, plays, concerts, theme parks, sporting events – without paying adminission.
You are what you charge for. With the hero’s journeys, then, what customers value is achieving their aspirations. Inputs don’t matter, only outcomes. To align what you charge for with what your customers value, you must charge for the demonstrated outcomes your customers desire. Even if you choose not to charge for change, you’ll receive immense benefit from thinking through everything your enterprise does as though its income were dependent on customer outcomes – because ultimately it is.
A number of businesses already do so, notably consulting firms that get paid based on parameters of success, put some of their fees at risk, get bonuses based on overachievement, or take shares in clients so their income goes up (or down) with share prices. There’s a marked shift to charging for outcomes in health care where it is often called ‘value based payments’.
What do outcome-based fees do. First they send a signal that you as a business are serioius in helping your customers achieve their aspirations. Second, they’re a catalytic mechanism for designing your transformation offerings so that they yield the outcomes customers desire. And third, the money you make, based on the value you create, gives you the wherewithal to invest in your offerings to ensure you do everything possible in guiding each individual to recoup the time and effort they put in.
In short, outcome-based fees align what you charge for with what your customers value and put you economically in the hero’s journey business. They yield time very well invested on both sides of the economic equation.
Reflection
Contemplate what you’ve learned in this first chapter through these questions:
- what really struck and surprised you in this chapter? What might hold the biggest benefit for your business?
- where do you see your business today in the Progression of Economic Value? Can you ascend to the proposition that you can be in the transformation business?
- where do you waste customer time today? How can you flip that into time well saved or time well spent, and even time well invested?
- How might you charge for the demonstrated outcomes your customers achieve?
Preparation
Guiding transformations requires understanding your customer’s why, the aspirations behind their purchases from you. We will continue with the why behind the why: the reason people aspire at all. Answering these questions will help you embrace the lessons of the next chapter and more richly think about your business, your customers,and your life.
- What industry are you in today? If you ascend to the proposition that you are in the hero’s journey business, how would you then describe your industry?
- In just a few words, why do you think customers buy from your business, beyond the specific benefits your offerings provide?
- Given that, what is the why behind the why of your business? Why does your business exist?
- What do you think life is mainly about? Is it something more than being happy?
FOSTERING HAPPINESS
Customers buy an economic offering if and only if they believe it to be of greater value than the money they exchange for it. They must feel they’ll be better off – however they individually define the phrase – with the offering than with the cash in their pocket, purse, or account. Yes, they may be wrong. They may get carried away by a bright and shiny object. They may be illogical, emotional or shortsighted. But their goal is always to improve their existence, to progress, to be flourishing, to have a better life and live it more abundantly.
In short, to be happy.
The connection between purchasing an offering and happiness is most direct with transformations. Customers pay for a transformation only if they believe it will help them achieve an aspiration, that it will improve their lives in some significant way. All transformations guide aspirants to higher and higher degrees of happiness as human beings.
Understanding happiness
There has been a renaissance in the idea of happiness in the social sciences, philosophy, psychology and even economics over the past thirty years or so. But it has a long history, tracing back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the fourt century BC. He spoke of happiness (using the term eudaimonia) as the ‘highest good’ the end goal for what it meant to live a good life.
The field of positive psychology – where the work focuses on helping people live more fulfilling lives, rather than recover from trauma or deal with issues – specifically adresses happines. Martin Seligman, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Postive Psychology Center, jump-started the field in 1998 when he became president of the American Psychological Association. He realized that people needed more from positive psychology. In his book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being Selighman writes that the field’s goal is to increase the amount of happiness and flourishing in your own life and on the planet. He mentions the three core features of positive emotions, engagement/interest and meaning/purpose and states that thre of six additional features must be present: self-esteem, optimism, resilience, vitality, self-determination, and positive relationships.
These are all good elements, each one the subject of transformation offerings that would indeed help people thrive. But happiness is not an on-off switch, where either you have it or you don’t. There are degrees as it fluctuates over time, even as we endeavor to achieve higher and higher levels. Moreover, any definition of the term needs to recognize that what constitutes happiness differs for every individual. It is not a state to be attained but a multidimensional and ever-changing picture of where we stand today in relation to our possibilities for tomorrow, one that realizes we all have, to varying degrees, aspects of our lives that are not perfect, and that far too many of us have dimensions that on any scale would register on the negative side – as struggling, languishing, even dying.
Every transformation moves people to a higher degree of happiness, and even though few people may use the term to describe what they seek, it is precisely their aim when they exchange their money for transformation offerings, for the opportunity to achieve their aspirations.
So what is happiness? Think of it as the extent to which any of us is the way we are meant to be.
This definition intentionally leaves vague exactly who determines that meaning, which also differs for different people. Fulfilling the definition entails times of discovery as much as hero’s journeys, a pursuit that lasts a lifetime, with many, many transformations along the way. Helping travellers reach ever-higher degrees of happiness is the goal of all transformations: guiding people not only in changing their lives but in living them more abundantly. In improving not just who they are but the possibilities of who they can become. In not just being human but in growing as human beings, thriving as businesses, and blossoming as communities. In transforming people in some way to be more of wh they are meant to be.
At the Heart of Business
Fostering happiness is the true purpose of business, its raison d’etre. Customers buy economic offerings to enhance their lives, and your role is to design, create, and sell those offerings. This is true even when your enterprise sells to other businesses, for that business or the one it sells to after that, eventually reaches individuals who deserve to realize the life they want.
Supporting happiness is not a social responsibility; it is a business imperative. It is core to why companies exist at all, from time immemorial. And it’s imperative that we recognize this truth – and act accordingly.
Part and parcel of helping people better themselves as an enterprise is working to help your employees do so. Employees should never be treated as mere means to an end; as human beings, they are always ends in and of themselves. Employment with you is a means to the end of their own betterment, as they simultaneously help you foster the betterment of your customers.
TRUIST BANK
Truist Bank is a company that proclaims such a purpose ‘At Truist, our purpose is to inspire and build better lives and communities. And we do this through real, unwavering care. Care that creates more opportunities, lends a helping hand, and encourages people and businesses to thrive. By living on purpose – and bringing others along the journey – we can make our world better together.’
Perhaps the last kind of industry you’d expect to embrace happiness would be private equity, investment banking and other financing enterprises, but at least some such firms recognize that it’s not just about the money. Many years ago, I worked with a trust company that catered to the finances of high-net-worth individuals. One of its clients was a professional athlete who led a hardscrabble life until he made it big. As he aged and his kids got into their teens, he became very worried that they would grow up to the entitled snobs. They spent as much time on ensuring that the kids grew up well as on the family’s finances.
May capital firms go even further in making happiness core to their business. A sample:
- Wildwood Ventures, which focuses on ‘building and investing in human technology business that bring life to the full’ and that adresses ‘America’s health and wellness crisis for greater physical, mental, social and spiritual wellbeing
- Eventide Asset Management, whose tagline is ‘investing that makes the world rejoice’
- Commonwealth Impact Investing, which ‘harnesses the same entrepreneurial talent that creates wealth to create more opportunity for everyone to flourish’
Monon Capital LLC, whose chair and founder Doug Wilson tells ‘the company starts with need rather than returns’ and has a forty to fifty year time horizon on its investments. Its ‘foundation is engaging with partners so that we lift people above profit, celebrate imagination over habit, and invest in futures that outlast quick returns’. Monon fulfills this mission in part by investing substantially in a 100 million dollar, 28 acre master-planned community in Carmel, Indiana. It is a mixed-use community with light agriculture/manufacturing retail, and restaurants, in addition to a 200 unit apartment complex and a 240 unit senior living facility, with over five acres of green space. A central element of the apartment building is a setaside of forty of the units for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Whatever your business is, your economic offerings almost certainly foster happiness, at least to some extent. The higher up the Progression of Economic Value you go, the more you can do for your customers, and the more economic value you create with your enterprise. When you think about the highest level of being in the business of guiding transformations, think simultaneously about how your offerings could better enable your customers to flourish, how the thriving of your employees can better make that happen, and how both of those contribute to the blossoming of the communities in which you operate, of society overall, and even of the planet.
As you do, you’ll find it beneficial to better understand the territory of transformations, how exactly they foster happiness.
The Spheres of Transformation
Any enterprise in the business of helping people become healthy, wealthy and wise is in the hero’s journey business, as each of these represent different ways in which we aspire to be happy. Accidents of birth – DNA, country, year – greatly affect your starting point and your potential for becoming healthier, wealthier, and wiser, but progresson each of these aspirations drives people to higher and higher degrees of happiness.
These qualities express what I call a sphere of the Hero’s Journey Economy, a sector comprising all the companies focused on similar endeavors, business opportunities, and properties of flourishing. They each encompass huge swaths of businesses and their economic offerings, overlap to a point, and will expand over time as more of them embrace the value to be gained in guiding people in achieving their aspirations.
However, the phrase ‘healthy, wealthy and wise’ does not go near far enough in describing the opportunities in the emerging Hero’s journey Economy. It is not just about staying healthy; it is about having heath & well-being. It is not just about becoming wealthy; it is about having wealth and prosperity.
And it is not just about being wise; it’s about having knowledge & wisdom. Additionally, I’ll add one more : purpose & meaning. In facti this is the most important sphere within the Hero’s Journey economy, the one without which we simply cannot flourish. Let’s go through each in turn.
Health & Wellbeing
The health-care industry perhaps most clearly comprises companies in the transformation business. No one interacts with a health-care system unless they want to go (at the most basic level) from sick to well, to find out if they are impaired or injured, or to avoid falling ill in the first place.
We value the transformational benefits of health care to a much greater extent than most other offerings, and also much more highly than we used to, in part because of improvements in medicine in the past century. Again, it’s about time. Fundamentally, we value our time in this world much more than in the ancient past, when life was nasty, brutish and short, the distand past, when we worked more, had less leisure time, and didn’t live as long; and even the near past when we had yet to shift into the Experience Economy, with its abilitiy to fill our time engaginly. We don’t want to be sick, encumbered by injury, or otherwise unable to fully enjoy all the experiences that offer us time well spent, nor do we want to be incapable of investing in the transformations that enable us to flourish.
Note how each of the health factors in the last sentence is negatively stated. Health care primarily involves returning us from negative circumstances to postive ones. More and more, though, we desire higher levels of not just health per se, but well-being. Well-being encompasses the positive circumstances of and within ourselves that let us enjoy life and all the experiences – economic or noneconomic – afforded to us in this world. In other words, to be happy.
The general aspiration for well-being drives consumers to increasingly pay out of their own pockets for such offerings. I am talking about paying for massages and spas; fitness centers and personal trainers; yoga, meditation, and tai chi; health and wellness coaches; medical tourism and transformational travel; and on an on the list could go. And that’s not to mention devices such as Fitbit, Apple Watch, Oura, and Whoop nor apps such as Noom, Aura, Calm and Hallow, which allow us to track elements of our well-being and improve them.
Such apps and devices aren’t full transformation offerings, but they are transformational, an element that individuals can bring into their life to have greater health & well-being. Many companyies recognize the value in this. Other companies are innovating new-to-the -world transformations in this sphere.
Health & Well Being is easily the largest sphere of the Hero’s Journey Economy. It includes everything people buy to achieve health outcomes and have greater well-being, such as the transformational elements and full transformation offerings above. It also includes all the experiences, good and even commodities subsumed within transformations. Transformation guiders must integrate these together into their offerings to effect the change desired by their customers, though many people use them piecemeal, acting as their own general contractors to achieve their aspirations.
There isn’t a firm line as to what constitutes health and what constitutes well-being, but on the whole, health is the means to which well-being is the end. Where health care is largely objective, well-being is largely subjective. Health care commonly treats the disease or condition; well-being proactively impacts one’s whole life. And, in general, if someone else pays for it directly, it’s about health care. If you pay, it’s more likely to be about well-being.
Wealth & Prosperity
Wealth is the domain of banks, credit unions, wealth management, and other firms that go in the general category of financial service providers. Financial firms ostensibly are in the hero’s journey business, fulfilling aspirations people (and businesses) have for moeny, and especially for what wealth can do for them.
But few such firms recognize this. They all seem to describe their offerings with the phrase ‘products and services’. All such enterprises should banish that term – as well as the phrase ‘financial services’ from their vocabulary and instead recognize the value in offering financial transformations.
People value wealth preciesely because it enables most everything they want to have, benefit from, experience and be. Money is a means to an end. If financial firms ascertained and offered the ends, rather than merely advising on the means, they would create so much more value. But they must understand the why of each individual traveller, the reasons they desire to increase and use wealth. Such aspirations include having a new child, affording a house, renovating a home, taking an annual vacation, covering college tuition for the kids, starting a business, caring for parents, and retiring, with every specific aspiration as individual as the person – or family or business – desiring it.
Unfortunately, the endemic mindset of the industry focuses companies on their products & services rather than the desires, needs and aspirations of their customers. If they instead were customer-focues,they would both charge more for their existing offerings and create many more to supply the outcomes customers truly desire.
Now, there may be no sectors more regulated than banking and insurance and wealth management can’t be far behind. If you’re in one of these industries – and if your business solely focuses on the commodity of money, then ‘industry’ is an appropriate term – you probably can’t imagine how you could get around regulations in order to focus on aspirations. If you don’t move beyond products & services you will eventually be commoditized and become a supplier to those that form relationships with people based on their aspirations rather than their money.
You can start by creating sister firms or partnering with those that recognize your clients as travellers and offer them the achievement of their aspirations while you focus on their wealth. One wealth management firm, for example, partnered with Carefull, a financial safety fintech that protects people – especially seniors – from fraud, scams, identity theft, and even their own mistakes. The company incorporates its capabilities into the offerings of wealth advisers, banks, credit unions and insurers and lets them handle the relationshop with clients. Todd Rovak: ‘In addition to the benefit of clients who are and feel financially safe, it helps financial advisers have conversations with their clients that they never otherwise would, treating them holistically as human beings. Adn they include in those conversations and extend the relationship to the next generation of clients, those who do or will care for their parents, who so often go elsewhere after inheriting money’.
Of course, fiinancial safety – plus financial stability and money management skills – provides the bare minimum for shifting to wealth transformations. Recall all the aspiration topics given above: children, homes, vacations, businesses, parents, retirement, plus many more you could think of. What kinds of conversations would such topics engender, what types of goals would they elicit and what sorts of differences would they make in gaining, managing and growing the accounts, portfolios and insurance policies that would ensure travellers have ways to achieve their aspirations across these arenas?
The umbrella term for such beyond-money aspirations is prosperity. There’s certainly some overlap between prosperity and the previous sphere’s well-being, which simply means that happiness can be approached from many different angles. And you can have such prosperity at whatever socioeconomic level you are at. It is not the sole province of the rich, nor is helping people with their wealth the sole domain of those who consider themselves to be in financial services today.
Look at how Apple, Amazon and Wallmart all moved into these businesses, catering to people across the socioeconomic spectrum. Of the latter two in particular, think also of how much money they save families because of their relentless focus on bringing down the cost of retail goods, moeny that you can spend on experiences & transformations or whatever else it is that you desire for you and your family.
Pundits already view Walmart, Amazon and Apple as disrupters in health care and financial products & services. The myriad other companies innovating new technologies and economic offerings are, potentially, too. They further increase the competition – and chances of commoditization – for those who still view themselves as being in financial services rather than in the hero’s journey business.
Recognize that, as with all the first spheres, the first term in wealth & prosperity leads to the second. Where wealth is largely objective prosperity is largely subjective. Financial firms manage money: prosperity impacts the life of the individual and family, and in B2B it impacts the core concerns of the business. In general, if the conversation starts with money, it is financial services. If it starts with you, it’s more likely to be about prosperity.
Knowledge & Wisdom
Education is also fundamentally a transformation industry. Parents have aspirations for the education of their children. They may pay for many classes, courses and programs outside of school based on the personal interests and tastes of their kids and themselves. Governments have great interest in transforming citizens into productive and contributing members of society through education, spending a lot of money to do so. Education affords individuals – as people, as consumers, as workers – greater possibilities for their futures as their knowledge grows. They want actionable knowledge and practical wisdom that actually improves their lives, that fulfills their aspirations for learning, working, living and being.
Wisdom is not about acquiring knowledge in and of itself; it is about the outcomes we derive from that knowledge in our lives, outcomes that yield flourishing. It is about applying what we learn with perspective and judgment, about shifting from knowing to doing. Wisdom is not the sole realm of the learned – scholars, academics, experts, intellectuals and the like. Everyons seeks knowledge that improves their work, home life and relationships with families and friends. Over time that practical knowledge turns into principles, applications, and decisions that reflect everyday know-how.
Knowledge & Wisdom is the proper, most expansive name for this sphere of transformation, of helping people gain knowledge, turn it into wisdom and thereby reap an impact on their lives. It’s what education, however gained, is for.
This sphere is not just about the intellectual; we gain knowledge & wisdom outside of formal education, including the kinetic/embodied, know-how, emotional and other forms of experiental learning.
Wisdom derives from knowledge, just as knowledge derives from information. Knowledge is experiential information, intelligence gained from and applied through experiences. And knowledge & wisdom necessarily reside in the brains of human beings. If something can be represented in symbols – or codified, residing in computer code – and embedded with context in technology (from books to computers to AI) then it is neither wisdom nor knowledge until someone reads, absorbs, and learns from it. It’s mere data, which with context becomes information, pure and simple, no matter how ‘artificial intelligently’ it might be derived.
Knowledge is the means to which wisdom is the end. Where knowledge is largely objective, wisdom is largely subjective. Education institutions focus too much on imparting instruction rather than impacting lives, as all who understand they are in the sphere of knowledge & wisdom should be doing. And in general, if it involves the acquisition of intelligence, it is about knowledge; if it involves application of that knowledge, it ‘s about wisdom.
Purpose & Meaning
The final sphere of transformation is purpose & meaning. These have been enormous factors in happiness throughout history. People not only desire but need to have meaning in their lives; it is core to who we are. And it is often in fulfilling our purpose that we gain meaning.
Meaning is innate to being human, and a sphere in which people commonly seek transformation. Without it, people perish, as the psychologist and Holocaust survivor Dr. Viktor Frankl made clear in his seminal book Man’s Search for Meaning. He found that the primary determination of which Jews survived concentration camps during World War II and which did not was whether they found meaning even amid the most depraved of circumstances imaginable. He further argued that ‘the quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing’.
In Abrahm Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, the highest order one is self-actualization, which he wrote ‘might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming’. In other words self-actualizationg is all about flourishing through transformation. The lowest order need is the physiological, particularly the body’s need to maintain itself through food and water, and above that comes safety, then love, and above that esteem, before reaching the level of self-actualization. But Frankl argued that meaning is in fact the essential, basic, lowest-order need, one for which we often require guidance.
Human beings have long gained meaning from religion and spirituality through organizations. Despite the transformational benefits, these organizations are not by nature businesses, – although many operate as such.
People do find meaning in many other pursuits, though, especially in family and other relationships. What we buy, use and experience also reflects our individual searches for meaning. And we often look to businesses as wel. think of companies that offer a percentage of profits to charitable organizations, or products made from recycled goods for those more sustainably minded. Each of these areas offers opportunities to contribute to meaning and purpose for customers.
Given how much time they spend at work, people of course find meaning in their occupations too. Work has a certain dignity, being a core element of what it means to be human. Helping employees discover and act on their personal sense of purpose benefits them not just as workers but as people.
In general if it entails how you impact the world, it’s about purpose; if it entails how the world impacts you, it’s about meaning. Purpose & meaning thus go hand in hand. As with each of the other spheres of transformation, the first term is the means to which the second term is the end. Health is the means of well-being. wealth is the means of prosperity. Knowledge is the means of wisdom. And purpose is the means of meaning.
Embracing the Spheres
If your enterprise fits anywhere among the four spheres of transformation, then you need to think about how you design and depict transformations, how you create and guide them, how you help customers achieve their aspirations and therefore flourish.
And if you do not already guide transformations today, consider how you can bring one or more of these sphers into your business, extending your offerings – commodities, goods, services, or experiences into transformations focused on why people buy whatever you sell today.
You might find that at least some of your business (es) have elements that lend themselves to guiding transformatons across one or more of the spheres. Even if you never sell transformations per se, you can contribute to human flourishing by being transformational through offerings that guiders or customers themselves can integrate into a full-fledged transformation. Consider just some of the possibilities: In commodoties, organic produce can boost health & well-being, while working the land can help in finding purpose & meaning. In goods, financial instruments help attain wealth & prosperity, while books – nonfiction and self-help volumes among them – assist with gaining knowledge & wisdom. In services, banks, credit cards, and financial apps help attain wealth & prosperity, while classes, videos and tutoring support knowledge & wisdom. And in experiences, fitness centers, spas, and yoga boost health & well-being, while religious gatherings, retreats and communal memberships help with finding purpose & meaning.
Remember, too, the Progression of Economic Value: each offering subsumes the ones below it. transformations are only ever guided through experiences; experiences are staged atop service activities; services are delivered using physical goods; and goods are manufactured out of commodities. You and your business can contribute at any of these levels, and can contribute more effectively and create more value by recognizing the outcomes for which people buy your offerings. The greatest opportunities lie in shifting up to guiding transformations as your economic offering.
Moreover, you need not confine yourself to any one sphere. Intentionally embracing multiple spheres and doing so more fully can magnify the value of what you sell. As you endeavor to shift up to guiding transformatons, simultaneously work to identify your enterprise within these four spheres, somewhere. If you see opportunities in more than one – great! After all, the four overlap and support each other. Knowledge enables prosperity. Prosperity facilitates well-being. Wealth and health govern and influence the pursuit of purpose. Having that purpose fuels the pursuit of wisdom, engenders well-being, and shapes a personal sense of what it means to be prosperous. And around and around we could go.
For again, at the intersection of the four spheres, at their very heart, lies their shared commonality: they together foster human flourishing. They are what business is for.
Reflection
Think about happiness as the raison d’etre of business and how it flows through the four spheres of transformation and then reflect on these questions:
- How is your business today contributing to happiness? Are there any ways in which you are detracting from it?
- No matter the level of your current offerings, where are you operating in the four spheres of transformation? How can you intensify, deepen, or expand your offerings in your current sphere(s) of operation?
- Where might you provide value for current or new customers in one or more of the other spheres?
Preparation
Now that you understand the great opportunities to contribute to happiness by guidding transformations, let’s take a moment to understand travellers and their aspirations more fully. Ask yourself these questions:
- How would you describe your current customer mix? Do you sell directly to individual customers (B2C) to other businesses (B2B, or something else?
- Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Why do people buy from you? What are their aspirations, and what are the transformations they desire?
- What might cause customers to have those aspirations? What might contribute to their desire to transform?
UNDERSTANDING TRAVELLERS AND ASPIRATIONS
All transformation is identity change. Which is strange, if you think about it, for the word ‘identity’ comes from a Latin root meaning ‘same’ and is closely related to the term ‘identical’. By definition, an identity can’t change.
And there is a sense in which you are the same as you were a decade ago, as a youth, as a child, even at birth. Some essence of you never wavers.
What we’re really talking about with transformation offerings, though – with their economic distinction of being fundamentally individual – is change in self-identity. In how you, as an individual, describe your own being. A transformation, then, occurs any time you can complete the statement ‘I was X, now I am Y’. The Y of how you now think about yourself is often expressed with adjectives: ‘I am fit’, ‘I am not sick’ and so forth. But it might also be done with nouns ‘I am a gardener’, ‘I am a pianist’ ‘I am a storyteller’ Since our agency and our sense of self are very intertwined, people often use agent nouns to express identity. And we often use adjectives to express the extent, degree, or level to which we have an identity: I am a professional pianist’.
Of course, we can complete the transformation statement in ways that do not signify lasting change or that regard trivial matters ‘I was tired, now I am energized’. Such prosaic changes do not rise to the level of the economic. They represent changes in state, not changes in being.
Those changes that do denote a lasting, significant shift in being, however, always involve some aspect of identity. It may be a central aspect of self, some part of your essence that no longer works for your current life, as so often happens when beginning a new life stage, such as becoming an adolescent, becoming a parent, getting married, going through a midlife crisis. It may be an attitude, behavior, or action that you wish to change. It may be your values. Maybe even your mindset, worldview, or personal purpose of why you exist.
Transformations within each of these aspects can lead to greater flourishing in your life, but they can be difficult to achieve on your own. People so often need help, someone to guide them though the shift from X to Y.
In order to effect such transformations within your customers, you need to know much more about them, traveller by traveller and aspiration by aspiration. This chapter, then, focuses on understanding who your customers are (the X) and what they aspire to become (the Y).
VARIETIES OF ASPIRANTS
Ask yourself, Who are you guiding? There are in fact four varieties of travellers for which you can guide transformations:
- People: Individual consumers, employees, or members of a community
- Businesses: Enterprises, including such entities as nonprofits, religious establishments, and governmental institutions
- Organisations: A set of employees with a collective identity within a business or other institution
- Communities: Groups not affiliated with any of the businesses above, such as associations, neighborhoods, and other sets of loosely affiliated people, scaling up to include societies, countries and the world
While most examples I’ve described thus far have been of guiding human beings who aspire to transform themselves, not all travellers are individual people – those are but one variety, though a very common one. Anyone who comes to you with a goal to change themselves falls into this category. Most businesses cater specifically to this group and stop there.
But companies also have aspirations and need guidance in transforming themselves. This provides the entire basis of the consulting industry and many others that work to help enterprises become better businesses, including outsourcing, banking and technology. Think of it as the new biz business, where companies can help their B2B customers become organisationally healthy, financially fit, wise in how they approach their objectives and customers and purposeful in how they operate.
Indeed, every company that sells to other companies should be on the lookout for transformation opportunities. No customer buys your offering – whether a piece of equipment, hours of a consultant’s time, or facilitation of a team-building offsite – for the offering itself. It is always a means to an end. Sell the end – operational efficiency, the new strategic direction the consultant helps you develop, or better relationships between team members – rather than the means, and you will both transform your customers and gain greater economic value.
When your travelleers are bsuinesses, all the ideas, principles, and frameworks in this journey still apply. Recognize that companies have a vested interest in not only the capabilities of their employees but also their health & well-being so they can apply those capabilities; their wealth & prosperity so they desire this particular employment ; their knowledge & wisdom so they can perform, innovate and improve the business; and their purpose & meaning, which nurture intrinsic motivation and advance organisational alignment.
Accomplishing the transformations for which businesses so often hire consultants almost always requires altering not just the business itself but the organisation, the third kind of traveller. Being an assembly of individual employees with a collectieve identity (often framed as ‘culture’ or ‘DNA ‘) the organisation is not the same as the business. Organisational transformation often must precede business transformation, especially when an organisation seeks its own preservation rather than that of its customers. So while businesses do desire transformations to be better equipped for changing times and new opportunities, often they must first pursue remedial transformations when the organisation is too bureaucratic, sclerotic, and product-centric to become open, agile and customer centric.
Communities form the final variety of travellers and can scale from enighborhoods to societies. People buy 4ocean bracelets not because they are special in and of themselves, but because the organisation promises that each purchase enables it to remove five pounds of trash from the ocean, making people feel like a part of a community that cares for the environment and does something about it. Dutch consulting and design agency includi specializes in turning public settings into third places.
By definition, customers are the ones who pay you money – but they are not the only ones for whom you can guide transformations. Often customers have aspirations for someone else and are willing to pay for a transformation for such a beneficiary. Parents, for instance, often pay on behalf ot their children, wether for tutoring, taekwon do classes or guitar lessons. Businesses pay for employees to take courses to learn new skills, take time off to enhance their well-being, and even take retirement. Learning and development departments exist solely for employee transformations, with benefits to the enterprise in higher-skilled employees and to the workers themselves in gaining knowledge and abilities to further their careers. In all such situations where a customer hires you to transform a beneficiary in achieving the aspiration – no matter who originated it – while meeting the desires of the one who’s paying for it.
People flourish alongside other people, as part of organisations, inside businesses, and within communities. No matter what business you are in, whatever genre of economic offering you sell is for one or more of these varieties. And pretty much every customer you have today aspires to change one or more aspects of who they are. By shifting up the Progression of Economic Value to guide transformations you can foster happiness individually and collectively. You can lead businesses in thriving. And you can help communities blossom.
Catalysts for Change
Tr instigation.
avellers across these categories perceive something in themselves that they want to change, formulate an aspiration to define that change, and, if they need help in making it happen, hire a business to guide them, creating economic opportunities.
Which raises a question: where do aspirations come from? Understanding the catalyst for the desire to transform helps you design the right transformation offerings, and can even spark aspirations that people, organisations, businesses and communities decide they would like to achieve.
Major changes are perhaps most often instigated and planned by travellers themselves. Such directed catalysts include going to college, entering a new market, becoming more agile, or acquiring another company. You recognize that you want change, and initiate, plan and go on a transformation journey that is completed long after its instigation.
While emotions remain significant in every decisioin, you generally need to make more of an intellectual pitch to directed travellers to show you have what it takes to get them on the other side. Having a point of view about how travellers should change, as management consultants typically do, can be of great benefit.
But directed transformations are not the only way people are pushed to change. I see three other catalysts: disruptions, deviations and discovery.
Many transformations that people undergo are catalyzed by a shock or trauma in their lives. On the personal side, such disruptions could include a diagnosis of heart disease or other health scare, ad death in the family, or the loss of a job. In business, it could be a large financial hit or disruptive innovation in an industry. These may seem to come out of the blue and can prove to be of enough magnitude to change how we live or manage, often instantly. If we then don’t let the disruption just happen to us but take control of it and transform positively, we can use the event as a force for good – for us, our family or friends, or organisation or business, our community even society at large.
With disruptions think about referring to aspirations not with the typical from/to statements but with transforming/into statements such as transforming pain into purpose, devastation into determination, or distress into opportunity. The goal should be not just eliminating the effects of the disruption but working through them to find a new, higher level of flourishing, especially in finding meaning in it.
Also unexpected are deviation catalysts, when something happens to you, often suddenly as you go about your everyday life and ends up stimulating an aspiration. Deviations include such seemingly minor events as seeing a TV show that inspires you to modify your behavior, finding a book in the library that shifts your thinking, or meeting someone at a coffee shop who opens up a new pursuit. Professionally, deviations could be an unexpected promotion or stretch opportunity, research that changes how you approach a project, or the proverbial watercooler conversation.
A deviation catalyst might immediately spark desire, but it may take a while for the aspiration to form, and even longer for the person to seek help from a transformation guider. When the aspiration does come, it may be ill formed, so collaborate with the person to draw out its nature and extent, resulting in a concrete, individual from/to statement. Also be careful not to scare off travellers with too grandiose a transformation plan. Over time an objective that started small can take on greater and greater magnitude and become a major change.
The final category, discovery catalysts, happen during some planned experience you sought – all experiences contain within them the possibility of transformation – with its instigation usually immediate but not nearly as major as a disruption. Such discoveries can happen in areas as varied as attending a thought-provoking play, hearing an enlgihtening message, traveling to a stunning destination, or visiting an inspiring museum – each one a potential spark of aspiration. Professionally, discovery catalysts can come into play when you encounter something you have not seen or thought of before, such as new technology unveiled by your R&D organisation or another company.
As a transformation guider, you can often prompt people to make a discovery that instigates a transformation that you can then lead them in. Trade shows, conferences and other events prove great vehicles for discovery, as do travel, conventions and retail outlets – especially flagship experiences – for consumers.
Ah, but all roads lead to desire. In every case, the catalyzing incident results in a transformational desire, an intention, an aspiration. With discovery you may have to reflect on your experience and internalize it before a desire sparks; with deviation you may feel that spark almost instantly; with disruption you may have to unpack your emotional responses before that desire arises; and with directed catalysts a major decisioin in your life or business may yield not just one but perhaps a cascade of aspirations.
Each of those desires sets transformation journeys in motion through the aspirations of individuals.
Types of Aspirations
As noted transformation always entails identity change, a shift in the story you tell yourself about yourself. When philosophers analyze the subject, though, only deep and personal changes count, such as those in central beliefs, worldview, purpose and values or what might be called core aspects of identity.
However as long as they change one or more aspects of identiy, changes that are shallow and mere are just as much transformations as those that are deep and core. They simply arise from different types of aspirations. By understanding the nature of aspirations, you can determine what type of transformation you can offer, and how to guide it.
Thinking Epistemicallly
When the transformation is deep, highly personal and substantial, involving profound identity change, the aspiration is best called one of metamorphosis. The word is used in biology to refer to a change (meta) in form (morph) such as frogs going from egg to tadpole to adult, salmon transmuting physiologically to move from fresh water to salt water (and back again) and caterpillars becoming butterflies (which comprises multiple metamorphoses, actually: from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis and finally to butterfly).
The term ‘metamorphosis’ was first used,though, to refer to human transformation, particularly that done by ‘magic’ or ‘witchcraft’. Today it’s not about such mystical and fictional means; aspirations of metamorphosis refer to a longing for identity change, which as we shift to the Hero’s Journey Economy often entails the guidance of companies.
Thinking Economically
Metamorphoses that involve a wholesale change in identity are real, impactful, even momentous – but remain relatively uncommon. The vast majority of transformations do not change core aspects of self. So even though the idea of the only true transformation being one of metamorphosis may be perfectly appropriate in philosophy, in business it is much too strict. In thinking about transformations as a distinct economic offering, people want not just deep but shallow change – and everything in between. And aspirations for identity transformation need not involve such sweeping change that you no longer even recognize your former self (whether as individual person, organisation, business or community).
So understand aspirations as having two primary dimensions of change: quality and scale. With the former, aspirations can range from differences in kind to differences in degree. Changes in kind do indeed transform your identity epistemically in core aspects such as essence, values, and purpose.. Such aspects are about being in the world. Changes in degree, on the other hand, shift noncore, more peripheral aspects of identity, as with attitudes, behaviors, and actions, but also include aptitudes, capabilities, skills and other ways of acting in the world.
Aspirations for changes in both kind and degree can range in scale from large to small. Large-sceale aspirations seek to affect us greatly, endeavoring to shift the trajectories of our lives. But we also long for those on a smaller scale that nonetheless affect us in important ways. There’s no need to denigrate these aspirations with terms such as ‘shallow’, ‘superficial’ or ‘mere’ for they still represent human longings for life changes; they also represent economic opportunities for businesses that can guide individuals through them.
These dimensions, then, yield four different types of aspirations.
Metamorphosis.
For the examples of large scale changes, aspirants do largely approach them with their eyes open to the transformations desired. In such cases, the conception of self may precede the transformation of self. Transformation guiders then need to work on the actual transformation as well as hel travellers reconcile the two over time.
In other cases the change in the conception of self comes after the actual transformation, as with impostor syndrome, where say you graduate from law school, pass the bar to officially become a lawyer, join a firm, and yet feel deeply inadequate to the tasks you’re expected to do, because you’ve never done them. You feel like an impostor, unable to get comfortable in your own lawyerly skin. So you fake it til you make it by acting as if you know what you’re doing, until eventually, one day, you realize you no longer think about the disconnect and can say Well, now I am a lawyer!’. You already were a lawyer in the eyes of the bar, your company, your clients – everyone but yo. Not all conceptions of self reflect reality. In such cases the transformation guider – the law school in this case, but in others it could be coaches, HR departments, and so on – should prepare travellers for exactly this eventuality, and continue to guide long after the transformation seems fulfilled, at least until travellers actually complete their identity change.
Cultivation
There are other facets of identity change that don’t involve wholesale, comprehensive changes but nonetheless remain differences in kind. These are cultivation aspirations. They include such economic actionas as joining a fitness center or becoming a vegan to cultivate a healthier lifestyle (I am a healthy person) shifting your savings from a bank to a wealth management firm to cultivate financial well-being (I am financially set) taking community educational classes to cultivate a new interest in say theatre (I am a theatre maven). These same sorts of cultivations exist in businesses, where companies may focus for a time on programs that, say, foster learning organisations, raise emotional intelligence or enhance creativity all as means to serve the ends of improving the business itself.
Whether within people, businesses or other entities, such cultivations can embed themselves into core identiy deeply enough that they become major changes over time. They can deeply affect values (financial stewardship is important for me’, ‘All employees should have access to well-being resources) beliefs (Everyone should eat healthy) and essence (We are a learning organisation).
Ambition
Many changes are in degree, not of kind, denoting aspirations for transformation in noncore, more peripheral facets of self. You have an existing element of self and decide you want to improve, boost or enhance it. When large in scale, such aspirations are ones of ambition. While not like those of metamorphosis, they can still lead to great changes in one’s life.
Your ambition may be to greatly improve at tennis, and so you take lessons and practice, play and practice some more until you reach the level of your ambition. Maybe you are a programmer and recognize the explosion of generative AI, and so you enroll in courses and earn certificates to prepare for and then take advantage of the career possibilities. Perhaps you’re a follower of a particular religion and have the ambition to grow deeper in your faith, and so you read books, attend services regularly, join affilitated clubs or groups and go to conferences to learn more, and to be more. Or maybe you’ve always enjoyed dabbling with filming and decide you want to get better at it – not to become an auteur but an accomplished amateur – so you see more movies to study technique, take classes on the subject, and experiment with longer and more involved filming.
Businesses have their own set of ambitions, such as to work with greater efficiency, produce fewer defects, create better marketing, sell more offerings, devise better channels, innovate more quickly or generate a smaller environmental footprint. Each one of these involves changes in degree, not in kind, as with the personal ambitions above.
Ambitions can slip into changes in kind over time, at least within particular identity contexts (and constructs). A core facet of your identity in tennis may shift, for example, from ‘beginner’ to ‘average’ to ‘advanced’ or in business from mediocre manufacturer’ to ‘high-quality producer’ to ‘best-in’class enterprise’. And while for you those may be core facets, for others they remain peripheral. You need to look out for such shifts when fulfilling ambition aspirations.
Refinement
Finally in other cases you want small-scale change in some facet of your identity, merely desiring a refinement in it. You enjoy gardening, so you tart to read magazines, talk with others who garden and watch videos to learn more. Such small scale changes in degree could apply to anything you enjoy, relish care for, delight in , or even love – wine, coffee, Italian food, cigars, running reading and more.
Refinement transformations lack a desire for large-scale change, but rather involve honing, polishing sharpening upgrading or otherwise improving some element of your current identity. Indeed, there isn’t an example of ambition I’ve described, whether of a personal or professional nature, that couldn’t also have the smaller scale nature of refinement. They can easily bleed into teach other, with some gray area in between, depending on the level of desire. In some senses, then when designing and guiding the transformaton, it may not make that much difference in discerning whether a particular aspiration is of small or large scale, for either the traveller or the company. But if an aspiration does shift over that line into ambitious territory, there may be some psychological aspects that are worth understanding and adressing, such as being unsure of actually being able to achieve the aspiration or guide the transformation, as the case may be. Some travellers simply may not have the innate talent, ability or suitability to achieve certain ambitions, while levels of refinement remain available to all.
Thinking transformationally
While metamorphosis may take the lion’s share of thought among philosophers and other academics, cultivation, ambition, and refinement prove equally valid types of aspirations, each one representing a longing for change and therefore an opportunity for companies to guide them. Though metamorphosis remain the most impactful and valuable, the other three types of aspirations offer more business opportunities.
Metamorphosis aspirations are clearly the outlier, distinct from the rest. These are so often instigated by trauma or other causes that so greatly disrupt people’s lives. They call for deep transformations that, even if the catalyst happens in a flash, generally require quite a long time. Almost by its very nature, wholesale change engages the whole person, so often proving emotionally gripping, physically engrossing intellectually stimulating and even spiritually invigorating. But not always in a positive way; it can also be emotionally laden, physically strenuous, intellectually intimidating, and even spiritually challenging. As such, wholesale change places a high degree of responsibility on you as a transformation guider to act in the best interests of your travellers, and deal with them as whole people, not collections of identity facets or aspirations.
Ambitions generally take a long time as well, depending on the starting point, the end aspiration and the aspirant. Here you don’t want to neglect the whole person, of course, but you need a greater focus on those aspects of them that affect the ambition. Such large-scale changes in degree tend to be concentrated, centering in one of four ways of engaging people – emotionally, physically, intellectually and spiritually – as well as in only one of the four sphers of transformation, although they often expand beyond these precisely becaus of their large-scale nature.
That is much less true of cultivation and refinement aspirations. Both are much more limited in scope, and even though cultivation affects core elements of identity, it doesn’t reach the essence that causes people to question who they are. Cultivation and refinement can be treated more in isolation, enabling you as a transformation guider to be more focused on the aspiration at hand and the means to achieve it.
So when you determine that transformations are the business you are really in, consider, too, what aspirations you want to guide travellers in achieving based on what catalysts spark the desire. Then you must determine which transformative experiences you can best use to do so, how best to stage those experiences, how to create full transformation offerings designed for each type of aspiration and how to design the right series of experiences to not only effect the transformations but sustain them through time – and even how to charge for the economic value you create within each traveller. And that is exactly what you will learn from the next four parts of the journey.
Reflection
This chapter discussed identity change and how to better understand your travellers and their aspirations. Consider these questions:
- Recall that all transformation involves identity change, going from ‘I was X, now I am Y’. How might your customers complete that statement? Come up with a number of possibilities.
- What variety of customers do you sell today – and who might you sell tomorrow? Are you focused on one group in particular, or more than one?
- For what types of aspirations might you create transformations? How do your current offerings fit into these ideas?
Preparation
As you contemplate what you’ve learned about aspirations, think too, about your current and potential offerings and how you can use those to create transformations:
- If you aren’t yet in the experience business, how might you stage experiences that will effect change?
- If you stage experiences, what more can you do to make them truly transformative?
- What reinforcing activities might you undertake to help your customers sustain the effects of transformation over time
SHIFTING FROM EXPERIENCES TO TRANSFORMATIONS
The art and practice of guiding transformations subsumes that of designing and staging experiences. It begins by recognizing that experiences are not monolithic and can have different levels of engagement that themselves progress upward to successively offer more value. This extends from merely memorable, to highly meaningful, to deeply transporting and finally to truly transformative. These experiences can then be subsumed within full transformation offerings that guide customers in achieving their aspirations.
Memorable experiences
Recall the definition of experiences as distinct economic offerings : memorable events that engage each individual in an inherently personal way. Note that first word: memorable. For an offering to be a true, distinctive experience, it must create a memory, the remnant that lingers long after it is over – and the longer the better. If there is no memory, there was no experience. Period.
To be memorable, you must be engaging, reaching inside of people and creating the experience within them. Commodities, goods, and services exist outside of us, while experiences happen inside of us, which is what makes them inherently personal. When people think of being engaged, generally they think only of emotional engagement – triggering happiness, sparking surprise, building suspense, and so forth. But as mentioned previously, you can engage people not only emotonally but physically, intellectually and spiritually. All four contribute to happiness so when designing experiences never confine yourself to simply designing for emotions. Think of such traditional examples as sporting events, concerts, plays and museums. Or more recent varieties, including movies, TV and radio programs, usergenerated videos, and digital games. Entirely new genres pop up every year, such as the recent innovations of escape rooms, game cafés, esports centers, axe-throwing venues, immersive art exhibits, competititive socializing nights, and on and on the list could go. Each of these offers something engagingly memorable.
Meaningful experiences
Meaningful experiences add a level of significance to us as individuals. Such experiences connect wit us more strongly, particularly in appealing to our humanity, to our personal sense of purpose, to our identity in some way.
Some events have more potential for meaning than others. Examples. What gives meaning to each of us is of course highly subjective. We individually determine how significant something is based on who we are and our personal identities. So a gray area forms between these first two levels of experiences, where a particular event may be memorable for some but meaningful to others; naturally, anything relating to the sphere of purpose & meaning proves inescapably meaningful. Indeed, meaning is created by the individual in reaction to and in concert with the experience.
Transporting experiences
When you create memorable and meaningful experiences, you have the further opportunity to make them transporting. Transporting experiences instill wonderment, shift you beyond the present moment and move you metaphorically to another realm, to a transcendent and liminal space and time. They do not by themselves change who you are, but can greatly change your state of heart, mind, body and spirit while more easily leading to the truly transformative.
One way to be transported is through what psychologist Abraham Maslow called peak experiences, which create moments of highest happiness and fulfillment and are ‘rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilirating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality and are even mystic and magical in their effect. Peak experiences enable individuals to transcend their daily lives through euphoric events, including a runner’s high, having a eureka moment, undergoing a religious encounter, feeling a burst of love, reading an inspirational book, or playing movie music.
Another way to be transported is flow. Psychologist Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi named this type of phenomenon and described it as an optimal experience where the challenges you face are relatively balanced with your skills. When the challence exceeds your skill level, you grow anxious, while having too high a skill level leads to boredom. But by striking the right balance you shift into a state of elevated engagement and face the endeavor with passion and persistence. Csikszentmihalyi’s research found that flow ‘provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It further changes our perception of time, bestowing freedom from the tyranny of time. I love that phrase – freedom from the tyranny of time – and in gaining that freedom we escape the routine, shed the mundane, exhilarate our emotions, excite our senses, energize our bodies and elate our minds.
A third way of having and creating transporting experiences, one that deserves special attention, is awe. While the word originally referred to great fear (once upon a time, anything ‘awesome’ terrified people) it came to mean solemn and reverential wonder, an experience of smallness in the face of greatness. While I told earlier about transporting experiences taking us out of present space and time, the key element of awe is taking you outside of your self. You lose yourself, sometimes to then find yourself again.
Most of the awe-filled stories you read or hear about or encounter yourself (particularly those involving moral beauty – other perople’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming) do not arise from staged experiences per se. Yet it is entirely possible to design and depict, awe-inducing experiences – just as with peak and flow experiences and any others that transport us.
Transformative experiences
While memorable experiences engage who you are, meaningful experiences connect with who you are ,and transporting experiences move you beyond who you are, transformative experiences change who you are.. It can happen with a single, life-altering event – in which case that experience is highly likely to first be transporting – or, more likely, a series of them that can encompass the memorable, the meaningful and the transporting.
Other example for Burning Man
Recall the definition of transformations as a distinct economic offering: effectual outcomes that change individuals in a sustained way. There’s a difference between a transformative experience and a true transformation: the outcome has to last. For travellers to truely transform, you must continue to work with them on the changes effected by the experiences you stage so they incorporate those changes into their lives in an enduring way. In any transformative experience, it’s what you do afterward with what happened to your travellers that determines whether they truly transform, to what degree, and of what type.
Even without being sustained through time, transformative experiences have their place. They are more morable, more meaningful, and more transporting than any lower-level experiences, with the greatest personal impact. They are worth having in and of themselves – but have so much more value when you guide guests in changing their lives.
Leading the Way to Lasting Change
So what does it take to turn transformative experiences into transformations? How do you guide aspirants in bringing home what they did, what they learned, how they grew? And how do you make it last? By encapsulating the experience with three activities: preparation beforehand, reflection afterward and integration on an ongoing bais.
The best way to sustain a transformation is to get people ready for it in advance. Preparation involves helping them imagine the experience before it happens by picturing its sequence of events, thinking about what it will be like, ideally even envisioning what effect it may have on them and how that relates to their aspiration. Such contemplation before the event engages guests in anticipating it, primes them to have an even better experience, and puts them in the right frame of mind, opening them up to the possiblity of transformation.
For in many cases, customers are not yet travellers. They may only be seeking memorable, meaningful or transporting experiences – even quasi – or short term transformations, where they want to change but only temporarily before heading back to their normal lives. They may indeed discover a catlyst for it in the midst of being transported, or they may accept your invitation to transform, embracing the possibility to achieve the actuality. Sometimes too, they recognize the changes they see in themselves after the experience and want to incorporate them into their lives, or desire to go further with an even greater aspiration.
The second step of encapsulation, reflection, happens when guests look back on an event not just to remember it, but to ponder it, perhaps to discuss it with others, and always to consider its impact on them as individuals. People don’t reflect on all their experiences, and companies don’t do near enough to encourage, instigate, or participate in reflection. But when it happens, it cements the memories of the experience, aids people inviewing it as meaningful, gets them to relive what was transporting, and advances the transformation journey.
While thinking back on any experience, peple can simultaneously look forward. Doing so pushes them to contemplate who they are in light of the event just encountered. It connects what they underwent to their identity, testing for a sympathetic vibraition that resonates with who they have been and who they might become. It can also lead them to desire new change, to formulate a new aspiration, even to commit to another journey of transformation.
Integration takes that reflection and puts it into action. This is where people – if they were mere guests before, they are full travellers now – go beyond mere experience to begin serious work on the transformation itself, with your guidance. It often starts with an understanding of the size and nature of the gap between what they now aspire to become and where they are today – their personal from/to statements. Help them explore various ways of behaving and being, noticing when and where they fall short, and endeavor together to close the gap with each opportunity, while realizing that regress sometimes follows progress. The work of integrating their experiences into their lives also resides in a liminal place and time – betwixt and between the from of who they were and the to of who they can become. In situations where people have been pursuing a transformation of their own, this is often when they seek help, a guide who can make integration take place more effectively, more surely, and perhaps more efficiently.
Travel design company Explorer X operationalizes this idea. Founded by Michael Bennett and Jake Haupert – the company is dedicated to crafting customized travel experiences that have a profound and lasting impact on your life. We believe that traveling like true explorers – with curiosity, courage, resilience and an open heart and mind – allows us to learn and grow from our adventures. In doing so we are inspired to live with more joy, intention, mindfulness and meaning. Never merely memorable, the highly customized travel experiences that Explorer X designs, books and encapsulates for its clients – called ‘explorers’ are meaningful at a minimum, almost always transporting and frequently transformative. Bennett: what we have found over the years is that in terms of desired outcomes, most people don’t have specific goals or intentions in mind for their travel experienes before they embark. What they do know is that when they approach travel with a curious heart and open mind, something inevitably will happen along the way that invites them to consider new ideas, perspectives, and ways of living. The catalyst for the transformation, in others words, is usually not instigated in advance, but comes via some discovery made along the way.
Encapsulation is key to the company’s success: Bennett: By far the most important element of a transformative experience is the traveler’s mindset before, during and after their adventures. After booking but before the trip commences, Explorer X provides a Mindful Travel Toolkit & Guide to help travelers both prepare for and deepen their travel experience, and challenges them to answer these preparatory questions:
- What are you going on this Journey? What is your Call to Adventure
- What is your intention for this Journey? What would you like to get out of this experience?
- What questions, opportunities and/or challenges would you love clarity around?
- What will you DO to make the most of this Journey?
- How are you going to BE on this Journey?
The company then urges its explorers to reflect as they travel, not waiting until the end of the trip. Ideally, they write their thoughts daily in a journal, and then use the Journey Reflection Guide, which the company encourages as the trip nears its end, and afterwards as well. This tool elicits reflection and integration by inviting the traveler to write down a description of the trip in detail. It asks such reflective questions as ‘What people, moments, or experiences will you remember? Who/what inspired you? and ‘What did you learn (or relearn) about yourself? followed by three integration questions that solicit one new action, one new behavior, and one new mindset the traveler should now practice. The Mindful Travel Toolkit & Guide helps people reflect and integrate by guiding each one to ‘make sense of what you experienced, identify things you learned and begin to take actions – big or small – that will positively impact your life, your community and the world around you. To help with these two all-important tranformation tools, it further offers support in the way of ‘community conversations, mastermind groups, introductions to coaches and consultants, and loads of recommended resources and tools.
You should similarly create opportunities for your guests to prepare for, reflect on, and integrate their experiences, for encapsulation is the crux of turning transformative experiences into full transformations. Like Explorer X, encapsulate your offerings with questions that would best assist your guests in turning any level of experience – memorable, meaningful or transporting – into a fully transformative one. Then determine how best you can ask those questions, get customers to answer and act on them, and guide them through the entire journey.
Reflection
Here are some questions to reflect on moving through the levels of experiences to full and lasting transformations:
- Think of experiences in your own life that exemplify the four levels: memorable, meaningful, transporting and transformative. What distinctions between the four do you perceive?
- How do these distinctions help you identify, define and clarify the types of experiences your company could stage?
- Does your company perform any of the elements to encapsulation today? What’s missing, and how can you add that to your customer journey?
Preparation
In the next chapter you will find ideas, principles, and frameworks that will enable you to design and stage memorable, meaningful, transporting and transformative experiences. Before moving on, think through these questions about your current offerings:
- Is your organization aligned in how it approaches customers and are the experiences they have with you unified in such a way that they perceive one holistic journey?
- How much effort do your employees generally put in to satisfy customers? Do they tend to go beyond the norm to create higher levels of engagement and loyalty? If not, why?
- Are your offerings pretty much the same for everybody, or do you go to lengths to appeal to each customer individually?
- Do the interactions that customers have with your business and employees tend to be consistent each time, or do they ever take on an intensity that excites and engages?
STAGING TRANSFORMATIVE EXPERIENCES
Given that transformations comprise a series of experiences staged to guide customers in achieving their aspirations, every idea, principle and framework for experience design applies to transformation design as well. To that end, this part of the journey offers four key elements of experience design. Turning the memorable, meaningful and transporting into the transformative requires making it:
- Cohesive: Establish and applying a theme, the organizing principle that determines what is in the experience and what not. With happiness the raison d’etre of business, as a transformation guider you need to go beyond a theme to determine your corporate raison d’etre, the meaningful purpose that gets to the theart of why you are in the transformation bueinss.
- Robust. Hitting the sweet spot within the four realms of experience – entertainment, educational, escapist, and esthetic. With transformative experiences you need to use these realms to transport each aspirant’s viewpoint, understanding, capabilities and appreciation.
- Personal: Reaching inside people to engage them by mass customizing the components of goods, services, and experiences that integrate into the offering. With the rise of digital technology and AI, you especially need to consider creating digital platforms that mass customize their offerings to individual travellers on demand, at point of need.
- Dramatic: Directing workers to act on your business stage plus designing the experience to rise up to a climax and come back down again through dramatic structure. For most transformation journeys – given the ups and downs, the progress and regress, and the inherent uncertainty how people react to guiding – you should embrace street theatre as the model for work and employ the hero’s journey as the dramatic structure specifically attuned to transformations.
While these four elements originate in experience design, in the following sections I’ll extend them in ways particularly helpful to guiding transformations.
Cohesive
Whether you intentionally give your experience a theme or not, it ends up having one. Your guests will surmise an organizing principle from their own encounters, consciously or otherwise. Therefore, the first thing you should determine is that theme. And if you already stage experiences but have yet to explicityly use a theme, determine what organizing principle would best harmonize the positive aspects of each one and then eliminate whatever doesn’t fit.
Since most tranformations happen not at once but with a series of experiences that lead travellers from where they are today to what they want to become, your theme needs to encompass each event in the series. These may be very different from each other – in weight loss programs, think of the initial orientation meeting, weighing sessions, counseling, app check-ins and so forth – so you very well may benefit from having a different theme for every experience. App check-ins may have an entertaining gaming motif, for example, while individual counseling is more serious and straightforward.
This in turn means you may need a guiding principle or metatheme for your complete transformation offering. The overarching meta-theme unites all the individual experiences into one cohesive whole, creating a unified journey for travellers.
From meta themes to meaningful purpose
To make the purpose meaningful to the entire organization, it must be declared, promulgated, upheld and lived in a way that ideally:
- Enriches greater humanity to foster human flourishing
- Simultaneously enriches the workers within and other contributors to the enterprise, so they also flourish
- Aligns all contributors – whether employees, contractors, suppliers, community members, volunteers, and sometimes customers themselves – in doing the work and producing the offerings of the enterprise.
- Is inspirational , aspirational, and timeless
- Functions as theme, determining wat is in and what is out
- Works for everyone who chooses to be a part of it (whether or not others view it as silly, trite or unworkable)
- Is concise, evocative and memorable
As with an experience theme, a meaningful purpose faces inward and manifests outward. It inspires, aligns, and directs workers in order tha thte organisation can create economic value for customers in ways that fulfill the purpose. All companies should embrace this concept for the meaning it offers employees (beginning, not ending, at the top) as well as to enable the business to thrive through the ongoing value it creates for customers.
Embracing it is particularly crucial for tranformation guiders because of the deep emotional labor that your employees naturally put into their work, and the deeply individual nature of tranforming travellers from the inside out. You want all contributors to ascend to the proposition stated in your purpose, even if it means some leave, and all new hires, partners, suppliers likewise should know and agree with the purpose before they join. Without that, alignment is lost and meaning is muddled.
You also want your travellers to viscerally feel the purpose emanating from your guides, who must live it with every interaction, encounter and step along the journey. This, too must be the case at the top of the company and everywhere in between. If the C-suite focuses on finances above all else, purpose loses its meaning. The organisation will realise it, corrode from the inside out, lose its way, become mediocre and eventually fail. The meaningful purpose must inform and guide everything employees do and everything customers experience.
And that purpose should never be a vision, a mission statement, or a tagline, all of which necessarily change with changing times. Rather, it should be composed to last.
Robust
The second core element of experience design is to make your experiences robust by exploring how to make them broader, more substantial and have greater engagement. To do so, recognize that guest participation in any experience can vary from passive, where they do not affect the experience much, to active, where what they do decidedly influences it. The connection guests have with the experience can also vary from absorption, where it comes into them, to immersion, where they go into the experience. These dimensions are continuums along which the experience always has aspects of being active and passive, immersive and absorbing.
You can take advantage of these continuums to design your experiences to be more engaging, and therefore more memorable, by employing the four mutually compatible realms.
- Entertainment: Passively absorbing the sights and sounds presented to you. Reading books, watching movies, listening to music, taking in plays and other such events count as the entertainment realm, which captivates audiences who enjoy the experience
- Educational: Actively wrestling with what is presented to you Taking a masterclass, listening to a talk, watching a video to figure out how to fix something and other such actions fall into the educational realm where it engrosses learners that , naturally, learn from the experience.
- Escapist: Actively joining what is happening around you. Touring a city or destination employs the escapist realm, which involves participants that go to some location and do activities within it.
- Esthetic: Passively immersing yourself in a place. Walking in a park, visiting a museum, and sitting in a café gain from the esthetic realm, which connects with selves that sit down, hang out and just be.
While the examples given for the four realms all have their center of gravity in specific quadrants of the framework, all four are always in play and therefore should be factored into the design of virtually all experiences. The most engaging, most memorable and most robust draw richly form all the realms by hitting the sweet spot in the center.
The four realms within transformative experiences
Robust experiences are broader, more substantial, and have greater engagement than those more typically encountered. With transformative experiences, this means expanding them to encompass the heart, body, mind, and spirit; going beyond what travelers say to what they mean or have yet to discover; and guiding the whole person, not just acting on appearances, superficialities, or symptoms.
The four realms naturally serve as stimuli for and lend themselves to specific sorts of changes. The entertainment realm most readily yields a transformation of viewpoint. Film directors, often create movies just to get across a certain perspective that they want others to understand, accept, and even embrace. Plays, concerts, and other forms of passive absorption – books most especially – can affect experiencer viewpoints. While much of this involves pushing a perspective out into the world, you can use entertainment aspects to pull a viewpoint aspiration from an individual to help effect most any desired transformation.
The educational realm encompasses a tranformation in understanding. Any transformation requiring that someone comprehend new levels of information and knowledge requires a center of gravity within that realm. This of course includes schools from kindergarten on up to higher education but also lifelong learning opportunities, employee experiences managed by learning and development departments, and any other transformative experience involving the attainment of knowledge & wisdom.
The escapist realm grants great possibilities for transformations in capability, whether new or improved. Immersive environments enable people to gain such capabilities in the places they would then apply them, such as with sports: it’s hard to get better at skiing without going down the slopes. Simulators and virtual reality also let people increase their capabilities at not only sports and games but mental health, physical rehabilitation, training and work.
Finally the esthetic realm suits itself to transformations of appreciation. By walking or hiking through a state or national park, you can come to appreciate the awesome wonder of nature. By visiting an art museum, you can grow in admiration for art objects, artists, and art in general. By sitting in a café, you can feel gratitude for a moment of peace, thankfulness for time with a friend, or simple pleasure in the small joys in life, a cup of coffee not the least of them.
You can gain more powerful outcomes if you intentionally design aspects of all four realms into your transformative experiences. Hit the sweet spot by asking yourself these questions:
- How can you use the entertainment realm to hel p a traveler enjoy the experience and thereby influence their viewpoint
- How can you use the educational realm to enable a traveler to learn from exploring new activities that yield greater understanding?
- How can you use the escapist realm to guide a traveler to go and actively do in orde to gain or improve capabilities?
- How can you use the esthetic realm to get a traveler to sit down, hang out, and just be, to affect their appreciation?
Increasing the robustness of the transformative experiences you create, design and stage will increase the level of engagement your travelers have, and thereby greatly increse the chances of transformation.
Personal
Customization is the route up the Progression of Economic Value. Experiences become transformations when they are tailored to exactly what customers need at this moment in time, based on who they are and what they want to become. Experiences are inherently personal, but again transformations are fundamentally individual, changing us from the inside out based on what we undergo. So you can shift from simply personal to deeply individual by customizing transformation journeys, experience by experience, for each traveler. And when you mass customize them with low costs and high volume, you efficiently guide customers uniquely.
Similarly there are operational transformation platforms. These incorporate experience platforms but go beyond time well spent to yield time well invested. Each experience must be appropriately customized, through learning about and responding to personal preferences and built atop previous experiences to yield the desired transformation. For instance, Symplany, the B2B2C plan-driven investing company provides a transformation platform that financial advisers employ to dynamically and spontaneously orchestrate ongoing discussions with clients, experience module by experience module, within the flow of conversation. For example, a client can ‘test out’ a goal – such as saving for the kids’ colledge funds, buying a second house, selling a piece of property, or working another year before retiring – and the adviser can treat it as a new module in the overall plan and show its potential impact. The platform further gives them various ways of examining and visualizing whatever issues arise, depending on the depth of financial knowledge the client demonstrates. Advisers can thereby instantly handle whatever concerns, questions or opportunities come up. Sumplany’s powerful visualisation tools, built via sophisticated algorithms using mountains of data, enable customers to visually see the results of any aspirational decisions under consideration, as well as the continuing outcomes of those decisions once made.
That is key to differentiating transformation platforms from experience ones: mass customizing journeys across time for individual travelers. It means doing whatever it takes to get there, including handling backsliding or other obstacles with remedial, rousing and/or recommitment experiences staged on demand, even in the moment.
Dramatic
Creating dramatic experiences works in two ways. First, when you stage experiences,work is theatre, It’s not a metaphor – work as theatre – but a model: work is theatre. Whenever workers are in front of customers, they are on stage. You must therefore direct your workers to act in ways that engage customers, the audience of their performance. Theatre alone can turn mundane interactions into engaging encounters, and engaging encounters into transformation journeys.
With transformative experiences, though, travelers aren’t just an audience and workers aren’t just actors; your employees are also guides. They must watch and cocreate performances with travelers, helping them just as acting coaches help actors. They must treat each traveler – including individual people within organisations and communities – as a whole person, engaging them not just emotionally but often physically, intellectually and spiritually.
Most importantly, they must guide each traveler individually, recognizing the unique person, organisation, business or communicty whom they have the privilege of leading to aspiration achievement. This again means that not only the economic offerings but the encounters workers have with travelers must be mass customized.
When directing workers to act, then, embrace street theatre, the mass-customized form where performers have a large set of routines or ‘bit’s – experience modules – that they call on in response to every reaction of the audience. And whenever you encounter something you haven’t seen before, you must turn to improv theatre to improvise the proper response. Modularizing employee performance in this way enables you to efficiently guide individual tranformations through every encounter with a traveler.
Second, transformative experiences must pay attention to the structure of performances, how the business intentionally arranges and stages everything. Recall that goods are inventoried after production, services are delivered on demand, and experiences – transformative ones included – are revealed over a duration of time.
This means embracing dramatic structure. With any drama, the complication or intensity of the experience changes through time – rising to a climax and coming back down again – and thus do experiences become memorable.
The Hero’s Journey
While there are may models for enacting dramatic structure, the one framework perfectly suited to staging transformative experiences is known as the hero’s journey. Delineated by literature professor Joseph Campbell in his seminal book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, it is based on research into world mythologies. It is not only a dramatic structure; it’s a transformation journey.
A seemingly ordinary individual, living a normal life, encounters something unexpected that calls that person to an adventure. Hesitating, the individual meets a wise old man as mentor/sage/wizard/jedi. With help the hero crosses a threshold from their ordinary world into a ‘special world’ where they confront dangers, undergo ordeals and face the threat of death, if not death itself before saving the world/Middle-Earth/a galaxy far, far away. The hero leaves the ‘special world’, still needing to prove their worth, and with a reward to offer others, finally returns home, transformed.
Now it’s rare that a customer comes to you for help in saving the world. But everyone is the hero of their own transformation journey, the protagonist who with the forming of an aspiration must leave the comforts of their present self to set forth on a journey – with the help of a guide – to face many experiences that move them toward that point when the traveler can proclaim ‘I was X, now I am Y’ Transformations do not come easy. To get there travelers must overcome obstacles and go through ordeals, dig deep within themselves to learn what is possible, and recognize that the point of proclamation is not the end of the journey. They must return to their daily life with the transfromation integrated into their identity.
Think about how you can make your customers the heroes of their own journeys.
Applying the hero’s journey
Whatever your business, think of how different your transformative experiences would be if you designed and depicted them using the hero’s journey.
The transformation journey entails twelve stages over four parts, beginning and ending in the ordinary world of life as it passes though the transformation world, a liminal space and time where the aspirant is neither the original individual nor the fully transformed one. Consider how your business would apply the steps along the journey, recognizing that you need not follow it slavishly but can adapt it to your perspective, circumstances and language.
Metamorphosis aspirations are perfect for this form of dramatic structure but the other types can benefit from it as well. Here’s how the transformation journey proceeds:
PART 1. ASPIRATION
- Living life: An individual – which could be an organisation, a business, or a community, not just a person – is going about their ordinary life, lacking any desire for transformation
- Aspiration: Something sparks a desire for change. Eventually that aspiration coalesces into one of refinement, ambition, cultivation or full-on metamorphosis
- Hesitation: The traveler may hesitate or outright refuse the call to transform, realizing they don’t have the time or resources to go on the journey, or decide the aspiration is too difficult or even unachievable. It may take another catalyst to encourage the traveler to embrace the journey of transformation – and sometimes that spark is the guide.
- Meeting the guide: Having a mentor turns the journey from an individual pursuit into an economic offering – and therefore greatly increases the chances of success. This encounter could come in the first two steps and could result result from the traveler seeking help, not just the guide offering it. Whatever the case, it’s time to develop the individual from/to statement and design the series of transformative experiences, properly encapsulated, for the journey ahead.
- Commitment: the transformation begins in earnest as the traveler ‘crosses the threshold’ from the ordinary world to the transformation world. Commitment proves crucial to doing so successfully, for without it the aspirant doesn’t put the work in. You’ll learn more about commitment and its power in the next two stages, but with that in place, the set of transformative experiences required to achieve the aspiration can proceed.
PART 2 EXPERIENCES
6. Preparation: This step encompasses imagining the entire journey before it happens, picturing its sequence of events, thinking about what it will be like, and envisioning life with the aspiration achieved. Doing so sets up each traveler for success, and the more arduous the journey, the greater the preparation needs to be.
7. Starts – and fits: After preparation comes the first experience, then the one after that, and the one after that. Most will progress the traveler toward the aspiration, while some may necessarily be remedial experiences to handle regress that occasionally – and for aspirations of ambition and metamorphosis, inevitably – happens. In some cases, this step may even be filled with trials and tribulations, especially for those with a disruption catalyst.
8. Crucible: this step is often named ordeal in the hero’s journey, but crucible is a much better term for the transformation journey, for out of the most difficult of experiences comes a new creation, a changed identity, a transformed traveler.
PART 3 TRANSFORMATION
9. Transformation: The traveler achieves the aspiration, going from what was to a new identity, finally able to say ‘I was X, now I am Y’. If the aspiration is one of metamorphosis, the part of the journey through the crucible into this third part is like a chrysalis, the place of transformation from which emerges someone or something new.
10. Reflection: As the traveler heads from the transformation world toward living life anew, the question arises: Will it last? To ensure tha the transformation endures and does not dissipate under the pressures of daily life, the traveler must be guided to reflect on the journey. Helping them look back on what transpired, and simultaneously look forward to contemplate who they are in light of the transformation, will reveal how it will likely impact the rest of their life.
PART 4: INTEGRATION
11. Integration: This step completes the overarching process of encapsulation by taking reflection and putting it into action. The traveler is guided on how to incorporate the transformation into their daily life, seeing how it impacts and is impacted by other aspects of identity. Their perspective then broadens out to include how the transformation affects and is affected by relationships with others, for it is often the pressures, considerations, and impacts of the external world that cause the internal change to lessen, regress or dissipate.
12 Greater flourishing (happiness): With integration the aspiration is achieved, the identity change complete, and the transformation is sustained. As the guide , you have fostered greater flourishing for the traveller, who can return to living life until the next aspiration starts the cucle of the transformation journey anew.
In every hero’s journey the hero returns with a reward that benefits others. With the Transformation Journey model, this naturally happens for any oragnisational, business, or community tranformation, since the aspiration always involves employees, customers or members, respectively. And it is often the case with individual people, but you should explicitly convey the benefits of having a positive impact on others, including helping them flourish, into the overarching encapsulation process.
That is the promise of the Hero’s Journey Economy, that as a guider you can, traveler by traveler, foster human flourishing and tereby fulfill the purpose of business.
Of course, not every step on this transformation journey is needed for every traveler nor every guider, and there can be a lot of variation, such as where the guide comes in, when commitment happens and how deep the crucible is. Feel free to take professional and poetic license to design a journey that best fits your or your travelers needs. And realize you don’t have to do it all – you can buy from or partner with other businesses and integrate their offerings into your transformation, or specialize in aspects of the journey that you can provide to other companies.
Moreover this transformation journey is not the only way to approach dramatic experiences, and it may not be appriopriate for everyone. But when it is, this structured framework, modeled on a quest, can be a powerful tool for designing and depicting, staging and guiding your experiences and for turning them into full transformation offerings.
Cohesive, robust personal and dramatic. In desiging and staging transformative experiences with these elements in mind, you will create far more engaging and compelling experiences on which to build your transformation offerings. You will significantly enhance the likelihood that your aspirants achieve their aspirations and sustain them through time. You will contribute far more to happiness. And you will create greater economic value, with the flow of profits as the matter of how well you engage, transform and contribute.
Reflection
This chapter was all about designing the transformative experiences that form the basis of any transformation journey. Consider these questions:
- Which of the four elements – cohesive, robust, personal and dramatic – did you have the most affinity for? How might you use its ideas, principles and frameworks to enhance the experiences your company stages?
- Think about the other elements as well. Are there ideas in there that you could apply?
- Look back to the transformation journey. See if you can map your offerings onto its steps. What more do you need to do guide your customers in completing their journeys?
- What might give your business the greatest economic value over the long term?
Preparation
Now that you’re equipped with the ability to design memorable, meaningful, transporting and transformative experiences, I will show you how to create true transformation offerings atop them, and how those offerings differ by type of aspiration. Mull over these questions before you read it:
- Recall the four types of aspirations – refinement, ambition, cultivation and metamorphosis – and think again about the whys of your customers, the aspirations behind the purchases of your offerings. Which of the aspiration types do you think best represent your customers?
- What impediments do you think your aspirants might face while trying to achieve their aspirations?
- I’ve been referring to those who help travelers as guides. Considering your offerings, what other words would you apply to your employees who are helping them to achieve their aspirations?
CREATING TRANSFORMATION OFFERINGS
To design full transformation offerings it is important to understand the three key economic distinctions of transformations that distinguish them for mere experiences.
First, transformation offerings are effectual. They make an impact on the traveler that effects the desired result, achieving an aspiration. Sometimes the outcome arises from one lifechanging experience, often by serendipity (a deviation or discovery catalyst).
In the vast share of cases it is not one transformative experience but a series of them that a traveler undergoes to effect, over time, the outcome desired. And that’s why the economic function of transformations is not to change, modify, or regenerate, but to guide – to come alongside customers and do everything you can to lead, steer, direct, encourage, urge, persuade, cajole and whatever else required to further aspirants along the path they desire, and pay you to achieve.
Second, transformation offerings are individual – whether individual people, individual organisations, individual businesses or individual communities. Travelers are the ones who transform and bring about their own aspirations. The customer is the product; you are the guide.
You must therefore get very individual with each traveler. No two transformations are alike simply because every customer is unique. It’s certainly possible to have one standard transformation process – but everyone reacts to that process in their own ways. When mass customizing your offerings to create personal trasnformative experiences, you should customize the entire series of experiences. Each one is a module within your architecture of modularity that you can bring ‘off the shelf’ when you determine that this is the exact right experience needed at this step in the series. And then withi that module you further mass customize its elements to ensure you create the memorable, meaningful, transporting and/or transformative experience this individual traveler needs to undergo at this moment in time.
Recognize too, that transformations rarely form a straight line from where a traveler is today to achievement. As seen in the Transformation Journey model, transformation offerings entail hiccups to handle, setbacks to deal with, personal nemeses to vanguish, deterioration to offset, hindrances to overcome, impediments to restrain, regressions to reverse, obstacles to rise over, stumbling blocks to surmount and backsliding to counteract. Some combination of these proves almost inevitable. Any such issues must be managed and you must have modules in your offering to continue the journey onward and upward. Each episode serves as a trigger – as with street theatre – to call the proper module on demand in time of need, to get your traveler’s back on track.
Third, transformation offerings must be sustained through time. Unless the transformation sticks, the individual wasn’t truly transformed and it was not a complete transformation offering. This can be tough for guiders because many people think they have been transformed and may stop working at it (and therefore stop working with you). They then become disappointed and sometimes disillusioned when the effects dissipate over time.
These three economic distinctions culminate in offering time well invested. As an effectual offering, all the time the traveler spends under your tutelage, acreoss the entire series of transformative experiences, pays off when the aspiration is achieved and the traveler becomes an achiever. Each experience, progression the person onward and upward, compounds the value of each one that came before. Inherently occurring inside each individual the transformation offering is literally a self-investment in the traveler’s own being, whether transforming in degree or in kind. And that investment pays further dividends when it is sustained through time, ensuring that the aspirant truly is and will remain transformed.
In short, transformations are effectual outcomes that guide individuals to transform in a lasting way – and are achieved through the time they invest with you. You must therefore design that time to yield the effectual outcomes your customers desire, which means starting with their aspirations, with why they want to go on the transformation journey you will guide for them.
ACHIEVING ASPIRATIONS THROUGH TRANSFORMATION OFFERINGS
Refinement, ambition and cultivation aspirations – are collectively much more common and straightforward to guide than those of metamorphosis. This type of aspiration is much less common and more difficult, but yields transformations of much greater impact and value.
How you design the time with your customers, then, depends on which type of aspiration they have. For refinement aspirations you need to enhance some aspect of identity that travelers already have to gain a refinement in it. For ambition you need to expand some capability they exemplify now in their identity to attain their ambition for what it could be in the future. You need to enrich aspirants in some new arena of identity to nurture its cultivation. You need to alter their identity in a major way to accomplish metamorphosis.
Refinement: Enhancing through expertise
Aspirations of refinement represent a small-scale change in degree. The desire here is not for wholesale change but for refining some aspect of self, sometehing already there that you enjoy, relish, care for, delight in, or even love.
When you guide enhancing transformations to gain such refinements, think of your employees as experts. Customers come to you because they seek the knowledge necessary to refine an aspect of identity, looking for you to direct, instruct, lead, and interpret the process. As an expert, you must calibrate the level of help you provide to your customers to avoid thinking that they want to take full advantage of your expertise, such as treating it as an expanding transformation when they desire an enhancing one.
On the other hand, you may also find that your work on the enhancing transformation causes the traveler to desire more, to shift into the quadrant of ambition and aim to become an expert themselves. That can provide an opportunity to extend or offer a new transformation to do exactly that.
Being small in scale, enhancing transformations lend themselves to short-term sets of experiences. I think of the prototypical example as an academy or similar places, such as camps, institutes, online courses, certification classes or workshops.
Whether your enhancing transformation is invitational or intentional, the best way to effect it is through encapsulation. Provide resources for guests to prepare for the experience in advance, specially encouraging them to think about the possibilities for change in viewpoints, understanding, capabilities, and/or appreciation. Offer opportunities for reflection at each stage in the experience. Then afterward, provide resources for further reflection on the entire offering plus ways for customers to integrate what they gained into their lives. This can be done via handouts, emails, website links and even live one-one-one or group sessions whether done in person or remotely.
Understand, too, that all this applies to remedial aspirations of refinement, as sometimes people desire small-scale changes that for example, correct flaws, decrease unhelpful activities, or diminish bad patterns. Knowing which way the transformation goes proves crucial to designing the right set of transformative experiences for whatever type of academy you create (physical or virtual) what you do for encapsulation, and how you apply your expertise.
Ambition: Expanding through coaching
For both refinement and ambition aspirations, the task is more straightforward than those that involve a change in kind. In these cases the customer already is what they aspire to become – a physician, an accountant, a professor, a religious leader, a surfer, a quilter, or other professional or individual identities – and wants to be more of it, better at it, to deepen or broaden it in some sense. It is still important to differentiate between refinement and ambition aspirations, though, to understand the scale of what travelers seek to attain. With ambitions travelers want to get significantly better at a dimension of self, obtain an elevated level of achievement, or reach a certain high standing in a field or endeavor. Your job is to greatly develop their knowledge and competencies, and substantially magnify the possibilities of what they can do and be. Given both are changes of degree, not kind, it is the adverbs here that most clearly differentiate expanding transformations from enhancing ones: greatly, significantly, substantially.
With this type of transformation, you must act as a coach. Coaches of all stripes are experts, certainly, but given the longterm nature of most ambitions, they must be so much more. They must know their travellers on an individual level to deal with personal ups and downs any ambition encounters. They must understand psychology (whether viscerally or learned) to inspire, encourage, cajole, persuade, coax and sometimes even harass their charges to get them to continue and excel at the journey onward and upward. And they must know when to bring in other experts and coaches to deal with matters beyond their own abilities. Coaches must further recognize that at times they have done all the guiding they can do, and it’s time for a traveler to move to another coach, live with the level of attainment or lower their aspiration.
The key is having a program with a distinct point of view for how transformation happens within your field of know-how. The program is your way of guiding transformations, necessarily customized to the individual traveler that take them from where they are to the desired ambition over a series of experiences, usually over an extended period of time. As with all transformations, encapsulation proves important here so that each experience in the series progresses toward the goal.
There are several concerns to be mindful of with expanding transformations: traveler’s not fully committing to achieving their goals, changing priorities over time, and decommitting or losing hope. A key to successfully getting them to achieve big goals is the obtaining and maintaining of commitment; without it few ambitions ever get attained. Here the commitment should often be moren to the process of transformation than to the specific outcome. The ambition can seem distand and foreboding in the early stages, but a commitment to the process can more consistently yield results over time.
As with refinement, many ambition aspirations can be for remedial attributes, such as eliminating agressive behavior, eradicating poor leadership conduct, or greatly lessening social media use. These are ambitions for less, not more, of some aspect of identity. They can thus slide over into metamorphic transformations if the aspect is core enough to the traveler’s identity, even if they don’t recognize it at first. In either case, for the best possible outcome it’s important to turn the negative description into a positive one: from eliminating agressive behavior to gaining social management skills, from being a poor leader to becoming a great one, from lessening social media use to taking control of their time online.
Cultivation: Enriching through counseling
Enriching transformations – those that tackle the aspiration of cultivation – flip over to the right side of the types of transformations entailing those that represent a change in kind, although of a small scale. Here people aspire to develop an unrealized attribute, to hone a fresh skill or capability, or to become something different, but not drastically so. The idea of self cultivation has been around since the ancient Greek philosophers and remains prominent in Asian philosophies such as Confucianism and Taoism. But as with all manner of transformations, people and companies increasingly hire businesses to help them undergo enriching change to nurture civilizations.
Many professions exist for that purpose. Thus in serving as a guide, you should take on the role, generically of a counselor. Customers hire you for the advice and counsel you provide in workshops, classes, events and sessions of all stripes to nurture the cultivations they seek for themselves, for their organisations, for their businesses and sometimes for their communities.
Yet they do it less to augment a capability, as with enhancing and expanding transformations (changes of degree) than to generate a new capability, make a lifestyle change, or stop a bad behavior (changes in kind). The prototypical example may be to build good habits.
Metamorphosis: Altering through alchemy
Metamorphic transformations change travelers both in kind and on a large scale. In particular such transformations take one or more elements of a person’s core identity and alter who they are. Metamorphic transformations may be the most difficult and time-consuming to accomplish, but they prove by far the most rewarding – personally for travelers and economically for you.
For many transformative situations like becoming an entrepreneur people attempt to accomplish transformations on their own. In other cases, they get some help from friends and family or seek assistance from goods&services – books, classes, apps and more. But increasingly they hire companies to guide them through the journey, yielding much higher probabilities of success in a way that brings them greater flourishing, with reduced anxiety and greater ease, and in less time. There is also a sense in which some of the people undergoing metamorphosis do drastically change, but do not succesfully achieve their aspiration. They become an entrepreneur but that business, and the one after that never catches on.
In all such situations, how much more likely would someone be to transforma successfully if they sought and obtained the guidance of a company that truly was in the transformation business, that has the capabilities for the lifealtering changes metamorphosis necessarily entails, and that created the offerings required?
Strange as it may sound, the praticular role required to accomplish metamorphic transformations is alchemist. The term originally referred to one who ‘transmuted’ elements, particularly metals into gold – a physical metamorphosis and while it was often associated with nefarious schemes and magic, alchemy was in fact a forerunner to modern chemistry. Today the word refers to the altering of one thing into another or to someone’s reinvention, particularly when it appears magical because of the extent of change. So, while the term may seem strange at first, its modern – day meaning of ‘someone who transforms things for the better’ perfectly fits the role required of any metamorphosis.
And it is a role, not necessarily an individual person – a single guide may not be enough. This is true especially for metamorphic, life-altering transformations (plus those that significantly alter organisations, businesses and communities) precisely because they are so vast, entail a journey deep into the unknown, more likely come with great trepidation (and hesitation), and greatly alter the self. For such journeys it’s rare that one individual can offer everything needed; it will take many guides across the timeframe of the journey to meld together into the role of alchemist.
The Modern Elder Academy offers an example of using alchemy to guide metamorphic transformations. Boutique hotelier Chip Conley fouded it after joing Airbnb as its chief hospitality officer – where at twice the age of the typical employee he became known as its Modern Elder. After a successful tenure at the company, Conley went through a midlife crisis, as detailed in his book Learning to Love Midlife. Coming out of the other side triggered him to create MEA, which he describes as the world’s first midlife wisdom school, where midlifers can reimagine and repurpose themselves; to create a life that is as deep and meaningful as it is long. He calls midlife a chrysalis where the transformational magic of metamorphosis occurs so that you can become what you are meant to be – to flourish in other words.
MEA is itself a chrysalis, a place where people come to reflect on, think through, and transform their lives to thrive in the second half of life. Its science based curricula at its campuses in Baja Mexico and Santa Fe – along with its online programs and events, videos and Wisdom Weekly newsletter – all guide midlifers in making the leap from who they have been to who they will become. These are led not only by MEA’s own set of guides but by a number of ‘superluminaries’ : business leaders and entrepreneurs, artists and athletes, academics and spiritual seekers whose heart-inspired teachings are deeply aligned with our mission and values. Among these are many experts, coaches and counselors all of whom together offer the alchemy that midlifers draw on. Moreover participants become part of the alchemy team during and after their own transformations for as Conley says, ‘We have learned that wisdom is not taught – it is shared’.
Altering transformations require commitment even more than the other three types. Travelers can’t foresee what largescale, core identity changes truly mean for them and how they alter their sense of self. Without commitment to see the transformation through, there is nary a chance of success; the disparity is just too great, too stark, too unknowable. Altering transformations may also require much more hand-holding, involve many twists and turns and backsliding and take much longer to achieve. But your role as an alchemist is to ensure that customers do in fact accomplish these high-bar, high-value aspirations.
Travelers own their transformations. They create their very own ‘new you’ . They achieve their aspirations. And once a metamorphosis is accomplished, these achievers recognize that they can never go back; they are forever altered, just as material elements forever alter in alchemy. In guiding altering transformations, therefor, as the alchemist you have a high ethical bar in how you conduct yourself. You are affecting the innermost parts of people, forever. You have a fiduciary responsibility – a position of great trust – to ensure you do the right things for your travelers, the designing and guiding of the right transformative experiences, as well as do right by them.
Reflection
This part of the journey discussed turning experiences into transformations, matching the four types of aspirations with the four types of transformations. Answer these questions:
- Did you find yourself gravitating toward certain words in the thesauri? If so what might that say about your customers and your business?
- As you read about the four types of transformatons, what ideas or exemplars most resonated with you? What can you learn from them?
- If you do not yet stage experiences or guide transformations, how might you make your offerings more transformational? In what ways could you subsume them in experience & transformation offerings, either your own or those of companies you might sell to or partner with?
- If you are in the experiences or transformation business where do you fall in the model? Can you envision ways of guiding enhancing, expanding, enriching and/or reaching the top of the model altering transformations?
Preparation
The final part of the journey pulls together everything necessary to truly become a transformation guider, focusing on how to bring travelers through three phases – diagnosis, encapsulated experiences and follow-through. It further offers different ways of charging for the demonstrated outcomes customers achieve. To get most out of reading it think on these things:
- It is not always easy to draw out, decipher, and grasp customer aspirations, no matter the type. What ways do you have of communicating with customers that would lend themselves to such conversations? How can you build in more such opportunities?
- After doing this journey do you have a good idea for how to encapsulate experiences and mass customize them to individual travelers? If not, think a bit more about how these could be done
- A transformation is not complete unless it is sustained through time. How might you ensure your aspirant’s transformations last?
- How are you currently pricing your offerings? Do you see any missed opportunities for charging for outcomes?
GUIDING TRANSFORMATIONS
With any aspiration and corresponding transformation, you must go through three phases.
Diagnosis
What do your customers hope to become That’s the first question of transformation guiding. Ahead of the transformation journey, you must take traveler’s through a diagnosis phase. You get to know each customer as an individual person, organisation, business or community and then ascertain each particular aspiration – their why – as well as wherre the traveler is today relative to that desire. Such from/to statements enable you to design, customize and then guide the set of encapsulated experiences that first prepare the traveler for the journey and then guide aspiration achievement. Because of the inherent value of the self-discovery that diagnosis entails, it can often be an offering unto itself.
Sometimes customers come with fairly general aspirations, such as becoming more fit, saving money, learning about a useful topic, or getting a job. Sometimes they are rather specific, such as running a marathon, saving for a first home, gaining a certification, getting their dreamjob. Sometimes they come with issues – health decline, lack of innovation or organisation agility – particularly when the catalyst is a disruption. Whatever the case, you need to understand the aspiration and its starting point well enough to get to a from/to statement usable to create the offering.
Sometimes people have aspirations that are deleterious to themselves and restrict their own flourishing – in which case, you have a fiduciary responsibility to set them straight. Sometimes they delude themselves in where (and who) they are today or in their ability to achieve their aspirations. It can often be of benefit, then, to preface the diagnosis phase with triage to determine whether a transformation opportunity actually exists for this particular traveler at this time.
If not, you can guide them to a proper understanding of the situation and work with them on an interim transformation to get them to the point where they can realistically achieve their initial desire.
Ascertaining aspirations
You need to ascertain aspirations at two different levels: generically, to determine the nature of the transformation offerings you must provide; and specifically, to determine what particular transformations you will guide. In your business, you may start with a generic from/to statement, such as from stressed to relaxed, from wage earner to lifelong saver, from neophyte to expert, or from recruit to soldier. This can be informed by what customers seek from your current goods, services, experiences, and even existing transformations, as well as from what you’ve learned in earlier parts of the journey, in particular about the spheres of transformation and the types of aspirations and transformations.
For some businesses that may be enough, especially when travelers are at the beginning of a continuing journey. But for most, you need to get down to that second level: the specific aspirations for this particular traveler. Even when a generic aspiration suffices – keep in mind that you still guide individuals, who vary individually. The more you know about them, design to them, and work with them, the more likely they will be transformed.
The focus is on what customers desire to become, including what motivates them, what goals they have, and what problems they want resolved. What is critical is talking with them to gain the insight needed to create offerings that meet their needs.
Designing transformations
As with all economic offerings, customers often don’t know what they want, and even when they do, they can’t always articulate it. You need to draw it out of them, helping to uncover vaguely known desires or discover previously unknown aspirations. That requires a design tool that guides people in figuring out what they truly want – preferably visually, and ideally viscerally – and guides you in determining what specific, customized transformation offering will enable them to achieve their aspirations.
While artificial intelligence promises to revolutionize them, design tools don’t have to be rocket science. Starizon Studio, a very different consulting company exemplifies how to diagnose aspirations and design transformations, specifically to turn companies into premier experience stages. They invited Starizon’s potential clients – or ‘explorers’ to their experience design center in Keystone Colorado, for a twenty – four – hour diagnosis. They got to see what it was like to work, eat and stay in the very place where their design work would happen, with Starizon guides drawing out of them their current circumstances and future aspirations while giving them a peek at what their future could be. At the end of the diagnosis, they presented their proposal of designed transformative experiences to them. How many visitors went on to a full engagement? Over 90 percent. How many gained value from the diagnosis in and of itself? Every last one.
It didn’t hurt that Starizon was its own first client, using the meaningful purpose of ‘Explore. Discover. Transform.’ to design its place and methology. They would guide explorers in first picturing their outcomes form the engagement, and then design the steps – all the modular experiences – it would take to get from that future state backward to the present to where they were today. Though the aspirations were from/to statements, the experience plan was really a to/from design! Every transformation guider should consider this technique, for research shows that when people envision their future selves, they make better decisions in the present.
Starizon also excelled at partnering with its travelers. It was never a normal consulting company that asked clients for all their data, pumped it into a black box, and spit out a plan. Rather Starizon elicited the intentions, ideas, and invitiatives of the experience design plan – beginning with clients determining their own theme/meaningful purpose – by working directly with each explorer team at the Keystone studio and then massaging them into the best versions possible, ensuring that they fit together into one cohesive plan. When presented back to a team – first verbally, then in written form – explorers saw their own concepts, heard their own words, and, most importantly, owned each element of the plan. They would not allow it to fail, for it was fully their experience design plan.
Similarly, you should partner with your customers in ascertaining their aspirations and designing and preparing for their journeys – and in guiding their transformations through encapsulated experiences.
Encapsulated Experiences
Transformative experiences form the nucleus of transformation guiding, the middle phase where you stage the right experiences at the right time in the right order for each traveler. You should properly encapsulate these experiences, preparing travelers beforehand and then guiding them afterward in reflecting and integrating them into their lives. This should be done in concert with each successive experience, each one building on top of the previous one to move travelers onward and upward toward, and eventually to, their aspiration.
Few transformations follow a nice, simple path, however (which is why ‘journey’ really is the right term). There are ups and downs, advances and retreats, progression and regression.
Sensing and recording
You must be prepared to adapt your transformation offering, no matter how well designed, in different ways for different travelers. A modular architecture enables not only efficient design but effective adaptability through sensing how well or not the transformation journey is going and triggering different modules on demand, in real time, at point of need.
Think of every transformative experience as one of many steps along the journey. Some are short, while some are long; some go smoothly, while some cover difficult terrain; some move forward in a straight shot, while others meander. There are milestones along the way, steps that should be recognized and celebrated, even when you are not sure exactly when each traveler will reach them or what precise modules will precede them.
Charging for Outcomes
While guiding transformations themselves may feel good (after all, you’re contributing to happiness) we must remember the economic aspect. You are what you charge for! With transformations that means aligning what customers pay with what they value by charging for the demonstrated outcomes they achieve.
Most enterprises that are or should be in the Hero’s Journey business, however charge at the service level – fixed prices, hourly billing, time and materials, or cost-plus. Economically, they have always been service providers, charging for the activities they do, for inputs even while guiding customers in achieving outcomes. As experience businesses increasingly move into transformations, tehy too tend to keep charging admission or other time-based fees rather than charging for the aspirational achievements that time effects.
Certainly such companies learn to secure premium pricing for the increased value they create and beef up their profits, but they’re still charging at the service or experience level and are nowhere close to capturing the full value generated. The simple fact of the matter is that if you don’t implement outcome-based pricing you are less likely to guide your customers i achieving their aspirations. It’s when you make your income dependent on your customer’s outcomes that you fully understand everything it requires – and do whatever it takes – to guide them toward achievement and ensure they sustain it through time.
Ways to charge for change
In researching over a hundred companies that charge for change I found four distinct ways they do it:
Transformation guarantees.
First, the traveler agrees to a specific fee, but with some or all of it subject to the value of the outcome achieved. This is often employed when a company primarily charges at the service or experience level but puts some of those fees at risk, subjec to if (or how much) the traveler transforms. Starizon Studio made its income dependent on the outcomes of its travelers. Twenty-five percent of its fees were paid completely at the explorer team’s discretion, based on whether explorers received the outcomes committed to in the engagement. In fifteen years of business before the founders retired, only two customers did not pay the entire fee (and in one case additional work yielded the full payment) precisely because Starizon viewed the arrangement as a catalytic mechanism for ensuring they did what they said they would do and travelers got out of it what they desired.
Success fees.
Second, companies get paid not a predetermined amount but one established after the fact or on an ongoing basis, based on outcomes. Success fees are not an all-or – nothing proposition with a set fee; the end amount charged varies based on a sliding scale of how much value was realised.
Management consultants have long charged based on success for at least some engagements, using such parameters as efficiency gained, revenue increased, and market cap valuation improved. But such charging mechanisms have never become endemic in consulting, even though the industry has always been a transformation one.
Income Share Agreements
Third, companies charge nothing up front but instead invest in the transformation journey, recouping the investment afterward to the degree of success travelers have. Similar to success fees, income share agreements pertain to situations where traveler’s incomes provide recognition of a transformation achieved, with the amount of income a proxy for the level of achievement.
Outcome funds.
Finally, companies can receive financing based on the outcomes they produce. This is appropriate for situations where enterprises secure funding, such as from governments, to guide transformation offerings for beneficiaries, such as their residents.
How to implement outcome-based pricing
Transformative impact – that’s exactly how all transformation guiders should be measured. None of the methods we have explored are mutually exclusive. Recognize, too, that when the payoff comes largely once aspirations are achieved, performing triage within the diagnosis phase becomes very important. If you accept travelers who cannot in fact achieve their aspirations, you’ll never recoup your investment in them.
No matter the method used, the first step you want to take in charging for outcomes is measuring them, and ideally not just at the end of the offering but on an ongoing basis. This means ascertaining that from/to gap between ‘I am X’ and ‘I aspire to be Y’ and how it closes over time. Then you can make course corrections via the right encaspulated experience within your modular architecture.
The Old Fire Station, a ‘centre for creativity’ in Oxford, England decided not to use ‘outcomes to measure against’ but ‘to let those we work with identify outcomes for themselves by telling us a story. What changed for them? How did it happen? Why is it important? The organisation developed a storytelling evaluation methodology to evaluate the impact of its work, which is now used by more than a dozen other transformative organisations.
This is where the Hero’s Journey Economy is headed – a destination where, ultimately, what you charge for must align with what customers value: the achievement of their aspirations.
Individualization
The one word that most fully captures the impact of the Progression of Economic Value is individualization. It incorporates the customization dynamic that enables enterprises to counteract commoditization and successively shift up the Progression to create more value. It also treats customers as the individuals they truly are. For customers are not a market, nor a segment, nor a niche, nor a generation, nor a persona, nor any other agllomeration of anonymous buying units of indeterminate size. A customer is a living, breathing individual person – or if you sell to other businesses, an active, adaptive individual enterprise. All customers are unique – undeniably, unremittingly, unalterably unique.
But individualization means so much more than that for businesses. Each successive economic offering going up the Progression gets you closer and closer to the desires, needs and aspirations of each individual customer (and not just people and businesses, both organisations and communities as well). Commodities supply merely the means for delivering service activities. Together, these three lower-order offerings lead to time well saved. Services provide merely the means underlying the staging of memorable experiences, which offer time well spent. And experiences present the means by which you can guide customers to achieve their aspirations, to transform their identity from ‘I was X’ to ‘Now I am Y’, to go from traveler to achiever. Transformations yield the greatest economic value, time well invested, as customers become who they want to become.
Moreover, commodities, goods and services exist outside of us, while experiences happen inside of us and transformations change our very identity. Commodities are arms-length stuff we hardly ever touch and feel anymore. Goods are tangible objects that we own, such as our cars and clothes. Services are activities performed on those objects, or on ourselves, such as cutting our hair or measuring our blood pressure. Experiences reach inside, engaging us in reaction to events staged in front of us. And transformations change us from the inside out based on the experiences we undergo. With transformations, the customer is the product – it is a changed being that individuals seek from transformation guiders.
With every step of further individualization, you generate more and more economic value for your enterprise precisely because you create more and more value within your customers, helping them become who they want to become and be who they are meant to be. Individualization is the route to human flourishing.
Reflection
After reading this part of the journey, reflect on these things:
- Can you imagine how you might interact with your customers to diagnose their aspirations? What processes already exist in your organisation on which you can build?
- How might you sense and respond with each customer to make corrections and avoid failure? What signals should you look out for that might indicate backsliding of a forthcoming obstacle?
- How might you ensure that customers sustain their transformations over time and lead into the next transformatoin they might want to undergo?
- Do you see how you might charge for the demonstrated outcomes your customers achieve? Were there any ways or examples that you could best relate to your business?
Preparation
Keep discovering! The journey never ends.
Telling the Financial Story 