If you have time, give participants three green stickers and three red stickers. Ask them to put their stickers on touchpoints that are performing the best (green) and the worst (red). Facilitate a dialogue around how the organization defines and measures the success and failure of touchpoints.
NOTE BUILDING BRIDGES, ONE STICKY NOTE AT A TIME
The sharing of information and dialogue you facilitate in this workshop can generate more value than what ends up on the sticky notes. Bringing together colleagues from different functions with their varying perspectives to cocreate a tool happens too rarely in most organizations. When facilitated well, this workshop is enlightening and enjoyable. You will build a lot of goodwill and lay the foundation for other approaches outlined in this book. Make sure to take good pictures of the session so that you can share the process and results with others.
Reflect and Determine the Next Steps
Wrap up your session with a review of the workshop experience. What worked? What didn’t?
Finally, discuss the next steps to improve your inventory. Engage stakeholders in doing some more discovery in their areas of ownership or expertise. Invite people to participate in field research to learn from customers about when, how, and why they interact (or don’t interact) with your channels and touchpoints.
After the Workshop
Once the dust settles, you will need to assess the completeness of your inventory. You may need to circle back with some of the participants to make sure that you captured things accurately. Or, if you have not done primary discovery yet, you can take a deep dive into each channel and the journey as outlined earlier in the chapter. Remember, this is an iterative process. Keep filling in the blanks and continue to build consensus on a standard way to refer to your channels and touchpoints.
CHAPTER 3
Exploring Ecosystems
From Business to Experience Ecosystems
Unpacking an Experience Ecosystem
Using an Ecosystem Map as a Tool
CHAPTER 3 WORKSHOP: Landscape Alignment
Example Pitch to Participants (and Their Managers)
All organizations sit within a complicated system of relationships of people, processes, technologies, regulations, and competitors. At every level, their employees make decisions to chart the best course through these ever-changing variables to support organizational objectives. Around each corner are risks and opportunities. Each choice affects the next; each action opens or closes new possibilities.
Customers, in turn, live within their own world—one in which they are the center, not your organization. Every day, between when they wake up and go to bed, customers navigate complex environments of people, places, and things (both seen and unseen) to meet their needs, chase their desires, and lead their lives. It’s a giant sea of stuff, relationships, and possible futures.
These dynamics help shape each discrete interaction a person has with a product or service. These interactions, in turn, determine the health of the overall customer relationship. Therefore, understanding this greater context—the colliding worlds of an organization and its customers—comes with the territory of orchestrating experiences (see Figure 3.1).
FIGURE 3.1 When they interact, an organization and its customers bring with them complex relationships, influencers, and objectives.
In this chapter, you will learn how to unpack an experience ecosystem to reveal relationships that influence customer needs, expectations, and behaviors today. These insights then can inform how you navigate and influence this ecosystem in the future. Before going too far, let’s start with a refresher on the concept of ecosystems and its common application in business.
From Business to Experience Ecosystems
Your first exposure to the concept of an ecosystem was likely in grade school science. Perhaps it was explained as follows:
The sun shines on the river, causing water evaporation. Clouds form, and rain falls upon the land. Plants absorb the water and nutrients from the soil and then flower. Bees and birds travel from flower to flower, picking up and pollinating other parts of the land. The bees use the pollen to make honey. And so on, and so on.
These simple stories helped us understand that ecosystems, while complex, are made up of many moving parts that can be identified and studied in relation to one another. Changing any of these individual relationships can have a profound effect on the rest of the ecosystem. Raise the temperature of the earth a bit, and you will lose the bees. With no bees, pollen isn’t spread, and then you have a plant problem. These relationships, therefore, are critical to scientific observations and understanding of cause and effect within any given ecosystem.
Business Ecosystems
Over time, these concepts have influenced thinking in business strategy, innovation, and economic theory. In the early 1990s, James F. Moore published “Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition,” transforming companies’ traditional views of competition. Moore argued that
[A] company [should] be viewed not as a member of a single industry but as part of a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries. In a business ecosystem, companies
