Figure depicting a word cloud with few words, for example,vision, business, layer, and so on represented in bold, and other words are presented in the lower fonts.

6
The Vision Layer

“If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don't have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.”

—Steve Jobs

Your business is a relationship, more than it is any other thing. Don't rush on to the next paragraph. Think about that for a minute.

Wikipedia defines business as “a commercial operation or firm engaged in commerce that seeks to achieve volume and profits by transacting its goods and services.”1 However, we are here to tell you that, although that definition holds true, your business is a relationship, first and foremost.

Your business is one of the most complex and important relationships in society; it moves the world forward in aggregate. Business is the engine of humanity's progress and it could, therefore, be said that business is humanity's most important relationship in the evolution of our species. However, focusing solely on profit motives—without regard for other people, species, and the planet—is not a good way to run your business. Either way, you definitely have a relationship with your business, good or bad. So, if you will think about your business from here on out as a relationship, we believe that you will be well on your way to leveraging the EMF to its maximum benefit as you transform to a customer-centric digital organization.

All of the great relationships in business, music and entertainment, sports, and everyday love stories have one thing in common. They all have a vision for where they are going together. Think of the great business partnerships, great rock bands, or great baseball teams like the 2015 Kansas City Royals, and think about why they work. It begins with painting a clear inspiring picture of where you are going and how you are taking each person with you. Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group says, “The biggest determinants, by far, of whether you will be successful at social business are leadership and culture.” (Sidenote: Travis added the 2015 Royals because (1) they were awesome and (2) the Royals beat Chris's favorite baseball team, the New York Mets, in the 2015 World Series. Chris left this in the final edits because karma is real and vengeance will be his in the next book…he hopes. img)

For relationships to work and last, an ongoing alignment and a shared vision are necessary.

Your employees, your stakeholders, and your customers all crave—and deserve—to know, and have the chance to align with, your vision. For that matter, your spouse does too! However, your vision without a prioritized plan is nothing more than a pipe dream. You must schedule and calibrate the scope. It has always been true that the vital few in society who can see the future and simultaneously work their face off to create it have carried the many who can merely just hope and dream.

The Vision Layer + Social Business

In the Vision Layer (Figure 6.1) of the EMF, you will clearly state and anchor your vision into a social business strategy that aligns to purpose, deploys human-centric tactics, and course corrects with data-fed iterations.

A triangle depicting the EMF vision layer: strategy, where its vertex are representing goals, touch points, and scopes. The sides of the triangle are representing purpose, people, and process. A circles inside the triangle is representing purpose focused social business strategy.

Figure 6.1 The EMF Vision Layer: Strategy

Later in the book, we will provide plenty of “how to” ideas and resources as they relate to specific tactics, technologies, and life hacks you can deploy to leverage your newly enhanced digital sense into more meaningful results. Since strategy always should come before tactics, let's focus on how you can leverage the EMF to build your strategic plan and the questions you need to ask and answer within your team to ensure that your strategy is holistic and human at its core.

The Vision Layer Exercises

Dive right in with your team to the Vision Layer with the momentum gained from your efforts at the Insight Layer by starting with an audit of your current business goals (aka, major business objectives) as they relate to the clarity you gained around your customer's needs. The first step here is to ensure that your major goals (Figure 6.2) align to the needs of your customer and will allow you to achieve your higher purpose.

A triangle depicting the goals node of the EMF vision layer, where the triangle is representing goals. A circles inside the triangle is representing measurable results aligning to VOC 1yr, 2yr, 3yr.

Figure 6.2 The Goals Node of the EMF Vision Layer

Building a solid social business strategy is the art of applying insights to specific touch points in the customer journey, guided by business goals and calibrated by scope to the resources available. This all begins with a clear focus on the top three business goals that deepen your relationship with your customer and employees, in a way that drives increased volume and profit to your financial statements.

  1. Time to complete exercise: 50 minutes to 2 hours (depending on the organization)
  2. Setting the stage: On the whiteboard should be the top three major business objectives for the coming year. The facilitator will quickly state aloud the major business objectives on the board and check for alignment amongst all the working group team that those objectives are clear and aligned on.

    Confucius said, “Man who aim at nothing—sure to hit it.” He also says, “Man who stands on toilet is high on pot.” But that's irrelevant.

  3. Step 1: In this Vision Layer exercise of the EMF, each member should write out their top three to five department-level goals for the coming year on sticky notes.
  4. Step 2: Each member will place those sticky notes underneath the most relevant major business objective that they support or impact.
  5. Step 3: The facilitator and remaining working group will discuss and verify that you have clear metrics (KPIs) by which you are measuring your progress to each of those goals. If you do not, either pause to define the valued metric related to each or throw that goal out and replace it with something you are willing and able to measure.

    Note: Data should drive decisions today, but the data is made valuable only when we hold each other accountable, as a cross-functional team, to define which measurements provide the most relevant value. When you measure the right stuff and observe the data through your five senses, you will benefit most from the continued mental muscle building of each individual's intellectual faculties. This allows your group intuition to grow stronger and more aligned. Intuition is the faculty you will use to uncover insights from the data and then imagine and create the innovations that you can operationalize in the future as you seek to optimize reliability in the customer experience.

  6. Step 4: Discuss your Lean Six Sigma and Voice of Customer (VOC) data,3 NPS scores, survey feedback, and detractor pipeline data, and look at how the happy and lost customers have prioritized their needs, and make sure that you helping them achieve those needs. Only this will allow you to achieve your stated business objectives in a sustainable way. Don't forget to give equal weight to considering the needs of your internal/employee customer as well as your external/end user customer in this regard.
  7. Step 5: Wrap up this session by revisiting the original major business objectives that are up on the whiteboard along with the three department level goals each leader is driving toward. Gut-check that they are stated properly and adjust them as needed to formalize the goals node as a group.
  8. Step 6: Document this and publish it everywhere it is appropriate and share with your department teams. Some example questions to help catalyze your goal alignment to customer needs audit are as follows:
    1. Do our department level metrics and KPIs all map to and connect to our management by objectives (MBO)?
    2. Does the impact on our customer rank number one in our department-level decision criteria?
    3. If the answer to question 2 is “no” or “not sure,” instead of asking why, which will just cause a justification of the current department level processes and KPIs, ask question 4.
    4. What if we put the customer (internal and external) first in priority across the company? What current decision criteria and KPIs are we governed by that would violate this new edict?
    5. How can we leverage our social business channels, tools, and incentives internally (Officevibe, Yammer, Slack, Facebook groups, and so on), to build a relationship between our people to these business goals, as a mutually beneficial and dynamically human thing?

Now you have up-to-date and documented 12-month goals. The good news is, if you are in a politically toxic environment, but you can't quit or won't leave, you can actually have these conversations with yourself and build out your own path to map your day-to-day team efforts to aligning around the customer and your current stated objectives. If you are reading this book, you are not a Zombie, which means you can make a difference if you are willing to try. Recruit one or two other people and start small. Remember always that much gathers more!

As Margaret Mead famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

The EMF is here to help you organize your own thoughts as well as your teams so that you can lead from wherever you are. A small group of committed people with digital sense and the customer at the heart of their efforts can make a huge impact even inside of siloed organizations.

Please don't mentally check out here if you feel yourself saying that, “This is great, guys, but it will never work in my f#@ked up company.” Remember that your relationship to your own enjoyment of your work is as important as anything larger. Master this effort for your own purposes. Never underestimate the power of you as a force for greater customer experience.

There is nothing wrong with self-interest as long as it is enlightened. If you are aware of and serve your personal goals and needs in alignment to the enterprise goals, you are acting in enlightened (mutually beneficial) self-interest, which is a worthy ideal for any company to enable. Depending on your rank in the company, its size, and its years in business, an official purpose statement may or may not be in your control. If your company has a clearly articulated purpose statement, you want to get yourself in relationship with that purpose at a renewed, visceral level. If you can't get yourself excited to embody that purpose day in and day out and you don't own the company, start looking for more meaningful work. If you do own the company and don't feel an unquenchable passion for the current or stated purpose, stop everything right now and get honest about what purpose inspires you to get out of bed every morning and grind. You must have a strong WHY to personally be your best, to inspire your team, and get their best output on a daily basis.

At Ethology, we realized in year 5 that we didn't have a clearly concise purpose statement that all team members would jump out of bed for and commit to hire and fire against. At the beginning of the fifth year, we embarked on a 6-month process that yielded a simple but powerful purpose statement, “To earn the compliment of being each client's most trusted business advisor.”

Now we have a purpose that every leader internally can hire and fire to. This purpose is both achievable and fragile in every single business and client interaction and represents an accountable relationship.

All of these truths make this purpose something extremely visceral for the organization and therefore make it a great purpose statement. What is yours? Can everyone on your team and in your organization state it out loud if called upon? If not, you don't have a clear purpose, and at a minimum, you need to remind people what it is and help them find their own conviction on why it matters. Strong culture is glued together by a clear and meaningful “why.”

A purpose-focused social business strategy must have a strong why, a clear what, and a manageable how. Redefine it if it needs redefining, or put it up on the whiteboard now and get everyone in your circle to share how and why it matters to them. Build a frothy energy of aligned purpose and bask in the productivity it will produce as you move through the rest of this layer with your team.

Customer Journeys

As you move around the nodes of the Vision Layer to the bottom left corner node, we will get into an audit of how you deliver at each of the key touch points in your customer's journey (Figure 6.3).

A triangle depicting the touch points node of the EMF vision layer, where the triangle is representing touch points. A circles inside the triangle is representing product line persona type channels KPIs.

Figure 6.3 The Touch Points Node of the EMF Vision Layer

You will run an audit against each product/service line, update and/or establish documented personas, journey maps, and the associated channel strategies you deploy for each. You will also decide how aligned your KPIs for each touch point map to your overarching channel strategy goals and your major business objectives. You will replace or redefine the data you capture and care about to ensure this is the case.

The most common mistake made in defining your social business strategy is not technology or choice of platform or channel. It's not necessarily the user experience either. All of those things play into your results, but before a line of code is written, a blog post or editorial calendar is conceived, or a dollar in advertising has been deployed, you cannot forget to answer the simple questions that your target has at each point in their journey.

In this section of the Vision Layer, you will unpack your major customer touch points along their journey from Awareness to Advocate and everything in between. You will begin to score yourself by how well you clearly solve and engage with them in a relevant way at each touch point or moment of truth. You will also build on the information gained at the Insight Layer around your competitors by benchmarking how well you stack up to competing solutions in the marketplace on relevance and engagement at these key touch points.

The bullets that follow cover the baseline understanding you should go over with all members of your cross-functional working group to level set the team around this section.

If you are newer to the world of customer journey map design and persona development we recommend our fellow Wiley author and friend Brian Solis's latest book X: The Experience When Business Meets Design as a phenomenal resource for architecting experience with deep process dives and visual examples of how to design and develop customer journeys for your organization.4

The resources above are invaluable to you and the free download is easy to print off and duplicate in PDF so that you have a step-by-step process for how to facilitate each internal working session. To start you off with an example of an exercise you should do with your team immediately, we have broken out elements of an audience development session below:

The Journey Map Touch Point Exercise

  1. Tip: You should use both analytics and direct observation (ethnographic) research when informing your journey map and audience development efforts.
  2. Setup: A large whiteboard (preferably 4 feet high and 8 feet long) or posterboard surface. Tape (using masking tape) a line that separates the top and bottom in equal parts across the full length.
  3. Materials Needed:
    • img You will need a stack of 5″ × 8″ and 3″ × 5″ index cards
    • img You will need several packs of multicolored (yellow, purple, green, pink, blue, etc.) sticky notes
    • img You will need Sharpie markers and/or pens for each participant.
    • img You will need one team member as facilitator and should aim for a cross-functional working group that includes a representative from marketing, sales, operations, delivery, customer service, and finance with direct customer knowledge from their domain.
  4. Time to complete: 2–3 hours
  5. Step 1: Identify the key steps that a customer takes as they progress through the buyer's journey.
    • img DON'T limit this to just the interactions/touch points with your brand, but take a broad view to see their entire experience.
    • img The facilitator will write each phase on one of the 5″ × 8″ index cards
  6. Step 2: On the top half of your whiteboard/poster board the facilitator will place these steps in order of how they occur, from left to right.
  7. Step 3: Identify what your customer is doing at each step in their buying journey
    • img Have each team member write every action they can think of for each step on a yellow sticky note
    • img Place the yellow sticky notes directly below the corresponding step above the tape line
  8. Step 4: Identify what your customer is thinking and feeling during each step.
    • img Write every thought/feeling on a purple sticky note directly below the corresponding step, below the tape line.
  9. Step 5: Examine the touch points in the journey (these are where your brand has the chance to interface with the customer such as search engines, websites, apps, social media, people, employees, retail stores/service centers, call centers, etc.).
    • img Have each person write these touch points on the green sticky notes.
    • img Place the green sticky notes below each corresponding step to identify which touch points are in play at each step of the buyer's journey.
  10. Step 6: Identify your customer's pain points during each step.
    • img Write every pain point on a pink sticky note.
    • img Place the pink sticky note directly below the corresponding step, below the line
  11. Step 7: Now you are ready to discuss the opportunities to improve the customer's experience and prioritize which areas will generate the largest impact/delta in ROI and get investment and focus in the coming year as it relates to budget and scope.
    • img Each member writes the opportunities as they see them on a blue sticky note and places them at the bottom of your board
  12. Recap:
    • img Yellow sticky=Customer action
    • img Purple sticky=Customer thoughts/feelings
    • img Green sticky=Touch points in the journey
    • img Pink sticky=Customer pain points
    • img Blue sticky=Opportunities
  13. Step 8: Identify the moments of truth
    • img Have each team member consider what your customer is doing, thinking, feeling, and experiencing every time they think or interact with your company and write each of these moments of truth on a 3″ × 5″ card.
    • img Place the index card next to its corresponding phase/step in the journey
  14. Step 9: Pop your favorite adult beverage because you have just mapped your customer journey. Now you can use this map to audit your existing customer experience and key touch points and make a plan to improve areas of concern.

Scope

Scope is the range or view, aim and purpose, length, and limit by which you will address any given opportunity or challenge you uncover as you complete your Vision Layer. It is the clear definition of any operation that you will undertake as it relates to improving key customer touch points that align to customer pain points/needs and generate the most impact toward your stated business objectives. No Vision Layer (Figure 6.4) can be complete without calibrating resources, time lines, and opportunities to a defined scope.

A triangle depicting the scope node of the EMF vision layer, where the triangle is representing scope. A circles inside the triangle is representing resources timelines opportunity priority.

Figure 6.4 The Scope Node of the EMF Vision Layer

Your strategy becomes ready to execute in the Success Layer once it has been put to a proper scope that defines how you will satisfy your strategic objectives/goals. Scope is your written governing document or road map that translates the customer needs and your product/service objectives into specific requirements to improve the infrastructure and messaging at key touch points, and defines who within your organization or vendor network will be tasked with implementing them and at what budgetary cost.

Taking time to define the scope is both a valuable process and a valuable end product. It is valuable as a process because it allows you to uncover land mines, budgetary conflicts, or internal political issues that could derail the project before it gets started and work to find a compromise in advance. It is a valuable end product because it provides a document for governance and measurement that can be shared and executed across the silos to maximize buy-in and efficiency.

  1. Step 1: Begin by defining the requirements.
    • img This seems obvious but it important to know what you are building and for what objectives. The second and equally important reason to define the requirements is to identify what it is that you are not going to build.
    • img If you have completed the Goals and Audience Development/Journey Map exercises from earlier, then the second half of these defined requirements is easy to complete. We suggest writing these defined requirement statements as follows: “We are building a (insert project here) to address the (insert specific customer pain point here) at (insert touch point impacted here) in the buyer's journey, for the sake of (insert the associated major business objective/goal here). List of requirements and phases would be expanded in each case below this summary statement.
  2. EXAMPLE: “We are building a mobile-first customer app portal to address the customer's need for real-time access to account information and transaction ability while on the go at the USE touch point, for the sake of increasing cross sales and customer loyalty by 10 percent this year.”
  3. Phase 1: Requirements and time line (derived from direct customer knowledge and feedback)
  4. Timeline of the sprint: January 15 to March 31, 2017
    1. Requirements:
      • img Simple, reliable, app interface that works reliably even in low-bandwidth environments
      • img Ability to see balance and recent transaction history in real time
      • img Ability to send or receive money or transfer to and from linked accounts.
  5. Phase 2: Requirements and time line
  6. Budget to complete Phase 1 and 2: $50,000
  7. Internal team members required:
    • img Director of Mobile Payments, director of IT, compliance officer, general counsel
  8. External resources needed:
    • img Front end developer, backend developer, UX/UI specialist
  9. Step 2: Prioritize the requirements.
    • img In the example above, we began to show a simple theoretical example of what a prioritized requirements document might look like.
    • img It is very important (although sometimes difficult) to put in the time to be very specific with the requirements of each investment you will make to optimize a key touch point in your customer's journey. It is not enough to stick with vague words like “a hip, cool interface that looks good to our customers on a mobile device.”
    • img You have done rigorous work in this layer and the Insight layer before to gain a clear picture of the thoughts, feelings, and actions your customers will be guided by at each point in the journey. As you think through these requirements, you will want to be as specific as possible and provide access to that summary persona data and journey map to whoever is building or executing the project for you.
    • img You will also need to negotiate with other department leads and budget holders depending and ensure that the scope stays well defined and as tight as possible despite the human nature of each new participant to want “it” to do one more thing for their specific domain of concern.
    • img It is very common to see one requirement impact or tie back to multiple strategic goals or objectives, and this is important to map out as well so that you can use this data to make the tough decisions on what gets cut when budgets and statements of work (SOWs) are in conflict and something must get cut or put on the shelf for another phase.
    • img Feasibility is a key determinant in how things get prioritized as well. For instance, you may have an executive order to hit one of the major business objectives within 2 months, but as you begin to scope out and define the requirements to get your current idea to market, it will require 4 months or not be possible for 12 months within that budget range. This lack of feasibility is a real constraint but is valuable to uncover because it can cause you to rethink your product strategy or find a whole new way to hit the major business objective. A design thinker mentality will look at the problem first (i.e., “hit this major business objective in 2 months”) and find the most feasible and efficient method to achieve that outcome.
    • img A hidden value of prioritizing and detailing the defined requirements of your scope with teams is that in some cases you will find that features and efforts you begin to see as requirements will not align completely to your defined goals section. This is a sign of either a doomed strategy that has not properly addressed constraints and feasibility and jumped to defining requirements too quickly, or that has not yet clearly ranked the priority of each major business objective to provide proper top-down guidance.

The key things to come away with from the Vision Layer of the EMF is a documented process and aligned rationale as to what the prioritized strategic goals for the organization are moving forward in the next 12 months in concrete terms, and not necessarily the proposed means of getting there. You will likely need to define scope more than once as you begin to phase into execution, and find ways to approach this process with urgency and accuracy and agility as environments, people, and markets shift in real time.

A great understanding of design thinking will help you and your teams navigate this balance, and you can find 45 amazing resources on implementing design thinking into your organization.5

Takeaways from the Vision Layer

  1. What: You have defined your three major business goals and aligned them to your customer needs. You have audited and mapped your buyer's journey and assessed key areas to improve at certain touch points. You have calibrated scope and prioritized projects to budgets and feasible timelines, and identified available internal and external resources.
  2. Who: Project stakeholders in a cross-functional working group, executive sponsor, client/customers, agency partners.
  3. How: Conducting workshops, ethnographic research, data analysis, building project plans and requirement docs, revisiting recommendations, and making decisions to prioritize.
  4. Why: The purpose of this layer is to get to a point where you have made decisions about how you will attack the coming year and put it all to a plan and schedule.

Notes