When historians look back at the twilight of the Western Roman Empire, they don’t point to a single afternoon when the lights went out. Instead, they chart a long, uneven devolution. As the administrative center in Rome grew too slow, too rigid, and too broke to manage its sprawling frontiers, the legions pulled back. The roads decayed, centralized currency lost its teeth, and ...
» Read the article |
|
|
|
Guest Post from Pete Foley |
Our world is changing at an unprecedented rate. We are in an innovation driven economy. AI, genetic manipulation, energy innovation, climate, and virtually anything driving change are all highly technical and complex. And all come with high stakes ...
» Read the article |
|
|
|
Customer churn is the most honest signal your organization receives. When customers leave, they are telling you — with their feet — that something in their experience with you fell below the threshold required to stay. Most organizations respond to churn with data: dashboards, cohort analysis, predictive models, and ...
» Read the article |
|
|
|
Exclusive Interview with Bruce Cleveland |
In a business landscape increasingly cluttered by “feature wars” and fleeting viral trends, true market leadership isn’t just about who builds the best product — it’s about who defines the problem. In his groundbreaking work, Market Engineering, Bruce Cleveland argues that successful companies don’t just enter markets; they architect them. By blending rigorous systems thinking with ...
» Read the article |
|
|
|
Most organizations have a voice of customer program. Most of those programs are not working as well as they think they are. The evidence is clear: organizations are collecting more customer feedback than ever before — surveys after every interaction, NPS scores, CSAT measurements, review monitoring, social listening — and yet customer experience scores across most ...
» Read the article |
|
|
|
Guest Post from Mike Shipulski
|
We have too many ideas, but too few great ones. We don’t need more ideas, we need a way to choose the best one or two ideas and run them to ground. Before creating more ideas, make a list of the ones you already have. Put them in two boxes. In Box 1, list the ideas without a video of a functional prototype in action. In Box 2, list the ideas that have ...
» Read the article |
|
|
|
Customer journey mapping is one of the most powerful tools available to experience leaders — and one of the most frequently misused. Organizations create journey maps in workshops, hang them on walls, and then make the same experience investment they would have ...
» Read the article |
|
|
|
Guest Post from Shep Hyken |
This article answers the question: What is the difference between personalization and individualization, and why does it matter to the customer experience? The concept of personalization is gaining increased attention. My annual customer experience research found that nearly eight out of 10 customers (79%) in the U.S. feel a personalized experience is important. So, what is a personalized experience?
» Read the article |
|
|
|
Customer service and customer experience are used interchangeably in most organizations. They are not the same thing — and the confusion between them is costing organizations significant competitive ground. When leaders conflate customer service with customer experience, they ...
» Read the article |
|
|
|
Guest Post from Art Inteligencia |
Digital transformation has reached an inflection point. Organizations are moving away from traditional, deterministic software and basic copilots toward Agentic AI—autonomous systems capable of executing complex, multi-step operational workflows with minimal human oversight. While this shift promises unprecedented efficiency, it introduces a severe ...
» Read the article |
|
|
|
Most organizations benchmark their customer experience against themselves. They track NPS month over month, monitor CSAT scores quarter over quarter, and celebrate when the numbers move up. What they rarely do is answer the question that actually matters for competitive survival: how does our experience compare to what our customers can get elsewhere?
» Read the article |
|
|
|
Guest Post from Greg Satell |
On a cold November day in 2013, frustrated by recent events in Ukraine, a journalist named Mustafa Nayyem posted to Facebook, “Okay guys, let’s get serious. Who’s ready to go to the Maidan today at midnight? ‘Likes’ will not be counted. Only comments under this post with the words ...
» Read the article |
|
|
|
As 2026 continues, we hope your year is excellent so far. Please be sure and follow me on LinkedIn!
I hope you enjoyed this week's contributions from our guest authors. Future editions will arrive each Tuesday.
Please direct all speaking and workshop requests, commissioned writing inquiries, and podcast appearance queries to info@bradenkelley.com.
And, reply to this email if you would like to contribute articles to this newsletter.
Sincerely,
Your Host - Braden Kelley
|
|
|
|
| Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly hosted by Braden Kelley, Seattle, WA, USA |
|
|
|
