How companies need to think

Grant Leboff: Adrian, one of the points you make in the book, which I think is very powerful, is this link between organization structure and customer experience. In other words a lot of companies are very outward-focused, "This is what we're going to deliver to our customers," and perhaps don't look inwards and think, "Actually, are we best-placed to even do that?"

Adrian Swinscoe: Sure.

Grant Leboff: It's question that you raised in the book and I think it's a good one. Maybe you can explain how companies need to think.

Adrian Swinscoe: I think that we know that the world is changing, and the world is changing very, very, fast, but we still organize our companies largely based on traditions that come from the 20th Century. It's very much production lines, sort of by function, so on and so forth. But as we move into further into the 21st Century and things do change, I think we have to start questioning everything in what we do and how we do it. I'm not saying that that there's only right nor wrong answer to this, but the important thing is asking the question, is to say, "If this is the experience that we want to deliver, is our organization set up in the best way to deliver that experience?"

Now the answer might be "yes", the answer may be "no". The answer might be, "Oh well, maybe not quite right." Because otherwise if we don't ask the question, we end up getting to that point where we try to put a square peg into a round hole or vice-versa. I think there's going to be a challenge for companies going forward to figure out how they can become more adaptable, more flexible, in terms of their organizational structure, and how they work with their customers and their employees to deliver the experience that they want, because we can't just assume that a fixed structure is going to be suitable for the next two, three, four, five, ten years.

Grant Leboff: It's interesting, because you hear about companies, in fact all companies really, which say they're customer-centric and customer-focused, and yet in marketing my experience is they're normally not. They think they are.

Adrian Swinscoe: Sure.

Grant Leboff: They're not lying, they're not.

Adrian Swinscoe: Yeah.

Grant Leboff: Would that be true of organizational structure as well, because you'd be saying, "Really, start with the experience in mind. This is the experience that you want to deliver, and then work back to how do we need to be to create that best experience"? Whereas of course most companies don't. They start with, "This is who we are. We've got to go and deliver that to the customer, now let's go do it."

Adrian Swinscoe: Sure.

Grant Leboff: Would you say you've got to start inside-out and think the other way?

Adrian Swinscoe: I think that's fair. That's one way to do it. I think there's other ways that you can do it. There's a company I talk about in the book called G Adventures [https://www.gadventures.com] and they changed their organizational structure but that's not necessarily the most important thing. The structure is not necessarily the most important thing. What's the most important thing is what they did with their people that were on the front line, is they just said, "Right, fine, we're not going to have a CEO anymore .... or rather we are going to have a CEO, we're going to have about 200 of them, because all our front line people are going to be Chief Experience Officers.

We're going to empower them, enable them, with the right sorts of tools and skills and training and so on and so forth, to be the person that is completely in charge of delivering the best experience for our customers. So it's not you're in a function and you're only responsible for A, B or C. Actually, we're going to give our people on the front line the responsibility and the tools and the accountability to be able to deliver A to Z experience." So the organization has changed to accommodate that, but actually it's more about like you say, they're designing for the experience. They're enabling their people to deliver the experience that they want, and the organizational structure actually is secondary to that, because they're actually focused on the experience.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order make it more readable.