In this episode
Lou Carbone—founder and Chief Experience Officer of Experience Engineering, Professor of Practice at Michigan State University, and the pioneer often called the “Godfather of Experience Management”—argues that a brand is no longer what a company says it is, but the cumulative effect of every customer interaction. In conversation with Greg Kihlström, Carbone lays out what he calls a “reformation” in branding: a move away from logos, slogans, and campaigns toward engineering experiences, where the real currency is memory and emotion, and the job is to design the sensory and emotional clues that build “brand ethos.” He explains why an obsession with scores and journey maps has stalled the customer-experience profession, how to get inside the unconscious mind of the customer, and why AI belongs at the center of a human operating system rather than bolted onto it.
Key takeaways
- A brand is the sum of every customer experience, not what a company claims. Control has shifted from the company to the consumer—”we’re not making a product,” Carbone says; we’re creating an experience.
- The currency of experience is memory. What a brand actually produces is memories, formed through emotion—not features and not a defect-free transaction.
- Chasing “the basics” commoditizes you. Aiming only to eliminate defects keeps a company at parity forever; distinctive value comes from designing for unconscious needs, not fixing broken things.
- Experience clues come in three types—humanic, mechanic, and functional. Managing those signals deliberately is how a company creates the emotional resonance that builds brand ethos.
- Measure only what customer experience can actually control. Holding a CX team accountable for ROI while another department raises prices is incoherent; measure emotional congruency, not vanity scores.
- NPS-style “would you recommend?” questions are the wrong metric. Carbone wants to know whether a customer actually referred or returned—not whether they say they would.
- Emotional ethos buys forgiveness. A London barbershop gave him a poor first haircut but an exceptional experience, so he keeps going back—feeling can outweigh a functional miss.
- AI belongs at the center of a human system, not bolted on. Carbone frames AI as the “central nervous system” of an engineered experience, fused with the science of human dynamics—not an add-on.
- “You cannot not have an experience.” Every business creates one whether it intends to; the only question is how managed or how haphazard it is.
Chapters
- 1:06 — What a “reformation in branding” really means
- 3:14 — From journalist to Disney: discovering brand ethos
- 5:12 — The biggest mindset shift: consumers control the brand
- 6:28 — Memory as the currency of experience
- 9:33 — Why customer experience is horizontal, not a box on the org chart
- 10:08 — Progressive’s instant-response vehicles: the journey as a continuum
- 13:19 — Why teams default to what’s easy to measure
- 16:41 — Marrying ROI with real experience: inside the maze of the mind
- 18:23 — Measuring emotional congruency and the barbershop that won him over
- 20:14 — Does this apply to every brand? Discovery beyond comfort
- 23:00 — Is ROI pressure helping or hurting the CX profession?
- 24:22 — “Does it ring the cash register?”: beyond the score and NPS
- 26:50 — How AI will (and won’t) change customer experience
- 30:32 — Three levels of desire, systems thinking, and “you cannot not have an experience”
- 31:49 — Staying agile: thinking like a researcher
If the experience is the brand, the consumer controls it—not you
Carbone traces the dysfunction to industrial-age habits: silos, and the assumption that the company controls the brand. In reality, he argues, consumers do. “We’re not making a product,” he says—what a brand creates is an experience, and the currency of that experience is memories. The task is to get into the unconscious mind of the customer and embed the clues and signals that build brand ethos around their real needs.
Why “getting the basics right” is a trap
Borrowing from quality thinking, most organizations frame the work as eliminating defects. Carbone’s counter: “if you aim that low, you’ll be there forever—you’ll be commoditized.” Distinctive value doesn’t come from fixing broken things; it comes from designing for unconscious needs and creating the emotional resonance that a defect-free transaction never will.
Measure what CX can control—emotional congruency, not scores
Carbone is blunt about the profession’s fixation on scores: “Who gives a damn about a score? It’s does it ring the damn cash register?” He argues teams get held responsible for ROI they can’t control, then measure the wrong things to justify it. His alternative is to measure emotional congruency—and to reject survey questions like “would you recommend?” in favor of whether a customer actually referred or returned.
Experience clues: humanic, mechanic, and functional
The mechanics of building brand ethos come down to signals the human brain picks up, which Carbone sorts into three types—humanic, mechanic, and functional. The work is finding the “emotional keyhole” that unlocks the feeling that a company’s disappearance would genuinely change your life, then managing those clues to create emotional resonance.
AI is the central nervous system, not a bolt-on
Carbone rejects the idea that AI is something you “hang on and bolt onto” existing work. In his framing, AI is the central nervous system of a human system, and the human system is an engineered experience—the fusion of understanding human dynamics with the technology itself. Bolt-ons, he says, are terrible; the science has to be central.
“You cannot not have an experience”
The line Carbone is best known for is a deliberate double negative: you cannot not have an experience. Every business is in the experience business whether it likes it or not; the only variable is whether that experience is managed or left haphazard.
FAQ
What does Lou Carbone mean by a “reformation” in branding? A shift away from logos, slogans, and campaigns toward understanding the brand as the cumulative effect of every customer interaction—where the currency is memory and emotion, not messaging.
What is “brand ethos”? The feeling that an organization is an institution rather than a company—the sense that if it disappeared tomorrow, your life would be different. Carbone points to Disney, Mayo Clinic, and Starbucks at its best as examples.
What are the three types of experience clues? Humanic, mechanic, and functional. Managing these signals deliberately is how a company creates the emotional resonance that builds brand ethos.
Why is Carbone critical of scores like NPS? Because they reward stated intention over action. He’d rather measure whether a customer actually referred or returned than whether they say they “would recommend,” and he warns that score-chasing has corrupted the profession.
How should companies approach AI in customer experience? As the central nervous system of a human system—fused with the science of engineering experiences—rather than a bolt-on add-on.
Does experience design apply to non-experiential brands? Yes. Carbone argues every business is in the experience business whether it likes it or not—”you cannot not have an experience”—so the only question is how managed or haphazard that experience is.
About Lou Carbone
Lou Carbone, often called the “Godfather of Experience Management,” has been a pioneer in experience engineering since the 1980s. He’s a globally recognized thought leader, author of Clued In (Fast Company’s Reader’s Choice Award winner), and co-author of award-winning research like “Sticktion.” He developed the proprietary Experience Engineering® methodology and has advised top organizations including Microsoft, IBM, John Deere, Pizza Hut UK, Allstate, and the UAE government. A frequent keynote speaker and guest lecturer at leading business schools, he’s also Professor of Practice at Michigan State University, shaping future leaders in customer experience. His innovations, like the Paperless Rental Agreement at National Car Rental, have become industry standards. He holds a Distinguished Alumni Award from Thiel College, where he also served as Board Chair, and is active on several healthcare and academic boards including Brown College. Lou also serves as a Professor of Practice in the Eli Broad Business College at Michigan State University, teaching within the Masters of Market Research and Analytics program, as well as the startup of the Masters degree in Customer Experience Management.
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Transcript
[00:01:06] Greg Kihlström: [gentle music] Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of The Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you. If a brand is no longer what a company says it is but the sum of every experience a customer has, what does that mean for the marketing department’s role in the organization? Agility requires more than just adapting to market changes. It demands a fundamental shift from broadcasting a message to engineering an experience. It requires a willingness to unlearn old definitions of brand and embrace a new reality where customer perception is the ultimate truth. Today we’re going to talk about what some are calling a reformation in branding, to move away from the traditional model of logos, slogans, and campaigns and toward a new understanding where the brand is the cumulative effect of every single customer interaction. This shift has massive implications for organizational structure, strategy, and even how we measure success. To help me discuss these topics, I’d like to welcome Lou Carbone, Professor of Practice, Michigan State University, and Founder/Chief Experience Officer at Experience Engineering. Lou, welcome to the show.
[00:02:56] Lou Carbone: Greg, thank you so much for having me on. I’m looking forward to the discussion. Thank you.
[00:03:02] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, looking forward to, to talking about this with you. Before we dive in, I know many are probably familiar with your work, but why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Experience Engineering?
[00:03:14] Lou Carbone: actually, my background started, many years ago as a journalist, actually, interviewing an Imagineer, the last Imagineer hired by Disney. From that, I went on into advertising and marketing with a number of agencies and had the great fortune through two of those agencies to be assigned to Disney, representing participants and what people refer to as experiential intelligence.
[00:03:50] Lou Carbone: looking at Disney, and being around it both on the inside and the outside led me to a deeper understanding of brand ethos, and brand ethos is sort of that feeling that an organization isn’t a company, it’s an institution. Mayo Clinic shares that same feeling. Starbucks had… I think they started to lose some of that patina and are now coming back to understanding what brand ethos is.
[00:04:25] Lou Carbone: And that is literally how you cause people to feel about themselves, and it is that transformational piece of what it means to me and how it becomes part of me. And, the evolution of branding started with trying to identify product, if we go back to branding cows [laughs] and so on.
[00:04:53] Lou Carbone: [laughs] And so one of the things that’s so important is to unlearn the things that we’ve learned, to be able to discover and to grow and to evolve things, and I think that brand has changed a great deal from the way that it was traditionally seen.
[00:05:12] Greg Kihlström: So I think that’s a great, that’s a great segue to what I w- where I wanted to start, which is really looking at this, this idea of brand from, from that strategic lens. And, and your work certainly calls for a reformation in how we think about brand as well as, as how we think about experience. You mentioned some iconic brands, you know, Disney, Starbucks, others, just now and, you know, I… But not all brands are certainly even close to, to achieving the kind of, the definition and, and some other things that, that those brands have achieved. in this model you describe, you know, if the experience is the brand, what’s the single biggest mindset shift that a, an exec needs to make to begin this journey?
[00:05:57] Lou Carbone: Oh, it is so huge. It’s, it’s moving out of the industrial age And understanding that in the industrial age we created silos, we created the idea that we control the brand [laughs]
[00:06:11] Lou Carbone: … and it’s really consumers who do. We’re not making a product. What we’re doing when we create an experience, which is what a brand is all about, the currency of experience is memories.
[00:06:28] Lou Carbone: So the industry did what it always did, which was built out of quality, which is how do we eliminate defects-
[00:06:37] Lou Carbone: … versus how do we create distinctive value? And everybody thinks, “Oh, we gotta get the basics down.” And if you aim that low, you’ll be there forever. You’ll be commoditized. What you have to do is get into the mind of the consumer and travel through the maze of their mind and understand unconscious thought, how emotions are formed, and then you embed those clues and signals that actually build that brand ethos in terms of what their unconscious needs are.
[00:07:18] Lou Carbone: And that’s something that we published on almost four decades ago.
[00:07:25] Lou Carbone: And what ended up happening is, um… I, I love the work that Joe and Jim Gilmore have done. I mean, they popularized the construct of value markets.
[00:07:39] Lou Carbone: What was never presented was how we need to think differently, and our article actually preceded theirs by about four or five years. But what they talked about was basically, theater at Disney. Well, there’s a whole science beyond that, that the science of theater is memory, it’s emotion, and yet there was never any real understanding. So then what we did is created a profession, and it took off like crazy. And I thank Bruce and Jeanne Bliss and the association, for recognizing that this is a profession.
[00:08:25] Lou Carbone: And it was my… I, I was the first chief experience officer probably globally.
[00:08:33] Lou Carbone: We started the very first company that was ever dedicated. But to me, the CEO is ultimately the chief experience officer. Instead, it got relegated to a profession, of departmental, safekeeping of measurements and metrics to create, um… Oh, I don’t wanna call it an alibi, but to create justification for everything else that’s going on in the company but no control over it.
[00:09:11] Lou Carbone: And so people hold, these departments responsible for ROI, and yet if someone in another department raises prices, what, what, what are we looking at? So the only thing that I believe is you look at what customer experience can control, and that’s what you measure.
[00:09:33] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, I’ve often thought, too, that to me, you know, customer experience seems like a, r- rather than a vertical, item in an org chart, it seems like a horizontal th- like, if a, if there’s a chief experience officer, that’s great to, to own that, but it, customer experience, it, it extends all the way throughout the organization, right?
[00:10:01] Lou Carbone: throughout the organization and even beyond our contact with a customer.
[00:10:08] Lou Carbone: when we did work with Progressive Auto Insurance, if you had done traditional journey mapping and not gotten into the mind of the customer, journey mapping, and many journey mappers really have tried to evolve, but it’s really looking at process.
[00:10:27] Lou Carbone: And process is not what it’s about. when we w- did work with Progressive, we realized the most vulnerable moment in a claim was at the moment of impact and created the instant response vehicles that showed up on the scene of the accident with a claims adjuster. In traditional thought, if you’re, you’d say, “Oh, it starts with the call,” the claims are now online. And what we need to understand is that a journey is not a beginning and an end.
[00:11:08] Lou Carbone: It’s a continuum. in, in our work and in Klude Inn and in the articles that we’ve published for decades, we talk about an experience ribbon that goes around and around and around, and the depth of that covers sensory aspects and emotions, and not things that happen that are functional only.
[00:13:19] Greg Kihlström: I mean, it seems like even the, the things that you are mentioning are measurable, but it seems like a lot of the, the dysfunction, I’ll just call it, is, is due to … Is it, is it that people tend to fall towards what’s easy to measure and easy to make a process around? Is, is that where brands get stuck?
[00:13:42] Lou Carbone: I, I think that it … I, I hate to say this, but I’m beginning to think of LinkedIn and all of what social media has done to the, fractionalization of the industry-
[00:13:57] Lou Carbone: … has become a cesspool of people trying to make money, which is nothing wrong with, but without advancing thinking.
[00:14:07] Lou Carbone: And there are so many self-proclaimed experts. There’s no science to back it up, in terms of what they’re doing other than borrowed from quality, borrowed from service, and we’re into a new era, and, and a really, really new era with AI. And we even misunderstand AI and think that it’s something that we hang on and bolt onto what we’re doing, versus AI is the central nervous system of a human system, and the human system is an engineered experience. It’s the fusion of the technology of understanding human dynamics and technology in terms
[00:14:53] Lou Carbone: of an artificial intelligence.
[00:14:57] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:58] Lou Carbone: And, it … So that’s the work that we’ve been doing. I’ve got, what, three, I guess, three new books coming out. One is The Currency of Experience, is, Memory. another is called Fusionomics, and I, I, I don’t wanna plug books, but-
[00:15:18] Greg Kihlström: [laughs]
[00:15:19] Lou Carbone: … I feel this, I feel this overwhelming need after four decades of waiting for the world to begin to realize [laughs] that, uh … I ended the book with the road less traveled and invited people on the road less traveled, which was discovery. It was about, unlearning, and it was learning new ways to create value in the economy at the turn of, the decade.
[00:15:50] Lou Carbone: And, unfortunately, people came on board and did what they were always doing and called it something different.
[00:15:59] Greg Kihlström: Right. Right. So I mean, if it … How, how do … How should brands do this right that, you know, they’re, they’re gonna need to, they’re gonna need to measure effectiveness and, and prove ROI and, you know, you’re not saying not to do that, of course, but, like, what’s the-
[00:16:15] Lou Carbone: No, exactly
[00:16:16] Greg Kihlström: … what is the right way? Because I, I, I agree with you. I think there’s a l- a lot of, you know, I’m sure well-intentioned people that are, also trying to, you know, make a living and, and stuff like that, but not necessarily steering the conversation in, in the right way around how brands should be thinking about experience. So, you know, how do you marry that need for, for ROI with the need to actually make a great experience?
[00:16:41] Lou Carbone: Absolutely, and there are some absolutes. The first absolute is being inside the mind of the customer.
[00:16:49] Lou Carbone: Walking the maze of the mind of the customer and beginning to understand unconscious needs, rather than … And it … What that is, is understanding how customers think versus what they think.
[00:17:04] Lou Carbone: There’s a big difference between the two. The second is then becoming aware of what that emotional keyhole is that unlocks that brand ethos, that n- that feeling that if that company went away tomorrow my life would be different.
[00:17:24] Lou Carbone: I would mourn the loss of that company. And then creating the key, and the key is the way the human brain operates, which is there are signals that we pick up which I call experience clues. They’re humanic, mechanic, and functional. And how do we manage those to create that emotional resonance? And then how do we measure, and we’ve been doing this for a while now, all of this unconscious work, my work with Jerry Zoltman over the years, in, in using all these distinctive new techniques. and when I teach at Michigan State, I’m teaching,
[00:18:10] Lou Carbone: people how to think differently, how to unlearn what we’ve learned in market research and qualitative research-
[00:18:18] Lou Carbone: … because there’s so much more to the world than focus groups and opinions-
[00:18:23] Lou Carbone: … to really in-depth understanding. So then from that, what we want to do is measure emotional congruency. Are we actually creating those, those, those needs? If we’re doing that, we will flourish. an example that I use is a, a barbershop that I love, that gave me a horrible haircut the first time I went there. But I go back there again and again and again. It’s called Truffitt & Hill, and it’s how they made me feel. They gave me tea. They shined my shoes. [laughs]
[00:19:05] Lou Carbone: it’s, there’s … The one that I went to was in Canada, but they’re out of London. And I even got a shave, I was so taken by the experience. And when I left, I was transformed. I felt like a phenomenal person because every clue, every element was how I would feel. And, I … Whenever I’m in London or in Toronto or wherever they have, a franchise, I’ll, I’ll go in there for a haircut. But they fell down on the first haircut. It wasn’t the best haircut I ever got.
[00:19:39] Lou Carbone: But it’s how it caused me to feel. So I think people are more forgiving when there’s emotional ethos built into a brand.
[00:19:48] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. And, and so, you know, you, you mentioned some extreme example. You mentioned a barbershop, and you mentioned Disney, in this conversation. So, you know, the, the natural question is, you know, are there, are there parts of this … Like, does this apply to every brand? And, you know, or like how, how does a, you know, how does a brand that isn’t, maybe so obviously experiential apply some of these and still, you know, and, and still a-
[00:20:14] Lou Carbone: Yeah
[00:20:14] Greg Kihlström: … adapt?
[00:20:16] Lou Carbone: I think it’s, it’s very simple, and I blame it on the industry. I, I don’t think that the industry … Everyone is so concerned about presenting themselves as an expert that they pull from what they know.
[00:20:30] Lou Carbone: What we don’t know, what we don’t even know we don’t know-
[00:20:35] Lou Carbone: … is the most powerful thing that we can bring to our work. And yet e- everybody is so concerned about presenting themselves as an expert, that they latch onto what’s comfortable. Discovery and innovation comes from a lack of comfortability. [laughs]
[00:20:54] Lou Carbone: and what we need to do is prove to organizations that there’s a different way to think. There are absolutes in terms of optimizing the value of experiences and the ex- the methodology and tools to create that transformative experience that begins to build brand ethos. [gentle music]
[00:21:23] Greg Kihlström: Best thing that’s ever happened to you financially. Go.
[00:21:26] Speaker 6: Easy. Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer.
[00:21:29] Greg Kihlström: Really? I hit 200 on a scratcher.
[00:21:32] Speaker 6: Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check?
[00:21:35] Speaker 6: How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on carvana.com once.
[00:21:39] Greg Kihlström: Okay. That’s fair.
[00:21:41] Speaker 6: It’s like the lottery, except you always win.
[00:21:44] Greg Kihlström: Not like the lottery at all, actually.
[00:21:46] Speaker 6: Exactly. Inexplicably good. Offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees may apply.
[00:21:53] Speaker 7: [phone vibrating] Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system.
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[00:23:00] Greg Kihlström: So, you know, I, I know I asked some questions about measurement. You know, I wonder your perspective on … I, I feel like there’s been a lot of pressure in recent years from the CEOs to show ROI on the customer experience profession. I mean, is that, is that helping or hurting or, or both the profession?
[00:23:20] Lou Carbone: It’s hurting. Oh, it’s hurting because there are people that think that if they’ve achieved this number … And we’re in a, in a race, and people are competitive. The worst thing that could’ve happened was putting an S on there. It’s an S word. It’s score. Who gives a damn about a score? It’s does it ring the damn cash register?
[00:23:44] Greg Kihlström: Right. Right.
[00:23:45] Lou Carbone: And it doesn’t. And people are so obsessed with the score because it’s justification, and then they complain that there was no return on the investment.
[00:23:57] Lou Carbone: Are we crazy?
[00:24:00] Greg Kihlström: Right, right. It, it’s chasing, it’s chasing measurement, at the expense of results.
[00:24:07] Lou Carbone: At the expense.
[00:24:22] Lou Carbone: … the work that we did 40 years ago is what we need to be grasping onto today, is understanding that experiences are engineered.
[00:24:32] Lou Carbone: They can be engineered to create emotional ethos. And yet what we’re doing is fixing broken stuff. We’re paying attention to scores. We’re journey mapping, which, you know… And, and even the net promoter score, the question, how many years before, I mean, d- decades before when I was a VP of marketing at National Car, we had a question on that survey that said, “Would you recommend?” “Would you, would you come back again?” That’s baloney. I wanna measure whether you actually did. [laughs]
[00:25:12] Greg Kihlström: [laughs] Yeah. Good, good point.
[00:25:14] Lou Carbone: I’d rather pay you to refer someone.
[00:25:16] Greg Kihlström: [laughs]
[00:25:17] Lou Carbone: And it’s getting so corrupted that I hung up yesterday on a call, that I believe was with either Microsoft or Capital One. At the end of the conversation, I got what used to happen in the automotive industry with J.D. Power. If I get anything less than a 10-
[00:25:45] Greg Kihlström: Oh, yeah
[00:25:45] Lou Carbone: … you’re gonna get- you’re gonna be asked… ‘Cause I said, “You did an absolutely fantastic job,” which he did. But then he pandered the score.
[00:26:00] Lou Carbone: What we’re doing is we’re, we’re, we’re inhaling exhaust fumes from a car in this-
[00:26:07] Greg Kihlström: [laughs]
[00:26:07] Lou Carbone: … profession.
[00:26:09] Lou Carbone: And don’t realize that we’re taking in carbon monoxide, which will kill you.
[00:26:16] Lou Carbone: What we need is freshness and oxygen, and that’s what the reformation is all about.
[00:26:21] Lou Carbone: And it’s bringing people together, and the problem I f- I see is bringing the experts together to create a consolidated view of the future of this work. And I’m willing to debate and concede or do whatever, but let’s work together rather than having a whole bunch of self-promotion going on-
[00:26:48] Lou Carbone: … in this space.
[00:26:50] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. A- agreed. So, you know, as, as we wrap up here, got a, got a couple things for you. You did- you briefly mentioned AI. Gotta, gotta get to that, at, at least briefly here. You know, I wonder your take on this, and certainly, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of hype. I’ve, I’ve seen some, some real tangible, results as well. You know, how is, how is AI gonna change customer experience, and maybe how is it not gonna change it? [laughs]
[00:27:16] Lou Carbone: Yeah. What, what is ironic is that, Steven Heckel, who recently passed away, was my co-author in the, seminal article on the space on managing experiences and a methodology for it. we started to write another book because Steve wrote The Adaptive Enterprise. He was a futurist at IBM. He was actually the director of strategic studies at the Advanced Business Institute, where I was an adjunct faculty member, and we wrote this article. We started to write a book, and one of the chapters was the future of work.
[00:27:59] Lou Carbone: This was back 30, 40 years ago. And Steve wrote a great Harvard Business Review article called Managing by Wire back then.
[00:28:13] Lou Carbone: And it was when IBM was playing around with Watson.
[00:28:18] Lou Carbone: And we could see what was going to happen, and it’s why Steve and I got together, because the tenants under engineering experiences is a science. AI is a science also in terms of prompts, and it isn’t an add-on. It needs to be central to an operating system that is human, which is the ability to engineer experiences.
[00:28:50] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:51] Lou Carbone: So, this … It isn’t a bolt-on. The, the bolt-ons are terrible, and, people that are experimenting with agentic AI, I must have, 30 bots a day [laughs] that I’m now like, “These are flies almost.”
[00:29:11] Greg Kihlström: [laughs] Right. Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:12] Lou Carbone: And it’s like, boom, I got another one, and bam, another one. un- the, the thing that happens is when you begin to look at adoption of technology, even the internet, AI in the, I think it was in the first week, had over a half a million users within days.
[00:29:35] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Chat, ChatGPT. Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:37] Lou Carbone: Yeah. Now, if you look at the adoption of the video tape recorder, it’s like seven or eight years before families-
[00:29:47] Lou Carbone: So in this rapid movement of discontinuous change- Is what Steve’s whole body of work that we started to expand into the fusion of human experience with AI was the idea of the, the adaptive enterprise, and that companies are ultimately customer-driven. And people talk about customer centricity. What we need to be able to do is drive what customers desire, and there are three levels of desire. First level is basic human needs, and we overlook that because we immediately go to the next level, which is cultural
[00:30:32] Lou Carbone: differences, and segmentation is huge. But what we’re not famil- f- what we’re not fulfilling is basic human needs, sort of the-
[00:30:44] Lou Carbone: … hierarchy of human needs.
[00:30:46] Greg Kihlström: Right. Maslow’s, yeah. [laughs]
[00:30:47] Lou Carbone: And now we’re going to start doing the top of that pyramid of experiences, which is individualized. What we need to do is build each of those on top of one another-
[00:31:00] Lou Carbone: … and it’s a system, and that’s the other problem is it’s systems thinking that ultimately the business, every business is in the business of creating a, an experience whether they like it or not.
[00:31:16] Lou Carbone: The expression that I’m best known for, that is a double negative is that you cannot not have an experience.
[00:31:25] Greg Kihlström: [laughs] Yeah.
[00:31:25] Lou Carbone: It’s a question of how managed or how haphazard that experience is.
[00:31:32] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah. Love it. Well, Lou, thanks so much for, for joining today. one last question for you as, as we wrap up. Like to ask this to everybody. what do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:31:49] Lou Carbone: What is so important to me is, continuing to learn. what I taught in this, qualitative research course is I said, “I am not going to spend a lot of time on tools and techniques. What greatest gift I can give you as students is how to think as a researcher.”
And as a researcher, you need to be curious, you need to discover, and you need to interpret what you’ve discovered and be uncomfortable with what you actually uncover. And there isn’t anything that’s going to take that away because AI is always going to be looking backward.
And what we have to do is to be able to predict and project the future, and the only way to do that, is to have the mind of researchers in qualitative research. So the entire semester was really built around how to think differently, how to be open-minded, and also, I think it’s probably one of the few times someone taught a course that said, “Here’s how you sell open-mindedness and how you sell this work to executives that are living in the industrial age.”
That’s how I keep busy, teaching, moving along with clients on experience engineering and the experience reformation.
[00:33:43] Lou Carbone: Oh, thank you. It, I think you can tell that I’m passionate. [laughs] I’ve lived this. It’s been my life, and I’ve watched so much and observed so much and discovered so much, and I thank you so much for the opportunity to be able to express these thoughts and feelings. I think they’re so critical, and if I were to die and go to my grave and not see what potential we saw in the constructs that we first saw before the industry went on the road often taken join us on the road less traveled.
