So, gut-check time! Who were you before Gen-AI? You know, before we were talking about lowering operating expenses, the death of a dozen roles, or downplaying the thing because it can’t do X (yet–bites nails because the new model does W). Because that 2022 version of you (or the company) is in your DNA and it’s a lot harder to change.

Prompts don’t create human-centricity, empathy, or culture. It let’s you think, sure, and even might speed things up, but in the end you are what you were. We haven’t had the time to change. So, if your experience strategy is (and was) built around understanding humans to remove friction, great! You’ll do that faster. But if your strategy was mostly around reducing Average Handling Time and diverting traffic to a cheaper channel and containing them there: uh oh. Instead of one annoying chatbot handing a few calls, we’ll let it handle a million and people STILL won’t get what they need!

Check it: lower operating expenses look great on a quarterly report. Attrition shows up a few quarters later. Instead of AHT, maybe use AI to do qual at scale and measure Intent (did they get what they reached out for) + Satisfaction (were they cool with it) + Effort (how hard did they think it was for them to get what they needed). That’ll let you peek under the hood at cost WHILE figuring out what to fix.

But make experience strategy and human-centric culture your DNA first. THEN build on it. Maybe even in bullet-time.

That is a problem for experience strategy because agility is not decor. It is the power that makes it possible for people to respond to people.

I’ve said it before: agility isn’t about speed. People hear “agile” and think “faster.” Speed is a byproduct of agile-done-well, but that’s not the point. The point is responsiveness. The capacity to learn something real about a human and flex to do something about it.

Human needs aren’t etched in stone. (Today anyway. I guess they were and maybe, they will again? Hope not.).  The person your product was designed for six months ago has shifted. Their context has changed. Their options have multiplied. Their tolerance for friction has decreased. If your development and delivery process takes twelve months from discovery to release, you are designing for someone who no longer exists. You will ship something accurate to a moment that has already passed.

Now, by “agility” I don’t (only) mean a way of dev-work. I mean the full stack of what it takes to respond in real(ish) time. I mean leadership that is close enough to the work to make decisions without three layers of approval. Teams that are empowered to act on what they learn from customers without waiting for a quarterly roadmap review. Systems that ship in time-boxed increments so that learning happens continuously, not at the end of a long build cycle when it’s too late and too expensive to pivot. Organizational trust as a prerequisite, not an afterthought.

The cost of delivering the wrong thing on schedule is worse than the cost of a short delay to get it right. Stinks to ship stuff that no one uses, can’t find, or find annoying. On time. On budget. Irrelevant. Eek. That is an expensive way to learn something you could have learned earlier (and cheaper).

Ten days with real user feedback costs a fraction of what it costs to build a full quarter’s worth of wrong. Businesses that have made agility work financially are not necessarily the ones moving fastest. They are the ones failing smaller and cheaper, learning more often, and compounding those learnings into products and services that are genuinely closer to what humans need.

Sure. There are contexts where agile is the wrong approach. Like if you’re building a bridge. But if you’re building a service, a journey, or a product…

Anyway, you can’t take apart the conversations around experience strategy and agility. Experience strategy defines the direction: who we serve, what they need, and here’s the friction we are committed to removing. Agility is the engine that let’s the strategy flex. Without agility, experience strategy becomes a document. A pretty one, sometimes. But a document.

The question is not whether your organization says it is agile. The question is whether the humans who interact with your organization can feel a positive difference. Whether the things that were broken are getting fixed. Whether the feedback is actually landing somewhere. Whether the system is learning.

If it isn’t, the methodology doesn’t matter. You’re not agile. You’re going through the motions, and the humans on the other end feel it.

Flex to build the real thing or don’t call it agile.

Here’s how it goes. The experience team presents work. Everyone nods. Someone asks about ROI. The convo shifts. Then the CFO, or someone from that world, says something like, “This is great, but what about operating expenses?” And just like that, experience shifts to soft-stuff: fund when there’s margin; cut when there isn’t.

Experience strategy isn’t a feel-good pillows-on-chocolate play. It is the bones of how your biz relates to the humans who pay for what you do. And the humans who don’t come back. And the humans who tell other humans not to bother. Ouch.

Think about the last time you tried to do something that should’ve been easy. Pay a bill, update an account, return something you bought. And it wasn’t easy. Maybe you stayed. Maybe you called someone. Maybe you said, “screw it” and went somewhere else. Now multiply that moment by every person who interacts with your company. Every day. Some of them push through. A lot of them don’t. And the ones who don’t send you a bill. They just leave.

Experience problems = financial problems.

Listen. I’m not saying experience strategy automatically produces those numbers. I’ve seen experience initiatives that went nowhere because they were disconnected from the actual human journey, dressed up as personas and great stories that never changed a single touchpoint. Experience strategy only produces financial outcomes when it is actually strategy. When it shapes decisions about what you build, how you build it, who is empowered to fix it, and how flexible you are to the shifts.

Experience isn’t the shiny output. A shiny layer of polish. Companies that are winning treat experience as an input. They are asking the experience question before they build, not after. They are asking: what does this human need to accomplish, and are we helping them do it? They are designing for the job the human is trying to get done, not the job their internal teams find easiest to support.

The cost of not asking that question shows up in call center volume, cart abandonment, bug tickets, lower retention, and higher acquisition costs because retention is slipping. It shows up with employees who spend half their time working around systems that don’t actually serve the work. There’s your operating expense. We just don’t trace it back to experience.

The first move is getting your finance and experience functions in the same conversation about the same metrics. Not experience presenting to finance. Not finance signing off on experience’s budget. Both disciplines looking together at where friction lives in the human journey and what that friction costs. When those two conversations become one, the resource decisions change. Because the problem is finally visible.

Experience is not a soft cost. It is either an investment with a measurable return or a liability with a measurable cost. There is no version where it is neutral. Your CFO needs to know that. So do you.

Perfect example is leaving the super-market. Out she comes with a full paper grocery bag. She is frustrated, wrapping both arms around the bottom because the bag is ripping. It no longer has handles, the paper is too thin, and the wetness of the fruit has further weakened the paper. The bad experience doesn’t have anything to do with the look of the bag (it looks great) or wanting to be delighted when she leaves the supermarket (please, she just wants to get home).

Her bad experience has everything to do with the bag not doing the job it was supposed to do when she needed it. There are a whole mess of reasons for that bad job. Some of it has to do with corporate money. Others have to do with laws. Some has to do with her own forgetfulness. Doesn’t mean we need punish her for those various reasons. She wanted help before needing to ask for it. If the supermarket really wanted to help, they could have looked across the street at the business who had the same journey and gave a better experience just by focusing on the job that needed to be done: get the ordered food safely to the car.

I’ve been in plenty of industries. Did time in the city working at an agency. Went through advertising, publishing, media, entertainment, b2b, and now did a short stint in banking and onto insurance. Brown paper-bags everywhere. They don’t look like brown paper bags, but they’re there. People wanting to do a simple task and blocked by the solution decisions we have decided to make.

Be human. Be helpful.

The best is when the culture pivots around people.

Helping (not delighting) human customers is the goal, a good experience is a driver, upper management’s conviction looks like funding, and there are practicing evangelists throughout the organization. That means empowered people are actually getting their hands dirty while driving strategy and agility. That is not perfect, but there is hope even if there are battles to make it happen.

In that culture, don’t give up yet. Keep iterating and delivering value to humans.

The ability to iterate, produce value, and pivot when circumstances changes. Companies, management, and non-practitioners think it’s about being perfect at a quicker pace. Nope. It’s about pace over perfection. Time-boxed shipment of actionable value.

Agile isn’t for everything.

If you’re building another bridge from New York to New Jersey, you don’t use agile. You plan the resources, get the budget, plan the location, do the math, take your time, and get it done. Insert waterfall here—see, not a bad word when it matters.

But, if you’re building an app for New York or New Jersey, meeting some possible needs within the next 6 to 8 months, then you use agile.

In English, we call this the “fog of war”. It is the honest perspective that no matter the strategy, once the battle hits, the details of the plan are thrown into disarray. Because our plans are often made in the two-fold vacuum: (1) limited information about what the enemy can (or will) do and (2) how will we respond once that information becomes situational reality.

Enter agility.

Agility is not about being fast. It’s about your ability to pivot within the situational reality. How quickly you change direction in the fog when the immaterial starts to take horrifying shape.

Are things currently foggy? Don’t try to plan out every detail. Pick a goal and prepare to pivot on your way.

There are 525,600 minutes in one (1) year

175,200 of those minutes are literally spent sleeping.
School (55,000 minutes) or work (124,600) takes up another chunk of minutes
164,250 is the average media consumption (more hours than work or school!)
~800 = mowing a lawn that grows on its own and dies on its own, every year.

Here is the kicker: I will still have over 50K minutes leftover.

I can read a Bible 12x. Or I can binge more of X. I can read other books. I can draw. Take a holiday. As a parent, do I really think I make an impact if my kids are consuming more time with media than anything permanent? Minutes are used and gone and I’m not even valuing the leftovers.

Seems like I got more than a minute. Just need to figure out the right way to spend them.

Maybe you’ve got a minute as well.

Look at this law. It is ancient. When it was created Star Trek had our closest idea to the iPhone. When it was created, you still need to carry around a “case quarter” so you could make a call while on the go. When it was created, the only way to enter into a virtual space was by making sure your telephone squawked at another phone (or something) somewhere else.

We need to do better. Read on.

Listen, a truly agile company looks different. Teams are doing the work. They are pivoting around the customer. They are driven by the overarching business strategy. They are funded by the value they offer to the company.

Here I am not only using standard SAFE terminology around value streams.

There is not a company today that doesn’t pay for phones. It is assumed that companies will have phones. They also assume they need people to support those phones. To manage the phone life cycle. Same thing with computers. Keyboards. Monitors. These things are assumed values because they are the cost of doing business. Sure those things are often capitalized and depreciated but that’s just because those are physical assets.

With agility and the modern marketplace, strategy is the driver and agility is a mindset that allows the flexibility to realize the strategy. Just like with computers and phones, certain things needs to be in place to bring the strategy into reality and in the modern world that means virtual assets should be funded—even if we haven’t figured out how to capitalize and depreciate them. No modern strategy should exclude a website, for example. Or customer-centricity. Or the customer’s job to be done.

Of course, if the business strategy no longer sees websites or apps (or phones or computers) as important to the business, then they stop funding those areas. It is why companies no longer fund a horse and buggy.

Now, by funding a virtual asset, I don’t only mean money.

I mean resource staffing so that small teams have the right people. I mean empowerment so that small teams can make the decisions. I mean investment in the equipment and tools to allow the team to work. I mean unblocking upstream or downstream damming that get in the way from happening—even if that damming looks like middle-management. I mean building up the team confidence cache by reflecting good (versus bad) behavior. All of that is the funding that makes agile work beyond a buzz word.

If you want agile to work throughout the organization you must do more than use the term in a PowerPoint. You need to fund the virtual assets that drive the business strategy with the tangible means to bring that strategy into reality in any hundred different ways.