Continuing this series on the last chapter of the forthcoming book, this week’s post is on the third phase of experience guiding. The first, recall, is diagnosis and the second, encapsulated experiences. (To view the three phases graphically, see the introduction to this chapter.)
This third phase of follow-through is required in order to ensure that the transformation lasts. It’s one of the basic economic distinctions for this fifth and final economic offering: while commodities are stored in bulk, goods inventoried after production, services delivered on demand, and experiences revealed over a duration of time, transformations are sustained through time.
Please do give me feedback on this section below. One of my Substack subscribers kindly wrote me about how to tie names/email addresses to your responses in Google Forms if and only if you provide yours (it’s optional), so we’ll see how that works!
Joe
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Follow-Through
When the aspirant definitively says, “I was X, now I am Y”, the journey is not over, and the offering should therefore not end.[i] As discussed previously, transformations must be sustained through time. Aspirants who purportedly have transformed may still encounter all the issues of achieving the aspiration in the first place. As life and business goes on, their progress – as great as it may be – may regress, their focus deteriorate, their behavior backslide, their identity de-align, and so forth. In which case the aspirant wasn’t truly transformed.
To help your aspirants keep all this at bay, you should conduct follow-through, the third phase of guiding transformations. Not “follow-up”, which is akin to asking, “Hi, how ya’ doin’?”. No, follow-through means ensuring the transformation takes hold so that it sustains itself through time without relapse, reversion, or decline. This phase continues to guide the aspirant, but in sustaining the transformation as an integrated part of the person, organization, business, or community. That’s what leads to flourishing.
Follow-through means ensuring the transformation takes hold without relapse, reversion, or decline.
Sustaining Transformations
This is where most companies ostensibly in the transformation industry today often fail their aspirants. Healthcare providers diagnose and heal patients and then prescribe medicine, but do little when up to a third of them do not take their meds as directed.[ii] Financial advisors successfully manage their clients to retirement (or hitting “the number” that enables retirement), but rarely shift to helping them with what to do with their time, nor shift from their old work-related identity. Educational institutions hand out diplomas and certifications without offering practical applications of what students learned. Many religious advisors focus on a baptism, bar or bat mitzvah, commission, or other such ceremony of spiritual significance, but often don’t extend the relationship into discipling. Transformation guiders of all stripes guide aspirants in hitting not just a major milestone but the highly anticipated capstone, and then think they are done with the transformation.
That does not mean that every transformation guider absolutely must perform follow-through. You could leave customers to their own devices – many choose that on their own, true – or let other companies handle this, but who better to guide customers in sustaining their transformation than the company that guided the aspirant to the pinnacle? The Sherpas of Tibet never leave their climbers on the top of the mountain; they guide them back down, with I’m sure much reflecting and integrating going on throughout the descent. The wise wizard doesn’t stop three-quarters of the way through the Hero’s Journey and let the hero stumble back home on his own. (Well, in many stories they do, and in many such situations the hero doesn’t make it home in one piece, physically or mentally. Good transformation guiders don’t let that happen to aspirants.)
Who better to guide customers in sustaining their transformation than the company that guided the aspirant to the pinnacle?
Instead, doctors need to create care paths for patients to fully heal from surgery, to work diligently on a condition, or to simply to take their meds as required – and then work with patients to ensure that path is followed. Financial advisors should focus on the ends to which money, and monetary achievements, are but the means – and develop or partner with companies on offerings focused on those ends. A high school, college, university, or other educational institution should think beyond graduation to create, collaborate on, or at least recommend (and maybe broker via a transformation platform) lifelong learning programs. Pastors, rabbis, and other spiritual leaders shouldn’t leave supplicants at the altar, so to speak, but disciple them to grow on their spiritual journeys – ideally for the rest of their lives.
Weight loss is one area where transformations can take a very long time, and where follow-through is absolutely essential. A longtime friend and one of our Certified Experience Economy Experts, Frances Turner, has had a lifetime struggle with weight, reaching over 300 pounds as an adult. An assistant professor of marketing at Ithaca College, she was always trying diets, fitness programs, and the like, but never managed to lose or keep significant weight off. Almost twenty years ago bariatric surgery enabled her to lose 140 pounds, but there was no follow-through in the healthcare system. So that weight crept up ever so slowly, but persistently, and then down some, but up more, and down, and up, until she had gained half the weight back. Frances told me:
During Covid-19 I started seeing ads for a company called Calibrate. It emphasized “metabolic health” combined with weight loss drugs. I talked with my doctor, and then joined, spending the first three months focused on tracking my eating, drinking water, sleeping properly, monitoring my emotions, working with a nutritionist, all those sorts of things. I lost ten pounds. The next month they introduced Wegovy into the regime.
In concert with the healthy habits, the GLP-1 drug enabled Frances to get down to 145 to 150 pounds, and I can attest to how wonderful she looks. Most importantly, she’s kept her weight there thanks to Calibrate’s follow-through, as the company continues to work with her with a continued focus on being healthy through tracking, educational resources, and personal video coaching.
Many people seek guidance for transformations they’ve already had.
Sustaining transformations is so important that many people seek guidance for transformations they’ve already had, for the follow-through other companies neglect to do. As Tara-Nicholle Nelson asserts, “Most of the transformational spending people will do in their lifetime will go toward buying supplies that help them maintain baselines”.[iii] Othership, for example, calls itself “a space for transformation” that offers “social self-care” through its ice baths and saunas in Toronto and New York. Cofounder and CEO Robbie Bent told me that many customers have, say, an ayahuasca experience to get off drugs, but start up again in a month or two. Othership’s “expert guides” work with them to take that transformative experience back to where they live, helping them through its “healthy, fun, good-for-you space” via classes (many of them intensely psychological and highly emotional), night socials, sound immersions, and other activities in its ice baths and sauna – but with no drinking, no drugs, and no phones.
One way or the other, to be a true transformation it must take hold and be sustained through time. How much time is enough? I won’t say it has to be forever, and I can’t say where exactly the cut line is, as it depends on the particular aspirant, aspiration, and transformation. For myself, when I finally got down to being a single-digit handicap golfer – persistently below 10.0 and as low as 6.4 – it lasted for years. That certainly was enough time for me to say I truly was transformed. But as I aged and found less time to work on it, my handicap slowly rose, for several years never seeing the underside of 10. I was no longer a single-digit handicap. (With a renewed focus the past couple of years it hovers around 11 with the occasional dip into the 9s. And given the time I have to take lessons at GolfTEC and practice, I’m ok with that, even if I no longer identify as a single-digit-handicap golfer.)
Think of follow-through as encapsulation writ large.