Thank you to all – paid and free subscribers – who responded with feedback to my series of posts from the second chapter of the book, currently titled Fostering Human Flourishing. If you just recently joined in or missed any of them, you can easily find the posts in the Substack Archive, from the first post back in January, also entitled “Fostering Human Flourishing”, to last week’s post, “The True Purpose of Business”.
With today’s post I’m starting another series, this time going through the last chapter of the book, “Guiding Transformations”. This is where everything comes together – which is why the opening here summarizes all the previous chapters – and culminates in how to think about transformations as a distinct economic offering. This means most of all incorporating the three phases of transformation into your work with customers: diagnosis, encapsulated experiences, and follow-through.
I make some other important points deserving of their own sections – different ways of charging for outcomes; how to integrate goods, services, and experiences into your offerings; and THE megatrend represented by the Progression of Economic Value: individualization.
I’m currently working on the final draft of the book, and of course there will be many changes, large and small, from my initial writing you see here (and have seen in other posts) and that final draft. And some of those will come from the feedback I get from you. I won’t be asking for any on the introduction to the chapter below, but will appreciate your reactions in future posts.
Joe
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Chapter 8: Guiding Transformations
Throughout this book I have written of guiding transformations.
In Chapter 1 you learned that it is the economic function of this fifth and final economic offering. Just as you extract commodities, make goods, deliver services, and stage experiences, you guide transformations. You also learned that the key reason transformations create more economic value than any other offering is that they generate time well invested. Customers – properly called aspirants – invest their time in your transformations, under your guidance, that pays dividends far into the future as they become a “new you”.
You extract commodities, make goods, deliver services, and stage experiences, but you guide transformations.
In Chapter 2 you learned the end purpose of guiding transformations: helping your aspirants flourish: fostering human flourishing is the reason for being of any and all businesses. By guiding customers across one or more spheres of transformation – health & wellbeing, wealth & prosperity, knowledge & wisdom, and purpose & meaning – you take them to higher and higher levels of flourishing, with profit being the measure of how well your customers flourish from your economic offerings.
In Chapter 3 you learned that aspirants may be individual people, organizations, businesses, or communities, including society in general. There are great opportunities for transformation businesses in particular, for again B2B offerings always present a means to an end; selling the end, rather than the means, yields much greater economic value. You further learned the seven aspects of identity affected by every transformation, common to all categories of aspirants, and what opportunities each aspect afforded transformation guiders.
In Chapter 4 you learned that the transformations you guide may differ greatly depending on the catalyst of each offering for individual aspirants, whether by deviation, discovery, disruption, or directed. Whatever the catalyst there are also four types of aspirations customers have – up to and including full-on metamorphosis –depending on the scale of change and whether the transformation is in degree or in kind.
In Chapter 5, recognizing that transformations are built atop experiences, you learned how to go beyond merely memorable experiences to the highly meaningful, the deeply transporting, and finally the truly transformative. You further learned that almost any experience can become transformative through encapsulation – the crux of transformation guiding – by surrounding experiences with three activities: preparation beforehand, reflection afterward, and integration on an ongoing basis.
Chapter 6 broadened the thinking on transformative experiences, showing how you can become a transformation guider by successfully staging experiences that are cohesive, robust, personal, and dramatic. Each one of these experience elements represents a set of ideas, principles, and framework(s) that enable you to heighten the level of your experiences to better guide your transformation offerings.
In Chapter 7 you delved deeper to learn how to turn transformative experiences into full-on transformations via the Delta Model. This extended the lessons from the previous two chapters to show you how to guide depending on the type of transformation required to achieve the type of aspiration desired. The lessons here include the particular role of guide that best fits each of the four types of transformation, with the alchemist of metamorphic, altering transformations – life-altering, organization-altering, business-altering, and community-altering – subsuming those of expert, coach, and counselor.
Here, in Chapter 8, come the last pieces of the puzzle.
Here, in Chapter 8, come the last pieces of the puzzle. It includes key lessons that enable you to transform your enterprise into a premier transformation guider, beginning with the three essential phases of guiding transformations: diagnosis, encapsulated experiences, and follow-through.[1]
Figure 8-1. The Three Phases of a Transformation
Joe Pine
© 2025 B. Joseph Pine II
[1] Jim Gilmore and I introduced these three phases and the figure, with some modifications here, in The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), pp. 176-180, and included them in the subsequent editions.