What to How to Why

A new way to think about the shifts from services to experiences to transformations

I recently recorded a podcast with Hector Garcia, a professional Certified Public Accountant who also runs, with his brother, a conference for CPAs called Reframe. And that’s exactly what Hector wants to do: get the accounting profession to reframe their business from services to experiences to transformations.

That may sound difficult for them to accomplish, but I find it greatly interesting that this was the second podcast I’ve done since the book came out specifically for CPAs, with two additional ones geared to CPAs and other financial advisors.

Something is afoot in the industry! And the way to think about this shift, which I started talking about just before the 5-minute mark of the podcast, applies to any company in the services or experiences business. And those already offering economic transformations for good measure.

From Services to Experiences

I often joke that the easiest way to turn a service into an experience is to provide poor service, for then your customers remember it.

But the easiest way to turn a service into a positive experience is to intentionally design how you do what you do. In fact, that’s pretty much the only thing services providers must do (assuming they do it well).

The reason? Work IS theatre.

Work is theatre, so intentionally design how you do what you do

That’s not a metaphor – work as theatre – but a model: work is theatre. In any dealing between a worker and a customer that worker is onstage and needs to act in a way that engages the audience. Doing so can turn any mundane interaction into an engaging encounter.

Jim Gilmore and I endeavored to make this clear in perhaps my favorite long paragraph The Experience Economy, in chapter 6 entitled, naturally, “Work Is Theatre” (p. 143):

In the emerging Experience Economy, any work observed directly by a customer must be recognized within the dramatic structure of the performance as an act of theatre. Indeed, flight attendants and hotel staff routinely perform acts of theatre when they direct patrons to the nearest exit or hotel room. The work of retail store associates is theatre when they straighten merchandise on a shelf. Bank tellers, insurance agents, and real estate brokers engage in theatre when they explain terms and conditions. So do cabbies when they converse with taxi riders. Your costumed UPS route driver performs an act of theatre with every package he delivers, and FedEx’s overnighting is absolutely, positively theatre. Watch your food server the next time you dine out: the taking of orders, the placing of dishes, the busing of tables—it’s all theatre. Selling, whether the salesperson pitches automobiles or bottles of perfume, is theatre. A presentation by an ad agency to a client’s marketing manager, after all, is an act of theatre. Doctors who perform surgical operations in an amphitheater also perform theatrical operations by the side of every patient’s bed. But how differently (and more memorably) would all these activities be performed if those executing them understood that their work is theatre and acted accordingly?

[It surprised me to see “emerging Experience Economy” at the beginning of that paragraph. I thought we expunged all uses of “emerging”, “forthcoming”, “nascent”, and other such terms in the 2011 Updated Edition when we declared that the Experience Economy had arrived. Ah well.]

Mindset matters. A service mindset focuses solely on what work is performed; an experience mindset focuses on how that work is performed. Therefore, how you do what you do enables workers to stage experiences purely through their performance.

We wrote about this later in that same chapter in a section entitled “Acting with Intention” (p. 156):

Focusing not only on the what but also on the how serves as the core distinction between mundane service interactions and memorable experience encounters. Economic activity truly engages customers when each worker fills activities consciously and thoroughly with intention. Every movement becomes a meaningful action when richly designed with intention in mind. Without it, work is dull, monotonous, a cliché. (How many processes are as thoroughly unimpressive from start to finish as those that end with “Have a nice day”?) Because many people perform acts without deliberate intention, [famed Russian theatre practitioner and instructor] Stanislavski could comfortably and universally demand that actors cut 95 percent of what they do. The same admonition applies to business acts. Process excellence—at least in the sense of truly engaging customers—surfaces only when workers decide to enrich how they perform each activity. As acting instructor Kearns relates, “Deciding what you want is critical to your success . . . If you haven’t decided what it is you want, you’re likely to be un-focused . . . and the result will be a vague, meaningless encounter. When you’ve conscientiously spelled out your intent beforehand, you are more likely to be specific and clear, and the result will be an energized connection.” Any offering increases in value when every worker on stage—in farmyards, on shop floors, at service counters, within themed attractions—fills work with intention.

All it takes to direct your workers to act is help them develop intention statements for their tasks:

Perform _______________ in order to _______________

The first empty space to fill in is the what; the second space is for the how.

We gave this simple example:

Imagine that you’re standing outside the closed door of your boss’s office. Your very next task is to knock on that door. How would you do it differently if you were to knock in order to announce you had just arrived? In order to apologize for being late? In order to let him know you were there, but without disturbing his work? In order to state that the time for a meeting was at hand? Each intention calls for a decidedly different knock.

So to shift from services to experiences go from what to how.

[We owe our development of the intention statement above – plus much other learning about theatre – to Michael Kearns wonderful book Acting = Life: An Actor’s Life Lessons (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996). In addition to reading chapter 6 of The Experience Economy, if you want to dive deeper that’s the book I recommend.]

From Experiences to Transformations

And to shift from experiences to transformation go from how to why.

It’s not the “why” of the worker, however; it’s the “why” of the customer (as I’m sure longtime subscribers and readers of the book have already figured out). Why do customers buy your offerings? What is their aspiration for which your offerings are the means to their ends? What is their intention for your offering?

So flip around the way you apply the intention statement:

Perform _______________ in order to _______________

This time read it as you (as a business, or worker) perform your experience in order to move your customers – aspirants – along the path to achieve their aspirations. Such work is the essence of guiding.