Bank X – The Road to Money Moments is through the Heart of your People

Posted on by Duena Blomstrom

Bankers ask us all the time why they can’t jump over this people betterment malarky and just go ahead and use our CX workshops to create Money Moments.

Many of our conversations go like this:

“We at Bank X love the idea of Money Moments instead of Banking Products!”

“Thanks, that’s great.”

“We think that’s spot on!”

“Brilliant.

“Can you guys come in and roll out some “EX not UX – how to Create Money Moments” workshops with some best practice examples please?

“Sure… Before we talk about that, what have you guys done to challenge the status quo of the offering so far?”

“Well we have various internal initiatives and projects.”

“Excellent – such as what?”

“There’s… well a multitude of things. There’s the overall digitisation priority of course.”

“…”

“And we are launching another innovation lab!”

“…”

“AND we are nearly ready for Open Banking!”

“Right. So are you guys fully Agile?”

“No – well that’s being implemented in some teams I hear.”

“Has everyone in Product and Proposition reentered around HLD? Have you popularised design with the rest of the organisation?”

“Well we’ve always designed well.”

“What have you found when you re-examined the full proposition with a “What if we had a blank slate, what would we build?” lens?”

“We do a lot of blueskying in every innovation sprint, I’m sure we have done some of that.”

“Have you asked your customers what counts for them money wise to design those moments?”

“We constantly listen to user feedback, sure.”

“What can you tell me about your culture? How empowered do you think your people are?”

“Huh? We attract the highest percentile of top graduates in the industry,  and we recently went through a strong re-branding exercise, we even changed the name of the digital offshoot so that’s not the issue – what’s the connection to changing products into MoneyMoments?”

“OK these banking products you want to change – how many of them do you have today?”

“…”

“Can we start by first taking an honest look at your organisation?”

“What? No! Why can’t we just get some of those killer-app style quick wins a consumer would like? Isn’t that a MoneyMoment?”

Leaving aside how MoneyMoments refers to the collection of all experiences the consumer has with their financial provider, whether overt or invisible, online or in person, conscious and subconscious, and not mere specific features or interactions, the answer to that is that even if the bank could create the most magical of UX while not having worked on Knowledge, Passion and Courage, then it would simply be masking the deeper issues within and it would be futile exercise with little end value.

And that’s a big “IF” because painting by numbers when it comes to the end-user experience simply doesn’t work.

how-to-know-if-someone-is-a-good-person

Moments of CX delight are unique and unless genuinely authentic and born of a true need to make the consumer happy they don’t resonate so they are non-transmittable.

This is why the extraordinary touch points that set Zappos, Disney and Apple aside have not become the norm cross industries.

It’s not for lack of information – everyone knows what makes the Apple store experience magical in terms of tools and processes – but while widely desirable it’s unrivalled. Everyone understands how Zappos goes above and beyond but offers mechanical copies of their wording at best. The technology Disney employs to make the experience seamless is easily accessible to any other experience provider be they a museum or a cinema and yet we don’t see it anywhere else.

What makes them unique is the intensely consumer-driven intention that built the experience. Their customer driven purpose. Their obsession with making them go “wow”.

Unless that spirit comes from the inside, unless the company  has enough good people with courage and passion who deliver against this purpose not because they read it in a white-paper, or it was mandated in their KPIs but because they live and breathe the conviction that it would make their customer’s life better – the “wow” can’t be copied and bolted on. Not consistently, not genuinely.

Supercharging emotions on top of the best of human centred design practices creates such magical experiences that we consumers fall -and stay- in love with the brands that can consistently give us that.

I ask bankers to imagine they could hook up the majority of their employees to a lie detector and ask them if they truly, genuinely, from the bottom of their heart care about their consumers.

Unless they are prepared to bet the summer cottage on how the answer would be a heart-felt, resounding “yes!” they shouldn’t wonder why their bank can’t delight and build MoneyMoments.

Bank X – The one with the Bank CEOs

Posted on by Duena Blomstrom

The main reason why we don’t even tell banks about our deep CX creation practice from the get-go- the EXnotUX and the “Money Moments™ not Banking Products” workshops before they start on cultural transformation (or betterment) is that they would be unable to internalise them if they don’t have a ballsy CEO and let’s face it, most don’t.

I’ve talked about Banking Superheroes a lot and there are some inspiring examples in the industry. Typically they aren’t CEO level. In fact, I can only think of 4 bank CEOs who would fit the profile right now. This is both sad and possibly an indicator of organisational mass psychosis in terms of the presentation of a leader and the inability of HR to do better by them that is worthy of analysis at another time.

We also talk a lot about Courage at Emotional Banking and while we are rolling out programs for product owners and tribe leaders we rarely see SVPs of X or Y or even department heads strolling into the workshops. This is presumably because they are busy firefighting and creating very important things and can’t afford the time. Things that are a bigger priority than growing the bravery to turn the world on its axis.

It’s tempting to think there are several different kinds of courage and to arrive to where they have enough to mandate that the bank supercharges emotions on top of human design practice and becomes truly consumer obsessed, CEOs need a different kind of courage, a more CEOy kind.

It would be a lot easier for our firm to sell a “Courage for Strong, Important, Lovely, Supercalifragelisticexpialidocious Bank Leaders” to ensue they are in a room where the same bravery inducing exercises would happen as the ones we pack in workshops for the plebs, but it would also be a PR lie that panders to the very ills of the organisation we accuse.

While indeed CEOs should be Banking Superheroes they aren’t special and they don’t need a different type of courage just maybe, more of it as more is perceived to be at stake on a personal level if they fail.

CEOs with courage see past this year’s commitment to shareholders. They say “Yes this is not immediately tricking down to consumers and may be all but invisible in my time here but I am doing right by this place, I am laying down foundations so that all those that come after me can do the client facing wow-ing you are after. We have purulent wounds and we can’t slap bandaids on them, we have to surgically clean and sterilise them first.”

There are no bank CEOs in position today who do not have the know-how to correctly evaluate the status quo of the bigger picture or lack the ability to know they are simply applying bandaids in lieu of cleaning wounds.

bandaids1

  • Revamping the mobile app in more hipstery fonts and colours? Band aid.
  • Restructuring around agile and organising teams in product tribes without changing the way they think? Band aid.
  • Adding a UXP layer to an aging spaghetti back-end? Band aid.
  • Starting a flanker brand? Band aid.

There are so many more examples.

Anytime worthwhile core concepts around experience, innovation and visceral changes such as Human Centred Design and Cultural Change are used as empty PR exercises in lieu of being fully embraced, that’s malpraxis.

In some ways it’s worst than bandaids, the lack of regard for real change means we apply solid, hard, cold plaster on top of those wounds, giving the patient even less chances for survival. They may limp out of the surgery but will they make it home before gangrene and sepsis set in?

This is not gratuitously morbid, the health of the organisation depends on the confiscation of bandaids and plaster.

videoblocks-surgeon-doctor-holding-a-scalpel-knife-with-blood-on-it_bz9yzxm_g_thumbnail-small01Hero bank CEOs armed with a golden scalpel need to scan every inch of their patient and locate every infected wound and cancer, put them under, then remove them or at the very least treat them quickly. And yes there are many and any long operation is extremely risky, there is no way to ensure they will wake up, but the truth is doing anything other would be criminal.

When a core banking system goes down and the bank is in the press for weeks that’s a glaring issue. It hurts the bank’s reputation and that of the CEO himself. It’s visible and painful but it’s also often times unavoidable and unpredictable so I personally never hold incidents as such where technology itself fails them, against any CEO, although there is a line of thinking suggesting that the right organisation has the right people to better safeguard against technology failing them.

What I find condemnable is when non-accidental failings that were waiting to happen materialise. Not urgently demanding profound change in the soul of the bank is one such temporarily invisible, insidious and catastrophic systemic failing and the CEOs that do not make this a priority are breaking the equivalent of the Hippocrates oath of doing no harm.

A bank asked me just yesterday why they can’t just jump this people betterment malarky and just go ahead and use our CX workshops to create Money Moments™. I told them it’s because even if they could create the most magical of UX while not having worked on Knowledge, Passion and Courage then it would still be nothing but a plaster on a slow festering gangrened wound and I’m hoping their CEO is on a health kick and ready to do grab a scalpel.

Who’s ready to hand it to them?

The Banker and the Sour Grapes

Posted on by Duena Blomstrom

*Warning – the following may cause your knickers to knot. If it does so, please re-read as it is meant as compassionate analysis not mindless bashing.*

Cognitive-Dissonance-1

Today’s story will be about bankers’ cognitive dissonance when it comes to consumers’ needs.

We are all “grown” here so I’m sure everyone is familiar with what “cognitive dissonance” stands for but a refresher may be in order to help us along:

In short, it’s the feeling of really uncomfortable tension which comes from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time.

The most well known example of cognitive dissonance can be found in Aesop’s “The Fox and Grapes” fable where a fox is really keen on having some grapes but can’t reach to eat them so decides to end its internal turmoil by concluding they weren’t going to be tasty as they were not ripe yet, originating the “sour grapes” expression.

Let’s replace the Fox with our Banker.

The fox’s thought is “I believe I fancy some grapes and I think I will reach and jump and generally do what is necessary to reach them and consume them which would make me happy“. Our banker’s equivalent is “I believe I am a good at my job, surrounded by good people and knowledgeable enough about FinTech that I accept fast changes need to occur in our digital proposition so I am working hard to ensure we make them fast enough to keep our customers happy.”

The dissonant thought on the part of the fox is “I know can’t reach the grapes” whereas the banker may think “I know that I am part of a nearly paralysed monolithic structure that is slow to come up with newness and implement it, that all the agile new challengers will bypass us on the race to the consumer no matter what I do.”

After having decided he can’t do it despite its better efforts, the fox thinks “‘They’re sharp and hardly worth my while!” while after seeing his first thought being uncomfortably challenged by the pace with which others are moving, the banker said no further than last week “Seen that there Tandem losing its license? Challenger -schallengers, no danger there, they won’t even make it to consumers, no need to hurry anyone, business as usual!”

Having personally heard variations of the “sour grapes” thought above from the mouth of a few different bankers, I was aghast. These are uber smart, uber hard working, very knowledgeable bankers, surely they can’t truly believe that.

Surely, I thought, they know that’s generally untrue and that examples such as Tandem’s story or Monzo’s tech issues or even the delays in Starling and Atom they use to make the same point, are not true illustrations of their license to relax as the customer will get better nowhere else, yet they say it. And momentarily believe it.

Furthermore, surely they know that the real threat and why they should not start leaving the office at 5 pm again and cancel their innovation labs, is not the challengers but the huge technology giants and what they are cooking in the background in digital money experience and yet they say that.

cognitive_dissonance (1).jpg

Don’t get me wrong, I know for a fact bankers are aware that there’s threat in the immediate propositions too – after all no one contests that the challengers and the experience-layer-banks will serve to wet consumers’ appetite for impeccable UX and really contextual functionality and once wetted it may be impossible to keep critical dissatisfaction at bay, but when you add to that same CX magic the mass that the giants have – it should keep every incumbent banker awake at night.

Here’s the kicker though – they are human beings, they can’t keep being awake every night, they work double hard without the luxuries the other FinTechers have – the freedom of expression, the speed to see results, the feeling of being part of change at a suitably innovative, fast paced rhythm so they need the momentary relief.

I’ve said this many times before – no other industry behaves quite like ours or has been affected by the sharp advent of technology and its effects on customer experience in quite the same fashion so we’re experiencing unprecedented levels of discomfort in many ways irrespective what part of the industry we are in. All of us – bankers new and old, technology makers and commentators, we are all impacted by this spectacular time in the growth of digital and the money retail business. There’s no time to complacently relax into anything, deep conceptual thinking is nearly banned if we wanted to keep up, there is definite uncertainty to accompany ever growing demands and it feels like the more we learn, and the more we try, the harder it is.

FinTech these days has become like an immensely fast paced game with absurd levels of difficulty thrown in for ever-diminishing (or at least largely unclear) pots of gold. No one has to bare the stress more than those working in large incumbent banks. Spare a thought (and occasionally a pint of beer) for their painful bouts of cognitive dissonance, look them straight in the eyes and remind them “Forget Tandem, they’re not sour, keep trying to reach.”

Holy Banking Paralysis Batman!

Posted on by Duena Blomstrom

The long writing hiatus was chiefly due to being busy but also having to process how I feel about a rather bedazzling find: “Tangible Banking” stood still while I was “away”.

Not all of it of course, there was much done on the launch and proposition of challengers and front-end of neobanks but for traditional, big retail banks time shockingly stood still. A time they hardly afforded to lose to begin with.

As some of you know, I left the very practical side of things – selling and designing a core transaction and data FinTech product for banks who desperately needed it as it could dramatically change the consumer experience- about 18 months ago to do the “Less Tangible” banking stuff and ask them to stop and think of the consumers’ feelings and take introspective long hard looks at their organisations. One would argue I moved from a “doer” to a “thinker”. Some would argue I moved from being FinTech-er to being a professional finger pointer. Call it what you will, I spent that time writing as a banking consumer advocate, advising lots of FinTech companies how to approach if not defeat inertia and even working with a handful of genius banks who “got it”.

A couple of months ago I went back to “Tangible Banking” by working closely with a company who also has an amazingly smart and technically briliant product to dramatically change the consumer experience, this time on the onboarding side and I was blow away by where banks had gotten in the time that I was “away”.

Nowhere much.

Reaching out to some of my old clients and prospects I heard the same complaints and excuses and I attributed them to natural moaning needs of unsung heroes – bank employees who stuck it out during this FinTech palooza and tried to make these organisations move. A task worthy of Sysyphus.

Sadly, as I got a deeper understanding of what exactly their organisations have brought to the consumer in the time I had joined the “Intangible Banking Fixers” brigade, the complains are genuine – nearly nothing substantial can be pointed to and some of the same projects that were slow moving back then are still around whether on hold or being resurrected now. The big worthy ones. The ones about IRL data access, the ones about replacing spaghetti back-ends that prevent change, the ones about vision that is truly digital, the heavy stuff.

Look, I get banking inertia caused by “Business Prevention Departments” (J.P. Nicols Perpetuity TM) as much as the next frustrated doer or thinker in the industry, and I realise to my FinTechMafia gang this is another article on “same stuff I’ve been writing about since 2000” but this is a whole new level of ludricous, when I left “tangible banking” there was impossibly much buzz about how banks were “finally getting somewhere” and heaps of really solid projects in the works and they have all but vanished.

Here is who and what I blame:

  • Blockchain. Yes it’s complex and yes it’s potentially revolutionary but did everyone in every financial institution have to drop everything else they were thinking of to read and learn about it?
  • The slow pace of industry innovation. Just look at a Finovate Buzz words card and you’ll know nothing much was offered to the banks from the FinTech innovation side of things in the last 3-4 shows. This is partly because there is state-of-the-art front-end and no easily approachable back-end proposition fodder out there, but also because FinTech needs to make a buck and pushing the innovation barrel too far ahead of the banks makes no ROI sense.
  • The inability to catch-up of knowledge houses. 6-7 years ago the big consulting giants were woefully behind in offering any kind of serious strategic guidance to big retail banks in digital and top product designers stood in for them. They still are and they still do.
  • The FinTech commentator inflation. A few years ago there were 30-50 voices internationally who stepped in for the knowledge void created by the analysts and consultants. In the last 2 years that number has immeasurably exploded and while in the future that will be great for the industry as it will filter into real value and some of the newcomers are providing that already, it’s simply just massive noise for the banks for now, furthering their confusion.
  • The Great FinTech Distraction (TM). The mere number of Innovation Labs, Funds, Incubators, Aggregators, all other “-gators” says it all. How is one to focus on getting things done when one is not sure what the next best thing is and needs to keep on scouting?

Much as I would rather find reasons to praise the big retail banks and distance myself from the mindless bank bashing that some have taken up as a sport, for the reasons above, I feel everyone dropped the ball and allowed a vicious sort of analysis paralysis to take over. Let’s pick it up again and get going on that Free-to-Spend project from 2001.

Dear Bankers – feelings make bank

Posted on by Duena Blomstrom

buy

Tapping into emotions and driving positive ones through addictively delightful interactions- pays. That’s why you need to be a brand. No seriously, I know I’ve been repeating this like a broken record over the past years but it most certainly does.

There are three areas where the connection between customer’s feelings and their shopping behaviour becomes most evident. Areas where the Rational Consumer is but Myth.

TECHNOLOGY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Recent research shows that the way we relate to technology and its digital manifestation has drastically changed over the past few years. We started our pre-digital relationship to technology by perceiving it as an objective enabler for various goals with practical benefits. Now-a-days technology translates into an instant appraisal of how it can “express and enhance who I am” – an emotional goal touching on motivation and needs.

CONSUMER GOODS

Nowhere is the connection more surprising than in purchasing decisions when it comes to everyday goods. Dr. P.N. Murray and his team found that:

“…consumers’ beliefs about a brand’s personality are based primarily on their interpretation of its “story” – the narrative expressed in communication, packaging, and other marketing elements. The narrative communicates what the brand means to them … the emotional connection. It is this connection that makes consumers loyal to brands.”

LUXURY BRANDS

We all know that luxury items are maybe the most emotional of purchases with no reason to buy a Tesla versus a Mercedes SLK beyond the fact that it intrinsically appeals to our aspirations and sense of self.

This new research also uncovered subconscious reasons behind each aspirational purchase decision

“unconscious perceptions about a brand’s authenticity and timelessness – what consumers describe as its “truth.” These perceptions evoke emotions – the sense of trust and security that is the essence of luxury for consumers.”

If you’re in banking and quickly scrolled down to see if Financial Services was listed only to let out a sigh of relief not to see it I would suggest it’s time you hold that breath and look up again because no matter how much we may not like to admit it, banking is part consumer goods, part luxury and it’s all underpinned by technology and digital products so all of this, the irrationality of consumers, their need for an emotional connection is highly relevant to us.

So Mr (or, sadly far more unlikely, Mrs) Banker let me ask you this: do you know how your CBBE (Consumer Based Brand Equity) pyramid compares to that of Levi’s, Amazon’s or Google’s? Does your bank have one? Shall we grab someone from the Customer Behaviour team and ask, maybe a Neuromarketing expert? Does your bank know what it is?

I’d wager the answer is “no, no, who?!? and no” because we’ve already established banks do not lift one finger to become a brand. In their defence there was no need – if they did not build delightful experiences and expressed their story and “truth” then what? What would the consumer do? Go to the next non-delightful-devoid-of-truth bank? The reality of it is that while there’s ample safety in numbers and banks can continue to abuse its consumers by withholding delight some of them have where to go now. And the places they go to will fundamentally have built an identity and the type of strong brand that will make people join them and fall in love with them hence buy from them

While we struggle to understand why we should even put the consumer truly at the centre of what we build in retail, private banking and wealth made some –timid- steps in researching emotions and some studies such as this and this have been surfacing. That’s because they care, they want to make money.

That 1 point change in mortgage rates you debated for 3 months won’t move the needle. The 0.02 higher savings offer or the 100 quid signing bonus won’t make anyone a loyal, invested customer because your premise doesn’t work. It’s not about the numbers, it’s about the feelings. That’s what pays.

No matter how much denial they invest in it and how many times they roll their eyes at the urgency to understand and act on Emotional Banking, retail banking will have to soon stop avoiding the issue, rip off stifling culture to inject experience design into the DNA as a sine qua non technology enabler, and become a loved brand, as opposed to just paying customer centricity lip service sometime very soon.

 

 

Money 2020 Europe – this is how we rolled

Posted on by Duena Blomstrom

 

CfL_hRIWIAABXJH

Let me tell you what this won’t be. A play-by-play of the conference. It won’t be that for several reasons including the fact that I missed a few general sessions due to meetings and the occasional hospital stay so I can’t comment on the full content. What I can comment on, is my experience of it.

First off, while I publicly flogged them for the iffy WiFi the rest of the organisation was flawless in terms of location and endless delightful perks such as DJs, laser beams, ice-cream and pancakes, cute huts for meeting places, mini Lego figurines for each speaker, smoothie bars, cool exhibitions and even the occasional bejeweled wheel chair for the temporarily impaired. As many people remarked it had a trendy, hipsterish, festival feel to it. Which made it an experience.

Which sadly, was in stark contrast with the content of most of the sessions I attended.

Stiff. Corseted. Jargoned to the gills. Wooden language galore. Many speakers other than the usual suspects who tried to liven it up, sounded like media trained drones repeating soul-killing messages about collaboration, technology and customer centricity devoid of critical thought or meaning. Why is this?

I find this fascinating and genuinely think this is a FinTech specific illness. The way in which we slip in and out of meaning and the way many people are genuinely passionate and bit by the bug one moment, and deadpan and businessy the other. Why can’t we say precisely what we mean in plain English?

Is it because the excitement of the Technology world only recently met the Finance world where being stiff has traditionally been everything? Many of the people in FinTech are new to both sides of the story, the new wave are new to the working force altogether yet they seem to adopt this same non-meaningful half unicorn, half sloth language.

Maybe it’s a sign of how everyone is more or less out of their depth and all the experts are still in the making. Even the most knowledgeable of the FinTech world have only had a few years to work this out as they go along and while in the Tech world one can easily be proud of the outstanding speed of change and focus on innovating for the sake of it, when we apply that to financial services it has to have application and it has to be worked out fast enough to allow the ridiculously long cycles of buying and implementing in banking so it is all scarily fluid. Having to translate all this Tech excitement into Banking value may be what makes them sound like a Silicon Valley hipster one minute and like a retiring McKinsey consultant the other.

Or maybe, more likely and hopefully, it’s all about the fact that before technology decided to stuck its hedonism inducing nose into finance, it was all about numbers and being stiff and corseted was necessary to perform the right math whereas now, banking has had to notice the consumer and attempt to start matching these moments of delight they get elsewhere thanks to digitisation.

UX is only “a thing” that bankers have to take seriously because our mobile phones is where we bank rather than where they’ve been expecting us for the last hundreds of years and the table has turned – it’s no longer the consumer shyly coming to the branch hat turned in jittery hands asking for the banker to make some incomprehensible number magic and sell them a product, it’s now a case of the banker holding out their top hat asking for the technologists’ best tips on how to get to a consumer through this new fangled device. Digital technology brought CX to banking and with it a new language and if it has to be a weird combination between real talk and consultancy speak for now while we build new paradigms for the consumer, so be it.

To me, wheeling my chair through its delightful networking areas and entering panels that felt like annual reviews for shareholders, Money2020 was a good metaphor for today’s banking proposition. Beautifully packaged, hip and trendy on the outside and tangled, stiff, immutably old school and rather useless on the inside.

EX – the antibiotic to cure Infectious Organisational Paralysis in CX professionals

Posted on by Duena Blomstrom

My “EX not UX” Emotional Experience method is generating quite a bit of interest these days and I am considering potential partners to help me bring it to more industries than banking and make it part of a bigger organisational culture
change suite as part of my “it’s all about the people and keeping it real” obsession. This means that I spent some more time reflecting on what I am aiming to achieve with it while preparing for the last two workshops of which an upcoming one with a large UK bank’s team of extraordinary designers.

The goal of the EX workshop is not to teach human centric design or empathy design but to attemptto make those who are involved in strategy, CX, digital or design prone to naturally, intrinsically create more empathic experiences. It aims to demonstrate the value of deeply and bravely recognising and analysing emotion and gearing their creative process towards enhancing the positive ones and minimising the negative ones.

How do I do this? I spend some time covering the theoretical basis of both the respective industry (in Financial Services it’s a solid2-3 hours of what’s new in FinTech, in Retail it’s a CX perspective, etc) and the basics of why creating delightful experiences is desirable, but then spend the remainder of the time honing attention, observation and empathy as skills through immersive experiences, open dialogue, exercises and roleplay. This is evidently a big ask for a room of 25 people over 2 days and I don’t aim to defrost all the Elsa’s and convert all the Grinch’s to enjoy Christmas, but people are surprisingly human and naturally empathic given half a chance.

354d5bace0f3fea0cd3f6890c091a855

Once they understand there is a clear business benefit in being open, caring and feeling and this is not somehow done at the expense of the company but in its best interest, they embrace it with revigorated gusto.

Two days is a long time to talk about feelings. It can get uncomfortable. In fact, the more real we get in personal examples or deeper understanding of someone else’s point of view, the more uncomfortable, but ultimately, what I aim to do with the EX workshop, is show people it’s worthwhile to stay in this state of discomfort if it allows you to understand each other and your consumer in ways you wouldn’t have done before.

I want the teams in the workshops to have an emotionally charged experience themselves so there are props and colours and exercises that often probe deeply into their attitudes and some would argue these are more like group therapy sessions than they are workshops for UX and Design professionals and in a sense that’s true. These teams are typically not where organisations are sick and need therapy, they are vibrant and knowledgeable but even these echelons of creativity are infected with acute corporatitis (also known as infectious organisational paralysis) where they’ve found themselves half courageous and half passionate and the other half has been muddled into stiff language, agile wireframes and rapid prototyping. The EX workshop is like an intensive course of antibiotics to create enthusiasm and reignite that passion.

Everyone should walk out of my EX Workshop a human factor expert with a degree in emotional ergonomics and they will then know how to design their own Wizard of Oz to translate this new confidence in their pre-existent skills into transformative user experience design. IDEO can teach them their Empathic Design method, I only aim to eradicate the corporate culture bacteria that doesn’t let them open their hearts and minds to deeply caring about their consumer’s feelings.

I want them out of there feeling as if they just finished a sauna session (only with more clothes!). Cleansed of the corporate BS and silly Business Prevention Department (JP Nicols TM) objections; relaxed; brave; rejuvenated; supremely passionate and ready to take on the organisation if it won’t let them design and innovate to fit their customers’ emotions.

If all know that if we design to create delight and happiness we’ll all be better off. I can only hope that one day my 5 year old son wouldn’t even know he’s banking or that it was a satisfying happy money invisible experience, as he has just sent 200 pounds to his “New Car Deposit” savings account by simply wishing he drove one like the Top Gear one he’s watching and approving the transfer with a dreamy nod.

You can read more about Emotional Banking here and EX not UX here