The Transformation Economy

Global connectivity brought commoditisation as informed and discerning customers search and compare products with unparalleled ease and speed. Current business wisdom suggests that successful companies either out-produce their competition at lower prices or out-create / out-innovate through better design and experience delivery (see Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind). 

According to Shaw and Ivens, authors of Building Great Customer Experiences (2002), “customer experience companies will focus on stories, theatre, emotions and memories to stimulate the customer.”  Their book concludes that “the customer experience is the next competitive battleground”. Sadly, there is absolutely no reference in the 2002 edition of this book to the seminal work on the importance of experience, i.e., Pine and Gilmore’s, Experience Economy (1999). Sadly, because Pine and Gilmore have a much more long-term view. They could have rested their laurels after identifying the importance of staging emotionally positive customer experiences. For most service companies have barely climbed the ladder to staging experiences. Instead, they speculated further into the future by identifying The Transformation Economy as the likely next phase in the increasingly complex saga of consumption.

Experiences are not the final offering. Companies can escape the commoditization trap by the same route as all other offerings: customisation. When you customise an experience to make it just right for the individual – providing exactly what he or she needs right now – you cannot help changing that individual. When you customize an experience, you automatically turn it into a transformation….

They go onto say very presciently:

With transformations, the economic offering of a company is the individual person or company changed as the result of what the company does. With transformations, the customer is the product! The individual buyer of the transformation essentially says, “change me”.

In the Transformation Economy, the customer is an Aspirant seeking some form of real and meaningful personal change – for example, a better figure; a new career, a larger sense of possibility; a deeper understanding of identity and purpose. In the Transformation Economy, the provider is an elicitor, supporter, or guide be he or she a personal trainer, coach, therapist, gardening coach, lifetime financial advisor etc.  If the Experience Economy is the commercial expression of the networked Knowledge/Information Age, then it is fair to say that the Transformation Economy is the outer, transactional expression of the emerging Age of Meaning when finally the needs of a human’s spirit and soul are met in the marketplace of ideas and personal services rather than in the cloister, temple or mosque. 

And here’s the rub. Transformations cannot be extracted, made, delivered or even staged, they can only guided. Transformations occur within the customer and can only be made by them. Transformative transactions are truly co-creative. The Elicitor or Guide can create the conditions that assist the transformation but cannot guarantee it. In this economy, equal emphasis must therefore be placed on four aspects of the transaction: 1). correct diagnosis of the need; 2). development of a shared agreement regarding the desired aspiration and the context in which that aspiration is expressed and anticipated; 3). the provision of support and guidance towards breakthrough; and then 4). sustained, long-term follow through. 

All of this implies a number of things: the Elicitor has to genuinely care about the Aspirant as well as be able and willing to enter into a relatively intimate, trusting and long-term relationship. It could mean that in many cases the Elicitor needs to be skilled and versed in the principles and practices of transpersonal psychology or at least have developed their emotional (EQ) and spiritual quotients (SQ) to a level above average. But it also means that the Aspirant has to assume equal responsibility for the outcome and cannot assume transformation as the outcome of nothing more than a series of appointments or encounters.  Finally, it also requires that both parties – Elicitor and Aspirant – share a common worldview, paradigm or set of values, beliefs and assumptions about how the world works, why they are here and their individual role in it. Challenges will inevitably occur if enither party is skilled in understanding what their own worldview ooks like and how it might differ from that held by the other party.

All of which imply – especially on the part of the Elicitor – a higher level of self awareness, hence this blog. All corporate and community leaders cannot ignore the public’s increasingly rapid movement through Maslow’s hierarchy of need. In the Transformation Economy, familiarity with the concepts and tools of depth and transpersonal  psychology will be essential. More on that later! For now, we’ll let a poet/playwright have last word - for now!

.....Thank God our time is now when wrong

Comes up to face us everywhere,

Never to leave us 'til we take

The longest stride of soul men ever took.

Affairs are now soul size.

The enterprise is exploration into God.

Where are you making for? It takes

So many thousand years to wake

But will you wake for pity's sake?

Christopher Fry, A Sleep of Prisoners

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