Chapter 7: Life Systems Help People Create Balance
Meaningful experiences come from the systems people create for their lives
Dear Friends,
I’ve started writing chapter 7. This is the second chapter that focuses a strategic point of view that your company can embrace for future growth. I hope you will find the idea of life systems beneficial to your business models.
Chapter 7: Life Systems Help People Create Balance
Meaningful experiences come from the systems people create for their lives
Chapter Objective
If you were to ask a customer 25 years ago what makes an experience meaningful, they would likely reply by saying things like ‘they remembered my name’ or ‘they upgraded my experience.’ But when we asked that question today, what people describe is very different. This chapter focuses on how people create systems for their life, how those systems create balance, and what the implications are experience design.
Chapter Summary
An abundance of quality experiences creates a new situation: too many ‘memorable’ experiences. And what a ‘meaningful experience’ means to people today.
Life systems are crucial to people. They create today to manage their lives and create balance.
Life systems impact the way people think about health and wellbeing, travel and food, finance and risk, work, consumption and entertainment, sports and physical activity, relationships and beliefs, and decision making
Life systems and modes work hand in hand.
How companies can leverage life system thinking to improve business models, channel strategies, customer relations, and product design.
The Strategic Point of View
The Near Future Need of Customers
In the near future, your customers will only integrate you into their lives if you can support their life systems. People need life systems today to help them manage the abundance of solutions at their disposal. They have the tools, the ability, and the desire to build meaningful life systems.
What Your Company Can Do
Your company can start developing solutions that help people manage the different domains of their lives. These include: health & wellbeing, finance and risk, relationships, family dynamics, home, things and consumption, entertainment and travel, work, sports and physical activity.
By focusing on design that supports their systems for these domain, your company can positively affect their decision-making and their most meaningful experiences.
The Impact on Your Business Model
Historically companies have built business models to be ‘sticky.’ But life systems represent a more intimate and significant relationship between company and customer. By focusing on life systems, the business model becomes essential to customers who build their life systems around your solutions. Your business model must change in the following ways:
Instead of focusing on repeat business, focus on creating tools and processes that can easily integrate into people’s lives.
Develop channels that individuals can customize to fit their unique circumstances.
Develop partnerships with other companies that support the same life domain.
How Life Systems Relate to the Four Principles of Experience Strategy
Growth through situational markets
People create life systems to reduce the burden of decision-making and to increase the meaning of an experience. When a recognizable situation recurs, people deploy their tools and get into modes that fit their life systems. When companies support life systems people deploy their solutions every time a related situation arises.
Be compelling through a strategic point of view
While your competition focuses on habits and routines, your company can build a far more enduring relationship with customers through support for their life systems. Habits and routines are designed to make decision-making automatic. Life systems are built by people themselves to manage and control tasks, relationships, knowledge, and experiences. Life systems utilize the best things about technology, especially intelligent technologies.
The customer needs the whole job done
Systemic thinking is all about getting the whole job done. When you focus on life systems, you pay attention to how the role you play affects various aspects of people’s lives. A key reason why people create systems is to help them manage all of the activities in their lives. The whole job means seeing how different jobs to be done relate to each other. It means supporting emotional and social jobs while fully supporting the functional tasks.
Not surprisingly, people find a lot of meaning in their life systems. That’s because they build their life systems to reflect their belief systems. People who are intentional about creating their life systems feel like they save time, spend time better, and are able to invest in the experiences that matter most.
Dynamic and Meaningful: Life Systems
Twenty years ago we conducted a large research study with one simple question: what makes an experience meaningful? A few years ago, we conducted the same study again. In the interim years, the number of people who went on a cruise annually grew from 6.9 million a year to 32 million per year. During that same period of time the number of people with mobile phones grew from 789 million people worldwide to 5.75 billion people.
So much has changed in the last twenty years that it’s somewhat difficult to remember how we lived only 20 years ago, let alone 30 years ago. We are smack dab in the middle of the Experience Economy. We are on the cusp of the Intelligent Era. People today have unlimited access to goods, services, and experiences. They can instantly buy everything from couches to vacations in Mexico. We are also in a time period of uncertainty. Around the world, major political assumptions are being called into question. It is more expensive buy almost everything. And many countries are rearming in preparation for war. Post COVID, the very way that people work has changed.
So what has changed in the way people define meaningful experiences? Twenty years ago, it was all about being pampered, being given status, and escaping from work and life. Today, people talk about the little things that happen in their lives. They don’t typically mention their most amazing vacations. Instead, they talk about how their values translate into their lifestyle. They talk about their family dynamics, the way they orchestrate things, their ability to control how they spend their time. And they seek balance.
Life today is more complex than it was 20 years ago. And it’s likely to get even more complex in the future. People rely on sophisticated technologies to help them maximize their time and to solve things instantaneously but learning new technologies and orchestrating the usage of these tools, requires brainpower, patience, and planning. So they set up life systems that help them keep everything moving in the right direction.
A life system is a set of rules, tools, relationships, and activities orchestrated by individuals or families to keep the various parts of their lives in balance. People have systems for their finances. They uses multiple banking accounts, payment tools, investment solutions, and spending processes to ensure they have cash on hand and can pay for household needs and lifestyle activities. Likewise they have systems for managing vitamins, calories, exercise, trips to the dentist and doctor. These systems help them achieve their health and wellbeing goals (their ‘health & wellbeing systems).
A life system is not a routine or a habit. A routine refers to a regular, repeated series of actions or behaviors carried out as part of a standard practice or habit. Both habits and routines are patterns of behavior. Life systems combine the automation and intelligence of technologies with the dynamics of people’s lives. They have inputs and outputs. There are feedback loops. And there are multiple paths through the system to a solution based on the situation at hand.
A shopper may have a Saturday morning routine that includes going to the grocery store closest to his home. But today’s grocery shoppers can, on average, choose from 19 grocery stores within a drivable radius, three grocery e-commerce sites, and a variety of delivery options. Depending on the shopper’s situation, mood, or needs he can quickly change the way he shops, changing stores, delivery time, or payment process. What he doesn’t want to do is to constantly weigh all options at his disposal. So he sets up a few services and tools that he can quickly choose from. Then, if on Saturday his son has a soccer game, he can still get the groceries while he watched the game.
That’s the power of a life system. His life system.
People create life systems for:
Physical Health
Emotional Wellbeing
Financial Wellbeing
Career Progress
Job Satisfaction
Family Togetherness
Relationships with Friends
Spiritual Wellness
Routine Responsibilities
Community involvement
Intellectual Wellbeing
Hobbies, Interests, Self-Care
Ability to Explore New Places, Travel
And most of these systems connect to the other domains of their life. They can do a little work while on vacation because they bring their laptops with them and they have access to Starlink. They can build family relationships while improving their physical health by walking to dog together. One child we interviewed referred to walking the dog and walking to the grocery store as her favorite time with her dad. He could have done both activities without her and been more efficient in the process, but that’s not his goal. He deploys his tools so that he can still do the little things with his daughter that matter to her and feel to him like time well spent.
Which brings us to another attribute of life systems. They are not really about convenience. But they are about maximizing the value of people’s time. Going on a walk with your daughter is far more important time than just getting the groceries bought. And the local store that can pick up on what the customer is actually using the store for—building a parent/child relationship—can expect to become essential to three life domains: Family Togetherness, Physical Health, and Routine Responsibilities. At least for situations when people can walk to the grocery store.
Companies whose business models depend upon customer routines and habits over the last ten years have been sorely disappointed. Think about the routine of driving to the drug store to pick of medication. In the United States, that business model is crumbling. As did drive thru banking before it. As channels proliferate and buying becomes automated and instantaneous, companies who build their businesses around the mistaken idea that their model is the most convenient model will be eliminated.
The answer is not to be the most convenient business model. The answer is to understand and support their life systems so that they have every reason to keep your company in their lives.
To be continue …