Why I Started The INNER CIRCLE

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed something interesting happening in my conversations with leaders who are responsible for customer experience.

The questions they ask rarely start with surveys, dashboards or journey maps. Instead, they tend to drift into deeper territory, the kind of questions that sit underneath all the frameworks and tools we talk about in our industry.

Why does customer experience still struggle to influence strategic decisions in many organisations?

Why do CX teams so often feel responsible for outcomes they don’t fully control?

Why do businesses say they care deeply about their customers, yet continue to design systems, policies and incentives that make genuinely good experiences difficult to deliver?

These are the conversations that happen quietly in workshops, leadership sessions and private discussions with people who are trying to do meaningful work inside complex organisations. They don’t often make it onto conference stages or into polished corporate presentations, but they are happening constantly behind the scenes.

That is really why I started The INNER CIRCLE.

I started it to connect more deeply and share more thoughtfully.

Sometimes the thinking comes from something I’ve observed during a transformation programme. Sometimes it comes from a conversation with a leader who is trying to shift the culture of a large organisation. Sometimes it’s simply a question that keeps resurfacing and deserves more attention than it usually gets.

The INNER CIRCLE is where I write about those things.

Customer experience is often discussed as though it were a collection of activities: mapping journeys, improving touch points, implementing feedback loops, measuring satisfaction. All of those things are important, but they are only a small part of the picture.

The real shift happens when organisations start to see customer experience not as a programme to implement, but as a philosophy that shapes how decisions are made, how behaviours are encouraged, and how relationships with customers are ultimately designed.

That idea sits at the heart of my book, CX-ISM, which explores what happens when organisations stop treating customer experience as a set of initiatives and start thinking about it as a belief system, something that influences leadership, culture, incentives and the way businesses interact with the world around them.

When that shift occurs, the questions organisations ask begin to change.

Instead of asking how to improve a single touchpoint, they begin to ask what kind of organisation they actually want to be. Instead of focusing solely on operational fixes, they start examining the behaviours, decisions and structures that shape how experiences are delivered in the first place.

Those are the kinds of conversations I enjoy most, and they are the kinds of ideas that tend to appear in The INNER CIRCLE.

Some weeks it might be a reflection on something I’ve seen during a transformation programme. Other times it might be a provocation about the way customer experience is often misunderstood, or an exploration of the psychology that sits behind how people perceive value, effort and trust when they interact with a business.

What connects all of these pieces of thinking is a simple belief: experience is not just something organisations manage. It is something they design, whether consciously or not.

And the organisations that truly understand that tend to behave very differently.

They make decisions differently. They structure teams differently. They measure success differently.

More importantly, they recognise that experience is not just about what customers feel in a single moment, but about the cumulative impression an organisation leaves over time.

The INNER CIRCLE is simply my way of sharing some of that thinking as it evolves.

Not as finished answers, but as reflections from the work itself, written for people who are curious about how organisations can move beyond surface-level CX activity and start shaping experiences in ways that genuinely change relationships with customers.

If that’s a conversation you’re interested in, you’re very welcome to join it.

Because in the end, customer experience isn’t just a discipline.

It’s a way of thinking about how businesses choose to show up in the world.

And that conversation is only just getting started.

Happ CX-ing,