The Progress Economy

1. Adopting a progress-first perspective ⇒ fixing innovation, sales, and growth problems

By prioritising progress over chasing hard to define value, we unlock powerful levers and tools that boost sales success and ignite (systematic) innovation.

Value is difficult to define and even harder to successfully chase. While our traditional view of value has been wildly successful in the past, it has blind spots and limitations that are becoming more apparent. It’s time to reimagine value.

The Progress Economy takes a progress-first, rather than value-first, perspective – we are all looking to make progress to a more desired state, with everything in life.

Progress gives rise to value: at our progress origin, there is no value; whereas we realise maximum value reaching our progress sought. Along the way, value both emerges as a trailing measure of the progress made and as predictions of progress that could be made.

Chasing value is putting the cart before the horse. We should focus on understanding, and improving, progress.

This is a subtle but powerful shift. From which we discover the levers and tools to fix the innovation, sales and growth problems.

2. Viewing progress as a state ⇒ better insights into desires, starting points, and achievements

Progress states capture necessary details, insights, waypoints and provide the language to discuss a seeker’s progress journey; essential understandings for improving innovation and sales.

As progress-first is a better way to view and drive the world, then viewing progress as a state is one of the ways to get better insights into our progress sought, our starting points and achievements.

Progress as a state consists of three equally important aspects: functional (like be able to speak Mandarin Chinese), non-functional (for example: personal challenge, quickly, etc), and contextual (often constraints: like unable to commit to same time every week learning).

Together these three aspects give us a rounded snapshot of progress at a point in time. We deepen that understanding through naming several progress states that act as journey waypoints:

• progress sought – the seeker’s more desirable state
• progress origin – where the seeker is starting from (and where a proposal offers to help from)
• progress offered – the state a proposition’s offers to help reach
• progress reached / potential – judgements of progress at points in time

Now we can fully understand progress journeys, and innovation (improving progress). Such a language opens up Christensen’s innovator’s dilemma, disruptive innovation, Drucker’s “innovate or die”, Kim & Maugborne’s Blue Ocean strategy and much more.

3. Recognising progress as a verb ⇒ deeper understanding of how progress is made and hindered

Understanding how progress is attempted – that a seeker tries to move from their individual progress origin to their progress sought through a series of resource integrations – is essential for innovation and sales: what are they lacking? what do they do? how can you help?

Progress is also a verb – moving to our more desired progress state. We make progress through progress-making activities, each of which involves integrating one or more resources

Ideally we attempt to progress from our individual progress origin to our individual progress sought. However, we may lack the resource(s) – such as time, skills, knowledge, tools, physical attributes, etc – to make progress.

In such cases, we might make the attempt anyway, and that might generate new resources (which we might offer to others to help them progress).

Or we might engage supplementary resources offered by a progress helper. Though now we likely compromise and make progress to the proposition’s progress offered rather than our progress sought. Additionally, propositions raise 5 new progress hurdles (including adoptability, resistance, inequitable exchange)

4. Framing value as a set of progress comparisons ⇒ achieving a clearer, actionalbe, view of value

Seeing value as a set of, often subjective, progress comparisons addresses all sorts of problems – Influencing those comparisons, in terms of amounts and objectivity, are levers for sales and innovation.

In our progress-first perspective, value comes from progress comparisons. For example:

• Potential value: How close to my progress sought can I get myself? Does a particular proposition help me get closer?
• Emerged value: How much progress have I made compared to my expectations?
• Recognised value: Is the progress I’ve made (emerged value) meaningful to me so far?

These progress comparison are predominantly made by the progress seeker, before, during and after attempting progress. They are phenomenological decisions. Meaning they are often subjective and based on the individual’s previous experiences and the situation they are currently in. An art of progress helpers is to turn these comparisons into more objective ones and to improve the seeker’s experience.

Sometimes progress helpers also make these comparisons, resulting in decisions to withhold, or withdraw, access to their supplementary resources if they think insufficient progress can be/is being made.

5. Recognising that, to be meaningful, emerged value must be acknowledged

Influencing the seeker’s value recognition frequency, and/or amounts of recognition at any one time, is a lever for innovation and sales.

Whilst value emerges from making progress, for it to be meaningful to a progress seeker, they have to recognise it (a process similar to revenue recognition in firms).

Say you want to travel 100km, but on day 1 you have to stop after 80km. We could say 80 units of value have emerged. That has some meaning to you if you can travel the final 20km the next day – you are 80kms closer. But has zero meaning to you if you had to be at the destination on day 1.

Getting a seeker to recognise value quicker or more at each recognition point is a lever for sales and innovation. Agile methodology, or subscription services, are two examples of doing this.

6. Eliminating (marketing) myopia ⇒ from goods vs. services to goods enable service distribution

Goods enable service to be transported to where/when needed. By eliminating the unhelpful goods vs. services debate of our traditional perspectives, we open up our perspective on potential solutions – unlocking a powerful lever for innovation and sales.

Let’s bid farewell to Levitt’s ‘marketing myopia’!

Traditionally we see services as poor relatives to goods: they are intangible, inconsistent, require customer involvement, delivery is inseparable from consumption, and we can’t create an inventory. This creates an blind-spot.

In the Progress Economy we see no difference to listening to your favourite band live (a service – applying knowledge or skills for benefit) or from a streaming app/CD/vinyl (a goods). Goods are just a mechanism for transporting service. We freeze service provision, transport it to when and where needed, and unfreeze in an act of resource integration.

Viewed this way, the solution space is wider and not hindered by a traditional goods vs services debate which is unhelpful.

7. Identifying clear progress hurdles ⇒ working to reduce them

Progress is not easy. In fact, there are hurdles to progressing.

Reducing one or more of the six progress hurdles is a lever for innovation and sales – though hurdles may be interlinked: reducing one may increase another

Since progress is made through integrating resources, the foundational hurdle is a lack of resource (time, skills, knowledge, physical attributes, tools, locations, etc). The higher a hurdle, the less likely a seeker is to make a progress attempt.

Though it is important to recognise this is a hurdle is not a barrier.

A seeker may attempt progress even if lacking resource (some may even relish doing so, and others actively seek out those situations). If a seeker succeeds in these cases, they have created new resource, which they might exchange with other seekers.

Or they may engage an existing progress proposition – an offering of supplementary resources. However, propositions introduce 5 additional progress hurdles:

• Adoptability – Rogers’ adoption theory
• Resistance – the missing part of Roger’s theory?
• Lack of Confidence – in the proposition/provider (where branding comes in)
• Misalignment on Continuum – are you trying to enable when the seeker wants relieving?
• Equitable Exchange – does the seeker feel they need to expand too much effort in return (often indirectly) for your service?

Reducing these is a lever for innovation. Though some are interlinked. For example, reducing the lack of resource often increases the inequitable exchange hurdle.

8. Enhancing progress ⇒ designing propositions that effectively support progress

Creating new, or altering an existing proposition’s progress-making activities and/or progress resource mix is a lever for innovation

Attempting progress and progress hurdles lead us to progress propositions – offers to help make progress. These are offered by Progress Helpers and consist of two bundles of supplementary resources:

• 1. A proposed set of progress-making activities – better known as instructions, manuals, recipes, guided systems
• 2. A progress resource mix – a proposition specific combination of:
  • employees (including some forms of AI)
  • systems
  • data
  • goods
  • physical resources
  • locations

Improving propositions to help make progress better and better progress is innovation. Aligning a proposition to a seeker’s progress journey is sales.

9. Dealing with changing attitudes ⇒ Gliding across the progress continuum

Sliding a proposition along the progress proposition continuum – in either direction – is a lever for innovation and sales

Some seekers want to be relieved, others enabled, and their position on a continuum between these two points can change over time/over context.

Progress propositions, naturally, also sit on the same continuum. Where they sit gives an insight into the proposition’s resource mix and non-functional progress it supports.

Innovation is gliding along the continuum; and it could be both ways. Servitisation is a glide to the relieving end of the continuum, and gains a lot of press as we “shift to a service economy” Yet there are possibilities to shift to more enabling propositions, where seekers are looking for self actualisation, for example.

10. Making the world go round ⇒ exchanging service, equitably

Thinking in terms of equitable effort exchanges opens our eyes to innovative business models – subscription, subsidised, freemium, etc.

An initially more challenging aspect of The Progress Economy is that rather than seeing an exchange of value (eg cash for a product), we exchange service (applying skills and knowledge to benefit) as the driver of economic activity. Often we do this indirectly – for example through transitive exchange across several parties – and it is mediated and enabled by service credits (of which cash is a successful implementation).

It begins with realising we’re all progress seekers but sometimes (often?) we the resources to progress are not equally. distributed. We effectively end up specialising and trading help. What does this actually mean? It explains:

• Why an actor is incentivised to offer progress propositions (i.e. in order to obtain service credits)
• Why certain actors set out to actively create resources to offer (ie helper innovation)
• Service exclusivity through patents, copyright, etc ()
• What Is pricing – an indication of effort expected in exchange for effort expended (effort * iterations)
• Inequitable exchange progress hurdle – the effort a progress seeker needs to put in (elsewhere) to get enough service credits is beyond what they feel the effort requested by a progress helper is requesting for their help
• Business model innovation – subscriptions, subsidised etc