The Progress Economy

Ready to embrace progress-forward thinking? How will you design your organisation to take full advantage?

Creating below here – these are all initial (and likely have inaccuracies) thoughts

Leveraging progress

Now we know progress is the key to unlock innovation, sales, and growth, what does that mean for your organisation?

• repositioning exec thinking
• introducing progress owners

Evolving executive thinking

The CEO defines why we help.
The CMO communicates who we help.
The CInO discovers new ways to help.

The CTO builds systems involved in how we help.
The COO ensures it actually happens.

Here’s a summary of what execs in a progress-forward firm champion:

Let’s look at each in turn.

The CEO’s Role: Aligning the Enterprise Around Progress

The lead towards a progress-forward organisation has to be steered from the top.

CEO: align organisation’s purpose and narrative around enabling progress rather than producing outputs

The CEO’s task is to turn that principle into strategy, culture, and execution.

1. Reframe Purpose: From Output Creation to Progress Enablement

Most organizations still define success in terms of what they make — products, features, or market share. A progress-oriented CEO reframes success around the outcomes they help others achieve.

This isn’t semantic. It’s structural.

• Traditional question: “What business are we in?”
• Progress question: “Whose progress do we enable — and how well?”

This reorientation becomes the foundation of corporate purpose and strategic coherence. Every decision, from portfolio allocation to performance metrics, must connect back to that progress narrative.

2. Make “Progress” the Unifying Language of Strategy

A CEO’s next role is to replace the siloed language of “products,” “features,” and “functions” with a shared organizational vocabulary of progress.

This language bridges sales, innovation, operations, and finance — creating a single lens through which to evaluate opportunities and allocate resources.

It allows the CEO to ask sharper, enterprise-level questions:

• Are we helping customers make meaningful progress, or just selling incremental upgrades?
• Are our internal teams making progress in their own work, or trapped in activity loops?
• Are our partners and ecosystems progressing in ways that compound value, or create friction?

When progress becomes the common unit of value, alignment follows.

3. Align Strategy Around Seekers’ Journeys

Every market, every industry, every customer segment can be understood as a set of progress journeys. The CEO’s responsibility is to ensure the organization recognizes, maps, and aligns to those journeys.

This demands that the enterprise:

• Knows where customers start (their progress origins)
• Understands where they want to go (their progress sought)
• Identifies the friction and capability gaps in between

Only then can the company define its strategic role: what progress it is best positioned to enable, and how it differentiates through that help.

This reframes “customer-centricity” into something operationally testable: progress alignment.

4. Govern by Friction, Not Just Finance

Progress alignment requires new governance principles. Financial metrics remain essential, but they lag behind the real-time signals of how progress is made or hindered.

A CEO should complement financial reporting with progress reporting — measuring how effectively the organization reduces friction for customers and employees alike.

Example progress metrics might include:

• Reduction in customer effort or adoption hurdles
• Increase in reuse of capabilities across propositions
• Time-to-progress (how long it takes a customer to achieve their goal)
• Internal friction indicators (how easily teams can act, decide, or integrate)

By governing through progress as well as profit, the CEO ensures that short-term performance doesn’t undermine long-term value creation.

5. Design the Organization as a Progress System

Enterprises are systems of capabilities, not collections of departments. The CEO’s design challenge is to ensure these capabilities integrate in ways that accelerate progress rather than create silos or redundancy.

That involves:

• Aligning structure with flow: Organize around progress journeys, not internal functions.
• Investing in shared capabilities: Platforms, data, and talent systems that can serve multiple propositions.
• Empowering local adaptation: Allowing teams closest to the customer’s progress attempts to sense and respond in real time.

A progress-oriented CEO treats the organization as a living system of help — constantly reconfiguring itself to reduce friction and extend value.

6. Institutionalize Continuous Innovation

In a Progress Economy, innovation is not a department or initiative; it’s the natural by-product of helping others make better progress.

The CEO’s job is to ensure that the organization’s innovation metabolism stays healthy. That means embedding the expectation that every team — from front-line sales to corporate IT — learns from where Seekers struggle, adapts propositions, and feeds those insights back into the enterprise.

The CEO leads by reframing innovation as:

“Finding better ways to help others make better progress.”

This keeps innovation tied to real needs and shields it from the trap of novelty for its own sake.

7. Redefine Leadership as Enabling Others’ Progress

At its core, the CEO’s role mirrors the Helper’s role in the Progress Economy: to enable others to make progress — customers, employees, partners, and society.

That means:

• Creating conditions where teams can experiment safely and learn quickly
• Reducing internal hurdles — bureaucratic, political, or procedural — that stall progress
• Building psychological safety and a shared sense of purpose around helping others advance

When leadership itself becomes an act of enabling progress, culture and performance converge

CMO role: Orchestrating Market Progress

In the Progress Economy, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) becomes the organizational sense-maker of progress. While the CEO defines the why (purpose and alignment), the CMO owns the where and for whom — continuously mapping, interpreting, and communicating the evolving landscape of progress.

CMO: ensures the organization sees, understands, and communicates progress sought, origins, and hurdle sizes – translating aspiration into strategic direction.

marketing reclaims its original purpose: to understand human progress and connect organizational capability to it. The CMO’s job is no longer to generate demand for what the company makes, but to reveal, interpret, and communicate where progress is being sought — and ensure the organization shows up as the most credible Helper.

The CMO becomes the organization’s progress cartographer — mapping where people and markets are heading, and ensuring every brand, proposition, and conversation aligns to that journey.

1. Redefine the Market as a Landscape of Progress Journeys

Markets are not defined by demographics or categories — they’re defined by progress attempts. Every customer, user, or partner is a Seeker, moving from a current state (progress origin) to a more desirable one (progress sought).

The CMO’s first role is to make these journeys visible and actionable:

• What progress are our customers trying to make right now?
• Where are they being held back — by friction, complexity, risk, or lack of capability?
• Which parts of that journey are underserved, over-served, or open for reinvention?

By mapping markets as progress systems, not product segments, the CMO provides the strategic clarity the organization needs to design relevant propositions and innovations.

2. Turn Customer Understanding into Organizational Alignment

Traditional marketing stops at insight; progress marketing starts at alignment.

The CMO ensures that every function — from product to sales to service — understands the same underlying progress narrative. This means transforming customer research into a shared strategic compass, not just a slide deck.

That requires:

• Building a unified “progress intelligence” platform: aggregating data, signals, and stories from across the customer journey.
• Translating insights into action: equipping teams to make progress-based decisions in real time.
• Embedding customer language into internal language: ensuring teams talk about progress sought, not product use.

In doing so, the CMO turns the voice of the customer into the operating rhythm of the organization.

3. Manage Brand as a Promise of Progress

In the Progress Economy, a brand is not a logo or slogan; it is a promise of help. It tells Seekers what kind of progress they can expect, how it will feel, and why they can trust the Helper.

The CMO must ensure that every brand interaction — every message, experience, and touchpoint — reinforces that promise.

That involves three disciplines:

• Clarity: articulating whose progress the organization exists to help.
• Consistency: ensuring all propositions and channels deliver on that same definition of help.
• Credibility: earning the right to help, through authenticity, competence, and shared values.

A strong brand in the Progress Economy doesn’t sell — it enables trust in progress.

4. Redesign Marketing Around Engagement, Not Exposure

The marketing funnel was built for an era of transactions; progress marketing is built for an era of journeys.

The CMO’s focus shifts from exposure and conversion to engagement and contribution — how marketing activities actually help Seekers move forward.

That means measuring:

• How marketing content reduces uncertainty or effort for the Seeker
• How dialogue deepens understanding of emerging progress sought
• How community and advocacy extend progress beyond the sale

Marketing thus becomes a value-creating act in itself — part of the operational layer of the Progress Economy, not merely its prelude.

5. Embed Progress Thinking into Proposition Design

The CMO plays a critical role in shaping propositions long before launch. By bringing insight into the missing capabilities and emotional hurdles Seekers face, marketing becomes a co-designer of progress.

This involves reframing go-to-market planning as a go-to-progress strategy:

• Define the Seeker’s starting point and desired outcome.
• Identify the hurdles that prevent adoption or progress.
• Collaborate with the CTO and product teams to integrate solutions that remove those hurdles.
• Frame the communication not as “why this product,” but as “why this helps you make better progress.”

When marketing sits at the table early, it ensures innovation and message are born from the same progress logic.

6. Govern by Relevance and Resonance

In fast-evolving markets, progress sought changes faster than propositions. The CMO’s ongoing task is to detect those shifts before competitors do.

That means:

• Continuously scanning for new forms of progress — emerging behaviors, expectations, and comparisons.
• Using real-time data to detect where friction is rising or value is eroding.
• Steering both short-term campaigns and long-term strategy around the same central question:“Where is our market’s next progress sought — and are we ready to help them reach it?”

This is the foundation of continuous growth — not chasing attention, but maintaining relevance through progress alignment.

7. Lead Marketing as an Enabling Function

Finally, the CMO’s leadership mission mirrors the Helper role itself: to enable progress, not control it.

That requires empowering teams to:

• Experiment and learn from real progress attempts.
• Collaborate fluidly across silos and functions.
• Focus on outcomes achieved, not outputs produced.

When marketing behaves as an enabler — not a broadcaster — it becomes a catalyst for organizational coherence.

CInO role: Building the Enterprise of Continuous Progress

n traditional models, the CInO manages pipelines, portfolios, and processes. In the Progress Economy, those are still tools—but the purpose shifts. Innovation is no longer about novelty or differentiation for its own sake. It becomes the organizational discipline of helping people make better progress—and ensuring the company continually learns how to do so.

CInO: ensures the organization continually discovers new and ways to enable Seekers and Helpers (internal) better progress

n the Progress Economy, innovation is not a department. It is the capability through which the organization continually improves its ability to help others make progress. The Chief Innovation Officer’s task is to ensure that this capability is systemic, repeatable, and anchored in a shared understanding of progress—never detached from it.

Innovation, in this context, is not defined by ideation or invention, but by movement: creating new ways for Seekers to move further, faster, or with less friction from their current state to their desired one.

1. Redefine Innovation as Progress enalement

The CInO’s primary responsibility is to reframe innovation around progress made possible. This requires shifting the question from “What new things can we create?” to “What new kinds of progress can we enable?”

That reframing transforms the innovation charter:

• From generating ideas → to identifying unmet or evolving progress sought.
• From pushing technology → to orchestrating missing capabilities.
• From managing a pipeline of projects → to cultivating a pipeline of better ways to help progress happen.

The CInO becomes the architect of progress creation—not the custodian of R&D throughput.

2. Anchor Innovation in the Progress Operating Model

Innovation must operate across all three layers of the Progress Economy—strategic, operational, and decision. The CInO ensures innovation is designed, executed, and judged through that lens:

• Strategically, by identifying new progress origins and sought states—new territories of human or organizational movement.
• Operationally, by experimenting with new resource mixes, progress-making activities, and proposition designs that reduce friction or extend reach.
• Decision-wise, by understanding how Seekers feel about progress—what motivates, discourages, or redefines their perception of value.

Innovation that overlooks any of these layers risks becoming technically clever but experientially irrelevant.

3. Build a System of Continuous Sensing and Response

In dynamic environments, the half-life of relevance is shrinking. The CInO must therefore lead the enterprise in constantly sensing where progress is shifting—and orchestrating rapid, coordinated responses.

That means institutionalizing mechanisms for:

• Continuous ethnographic and data-driven observation of emerging progress sought.
• Early identification of rising progress hurdles—adoptability, inequitable exchange, misalignment, and others.
• Structured experimentation that converts insight into validated new propositions.

The CInO’s role is not to predict the future, but to make the organization fluent in adaptation.

4. Orchestrate Innovation Across the Progress Continuum

Every proposition exists somewhere on the enabling–relieving continuum. Innovation can occur by moving along that continuum—offering new levels of empowerment or new levels of convenience.

The CInO ensures innovation portfolios maintain this balance:

• Enabling innovations that extend Seekers’ own capabilities and agency.
• Relieving innovations that remove burdens, automate complexity, or provide outcomes directly.

By deliberately managing this continuum, the CInO ensures that innovation efforts align with both Seeker preferences and organizational positioning.

5. Turn Failure into Progress Intelligence

In the Progress Economy, every failed progress attempt—by the company or by the Seeker—is data. The CInO’s job is to treat value destruction not as loss, but as learning.

That means embedding systems to:

• Capture and interpret why progress was not achieved.
• Translate those findings into design improvements, new capabilities, or different propositions.
• Share learnings across the organization in a way that enhances everyone’s ability to help progress happen next time.

Innovation thus becomes the organization’s learning metabolism—how it metabolizes failure into foresight.

6. Institutionalize Innovation as Daily Practice

Peter Drucker’s warning—innovate or die—takes on literal operational meaning in the Progress Economy. The CInO’s mission is to make innovation continuous, not episodic.

That involves:

• Embedding innovation routines into every business rhythm: quarterly reviews, customer dialogues, performance metrics.
• Democratizing innovation capability—equipping every function to identify and act on progress gaps.
• Shifting governance from idea approval to progress accountability—how each initiative helps Seekers make better progress.

When innovation becomes a daily act of progress-making, the organization ceases to fear disruption; it becomes its own source.

7. Redefine Metrics Around Progress, Not Output

Traditional innovation metrics—number of launches, patents, or prototypes—measure activity, not impact. The CInO must build new dashboards that track progress outcomes:

• How much further Seekers can move because of a new proposition.
• How friction, effort, or inequity hurdles have been reduced.
• How Seeker confidence, trust, and continuity of engagement have improved.

These measures translate innovation from a creative process into a performance system—making “better progress” both measurable and manageable.

8. Lead the Organization’s Innovation Culture

Ultimately, the CInO is the chief architect of a culture that sees progress as everyone’s job. That culture balances curiosity with discipline; creativity with accountability.

The CInO nurtures this by:

• Framing progress as the shared purpose of innovation, not just growth or differentiation.
• Celebrating experimentation as progress-making behavior, even when results differ from expectations.
• Building bridges between Seekers, Helpers, and Externalities—so innovation reflects both individual and societal progress.

When innovation culture is rooted in progress, it becomes intrinsically motivational. People want to contribute when they see their work move someone forward.

COO role: turning internal progress into practice

In a Progress Economy, operations are no longer about throughput, efficiency, or control. They are about orchestrating how progress actually happens — through people, systems, and partnerships that help Seekers (customers, employees, and partners alike) move from where they are to where they want to be.

COO: turn purpose into performance, friction into flow, and activity into recognisable progress.

The Chief Operating Officer’s role, therefore, is to design and manage the organization as a progress engine: a dynamic system that reliably converts capabilities into outcomes and friction into flow.

1. Redefine Operations as the Flow of Progress

Traditional operations focus on processes — what gets produced, at what cost, and at what speed. In the Progress Economy, the focus shifts to how effectively the enterprise enables progress across every touchpoint.

That means tracking not just operational efficiency, but progress efficiency:

• How easily Seekers can apply their capabilities and the Helper’s resources.
• How quickly barriers are detected and resolved.
• How consistently progress-making activities produce recognizable movement toward the desired state.

The COO’s task is to design systems that make progress frictionless, measurable, and repeatable — even as markets and contexts change.

2. Architect the Enterprise as a System of Capabilities

In the Progress Economy, value doesn’t reside in assets — it emerges from the application of capabilities.
The COO becomes the architect of capability flow: ensuring that the right resources (human, digital, and systemic) integrate at the right time to help progress happen.

That involves:

• Mapping capabilities across the enterprise and identifying where they enable, duplicate, or block progress.
• Designing for integration, not isolation — making sure teams, technologies, and partners operate as a coherent service system.
• Optimizing adaptability — structuring the enterprise so it can reconfigure its resources as progress needs evolve.

Where the CTO engineers the technical system, the COO ensures it operates as an organizational rhythm — responsive, aligned, and continually learning.

3. Operationalize Progress Intelligence

Operations generate vast amounts of data, but most of it reflects performance against internal goals, not Seeker progress. The COO’s opportunity is to institutionalize progress intelligence: the ability to see, in real time, how Seekers are actually moving.

That means:

• Embedding sensors, analytics, and feedback loops into every operational layer.
• Tracking where progress accelerates, stalls, or reverses.
• Creating operational dashboards that combine efficiency metrics with progress indicators such as friction removal, time-to-outcome, or Seeker confidence.

Progress intelligence turns operations into an adaptive system — one that not only delivers outcomes but understands whythey matter.

4. Design for Friction Reduction

The Progress Economy teaches that value emerges through progress — and that friction is the enemy of both.
The COO’s job, therefore, is to act as the organization’s chief friction remover.

That includes:

• Streamlining internal processes that slow resource integration.
• Identifying the six progress hurdles — adoptability, resistance, misalignment, confidence, effort elsewhere, and inequitable exchange — and addressing their operational roots.
• Ensuring that every process, policy, and workflow is judged by how much progress it enables, not how well it enforces control.

Operational excellence becomes synonymous with progress ease — helping everyone move further with less effort.

5. Embed Dialogue and Feedback in the Operating Model

In the Progress Economy, progress is co-created through interaction. Seekers judge, recalibrate, and sometimes abandon progress attempts based on the quality of their experience. The COO’s role is to build operating models that enable continuous dialogue — between Seekers, Helpers, and the system itself.

That means:

• Designing feedback channels into every stage of the operational process.
• Enabling front-line teams to act on real-time insight, not just escalate it.
• Turning customer and employee interactions into operational learning loops.

This operationalizes the principle that “dialogue is design.” Every conversation becomes a site of progress-making.

6. Balance Enabling and Relieving Operations

Just as propositions exist on a continuum from enabling to relieving, so too do operating models. Some operations should empower customers and teams to act independently (enabling); others should absorb complexity on their behalf (relieving).

The COO ensures the enterprise balances both:

• Enabling operations equip Seekers and teams with tools, data, and autonomy to progress on their own.
• Relieving operations take on the effort — automating, coordinating, or delivering outcomes directly.

A sophisticated COO designs operations that can fluidly shift along this continuum based on context and Seeker preference.

7. Turn Service Credits into Business Model Innovation

Behind every act of help is an exchange of effort. The COO manages this exchange infrastructure — the service creditssystem — whether expressed as money, subscription, tokenization, or reputation.

The COO ensures that this flow is equitable, scalable, and strategically aligned.

• Ensuring pricing and service mechanisms reflect the true effort of help.
• Exploring alternative credit systems that enable new forms of progress exchange (e.g., loyalty ecosystems, tokenized contributions).
• Integrating service credit logic into operational design so that value exchange remains fluid and fair.

This is how operations become a platform for business model innovation, not just delivery.

8. Build a Culture of Operational Learning

Operations often run on discipline and efficiency. In the Progress Economy, they must also run on curiosity and learning.

The COO builds this culture by:

• Embedding reflection and improvement loops into operational routines.
• Encouraging front-line experimentation — treating micro-innovations as legitimate forms of progress.
• Recognizing teams not just for output, but for progress created — for Seekers, colleagues, and the organization itself.

The most advanced COOs turn operations into a living laboratory for better ways to make progress happen.

They ensure that every process, system, and person contributes to a seamless experience of movement — for customers, partners, and employees alike.

When operations are designed around progress, efficiency becomes empathy, scalability becomes service, and the enterprise becomes what it was meant to be — a system that helps the world move forward.

CTO role : build and evolve the systems carrying capabilities

If a CEO’s job is to align the organization’s purpose and narrative around enabling progress rather than producing outputs, then the CTO’s mandate becomes to build and evolve the system of capabilities that make that progress possible — reliably, scalably, and continuously.

Here’s how that translates into concrete strategic shifts for a CTO:

1. Reframe Technology as a Progress-Enabling System

Instead of managing a technology stack or roadmap, the CTO manages a capability stack — the set of technical, data, and process capabilities that enable Seekers (customers, partners, or employees) to make progress.
The core question shifts from “What can our technology do?” to “Whose progress does it enable, and how does it reduce their hurdles?”

2. Build for Adaptability, Not Completeness

Progress is never static. Seekers’ goals evolve as their own capabilities grow.
The CTO’s role is therefore to design modular, adaptive architectures that allow propositions, data flows, and user experiences to evolve at the same pace as customer progress itself.
This means prioritizing:

• Platforms over products
• APIs and interoperability over monolithic control
• Continuous deployment and experimentation over release cycles

3. Turn Data Into a “Progress Feedback System”

Traditional data strategies track performance; a Progress Economy data strategy tracks progress made and friction encountered.
A CTO should invest in systems that surface:

• Where customers stall in their progress journeys
• Which propositions or activities deliver the greatest progress delta
• What new forms of progress are emerging in adjacent spaces

This is how technology becomes a strategic sensing system, not just an operational reporting layer.

4. Orchestrate Human + Digital Capabilities

In the Progress Economy, resources carry capabilities, and progress emerges through resource integration.
The CTO’s role is to blend human and technological capabilities in ways that amplify progress — through automation, augmentation, or entirely new interfaces.
For example:

• AI as a co-pilot for human judgment, not a replacement
• Process automation as a way to remove non-value work so humans can focus on innovation and empathy
• Internal platforms that democratize progress-making tools across teams

5. Institutionalize Continuous Innovation

If the CEO ensures innovation is the organization’s default behavior, the CTO must ensure it is the system’s default behavior.
That means embedding innovation into the architecture itself:

• Continuous integration pipelines
• Safe sandboxes for rapid experimentation
• Data-driven learning loops connecting product, operations, and customer experience

In this sense, the CTO becomes the chief architect of the enterprise’s innovation metabolism.

6. Govern Progress, Not Just Risk

Traditional governance focuses on minimizing technological or security risk.
In a progress-oriented organization, governance must also ensure that technology does not create progress friction — for Seekers or for the people helping them.
That means evaluating systems not only for reliability and compliance, but for:

• Accessibility and adoptability
• Transparency and ethical impact
• Their effect on both customer and employee progress

CHRO

In the Progress Economy, people aren’t resources to be optimized — they’re progress makers. Every employee, partner, and leader is simultaneously a Seeker (making their own progress) and a Helper (enabling the progress of others).

The Chief Human Resources Officer’s mandate is to design the conditions under which those two roles flourish. That means building an organization where people see progress, feel progress, and enable progress — for themselves, their teams, and the customers they serve.

1. Redefine HR as Human Progress Architecture

Traditional HR manages people; modern HR designs progress systems.
In the Progress Economy, the CHRO becomes the chief architect of human progress — ensuring that every structure, incentive, and development program aligns around one question:

How do we help people make better progress in helping others make progress?

This shifts HR from compliance to coherence — from enforcing policies to enabling movement.

2. Align the Employee Value Proposition with the Progress Economy

In most organizations, the employee value proposition (EVP) is framed around compensation, perks, or career advancement. In the Progress Economy, the EVP becomes a progress promise:

• What progress can employees make here — professionally, personally, and purposefully?
• How does that progress align with the progress we help our customers make?
• How easily can employees see their contribution to that wider progress narrative?

The CHRO reframes recruitment, retention, and engagement around the shared pursuit of progress. When employees perceive visible progress — in their skills, autonomy, and impact — engagement follows naturally.

3. Redefine Talent as a Capability System

Rather than treating talent as a set of roles to be filled, the CHRO views it as a living system of capabilities.
Capabilities are the currency of progress — they are what people and organizations exchange to help one another move forward.

The CHRO’s task is to:

• Map capabilities across the enterprise — both technical and human.
• Identify capability gaps that limit collective progress.
• Orchestrate learning, mobility, and collaboration to close those gaps dynamically.

This is how HR evolves from “staffing” to capability orchestration — enabling progress to flow wherever it’s needed most.

4. Design Progress-Centric Performance Systems

In traditional models, performance management focuses on output and efficiency.
In the Progress Economy, performance is measured by contribution to progress — both the individual’s own and that of others.

That requires rethinking key systems:

• Goals become progress milestones — clear markers of movement, not static KPIs.
• Reviews become progress conversations — forward-looking dialogues about what’s enabling or hindering progress.
• Recognition celebrates visible acts of help — moments where someone made it easier for others to move forward.

The CHRO leads this transformation from evaluation to evolution — from control to contribution.

5. Build a Culture of Progress-Making

Culture, in this model, isn’t defined by values painted on walls but by how progress feels inside the organization.
The CHRO cultivates a culture where:

• Progress is visible and celebrated.
• Learning is continuous and shared.
• Helping others progress is a core norm, not an exception.
• Friction is surfaced early and addressed collectively.

This cultural shift makes progress the organization’s social currency. The more people help others progress, the more progress the organization makes as a whole.

6. Embed Progress Dialogue into Leadership

Leadership development must evolve from teaching behaviors to enabling progress dialogues.
Progress dialogue is the practice of helping others clarify where they are, where they want to go, and what’s holding them back.

The CHRO institutionalizes this by:

• Training leaders to become “progress coaches” rather than “performance managers.”
• Embedding reflective dialogue into one-on-ones, team reviews, and project retrospectives.
• Equipping managers to diagnose and reduce progress hurdles — emotional, cognitive, or structural.

When leaders master progress dialogue, every interaction becomes a site of development and motivation.

7. Design the Organization Around Progress Flow

Traditional org charts are static — built for stability and hierarchy.
The CHRO reimagines the organization as a progress flow network: dynamic, fluid, and centered on how capabilities integrate across teams to enable progress.

That includes:

• Moving from job descriptions to progress roles — defined by the progress a role enables rather than the tasks it performs.
• Encouraging cross-functional movement to accelerate capability transfer.
• Using temporary “progress squads” to pursue emerging opportunities or friction points.

The CHRO becomes the conductor of human agility — ensuring progress flows to wherever it creates the most value.

8. Reframe Employee Experience as Progress Experience

Every employee experience — onboarding, learning, performance, exit — is an opportunity to reinforce the organization’s progress narrative.

The CHRO curates these experiences around three guiding questions:

1. Do people feel they’re making meaningful progress?
2. Do they see how their progress connects to the progress of others?
3. Do they feel supported when they hit friction?

When these answers are “yes,” engagement metrics, retention rates, and innovation naturally improve — because progress feels tangible and shared.

9. Build Progress Literacy Across the Enterprise

Finally, the CHRO leads the development of progress literacy — the shared language and understanding of what progress means, how it’s made, and how it’s helped.

That means teaching everyone to:

• Recognize the dimensions of progress (functional, non-functional, contextual).
• Diagnose progress hurdles.
• Frame their work as helping Seekers move from origin to sought.

Progress literacy turns culture from abstract aspiration into applied practice — making every employee a designer and steward of progress.

10. Partner Across the C-Suite to Humanize Progress

In the Progress Economy, the CHRO’s influence extends across every domain:

• With the CEO, they align organizational purpose with human capability.
• With the CTO, they design progress-enabling technologies that enhance rather than replace human contribution.
• With the COO, they ensure operational systems support rather than stifle human progress.
• With the CMO, they align internal and external progress narratives.
• With the CInO, they ensure innovation emerges from the lived experience of people making progress inside the organization.

The CHRO becomes the chief integrator of human potential — the guardian of the conditions under which progress can thrive.

CFO

In the traditional economy, finance is the language of value — of inputs, outputs, and returns.
In the Progress Economy, finance becomes the language of progress — of movement, momentum, and meaningful impact.

The Chief Financial Officer’s task is no longer to count what happened, but to resource what should happen next — to translate progress into sustainable economic systems that enable more progress to occur.

The CFO becomes the Chief Progress Financier: ensuring that effort, capability, and time are invested where they create the greatest future progress, not simply the highest historical return.

1. Redefine Capital as Progress Potential

Money, in the Progress Economy, is not a store of value — it is a service credit, a mechanism for acknowledging and redistributing the effort of service across time, scale, and space.

The CFO reframes financial capital as stored progress potential: accumulated service credits that can be reinvested to enable new forms of progress.

This means evaluating every financial decision not by ROI alone, but by Return on Progress (RoP) — how effectively a given investment expands the organization’s or customer’s capacity to make progress.

Traditional finance optimizes efficiency.
Progress finance optimizes enablement.

2. Measure Value Through Progress, Not Just Performance

The CFO becomes the chief translator between progress made and value realized.
That requires new lenses of measurement:

• Progress Efficiency – How effectively resources are converted into Seeker progress.
• Progress Equity – How fairly the effort and benefit of progress are distributed between Seeker and Helper.
• Progress Sustainability – Whether the progress created today reduces or compounds future hurdles (environmental, social, or operational).

By quantifying progress as both an economic and human phenomenon, the CFO helps the organization see value not as something exchanged, but as something emerging through continued capability integration.

3. Fund Progress, Not Projects

In a Progress Economy, the CFO’s investment logic shifts fundamentally:
from funding isolated initiatives to funding streams of progress.

That means:

• Investing in capability development rather than one-off deliverables.
• Financing systems that reduce recurring progress hurdles (e.g., adoptability, inequitable exchange).
• Treating customer or employee progress journeys as capital assets — to be nurtured, not extracted.

Progress funding becomes a dynamic cycle: identify where friction is highest, resource experimentation to remove it, and reinvest the realized progress credits into new opportunity areas.

4. Reimagine Financial Planning as Progress Forecasting

Traditional financial planning extrapolates the past. Progress forecasting models the momentum of progress — how quickly the organization and its customers are moving toward their sought states.

The CFO’s role expands to include:

• Anticipating when progress plateaus and when new capability infusions are needed.
• Tracking “progress velocity” as a strategic metric — how fast new progress emerges per unit of investment.
• Integrating leading indicators such as customer progress signals, capability maturity, and hurdle reductions.

This approach transforms budgeting into an act of strategic foresight, not just fiscal discipline.

5. Align Resource Allocation with the Progress Journey

In the Progress Economy, resource allocation isn’t about departments or cost centers — it’s about progress centers: points in the Seeker’s or Helper’s journey where additional capability or attention creates disproportionate progress.

The CFO orchestrates this by:

• Mapping where capital, talent, and technology can most effectively reduce friction or expand reach.
• Funding early-stage initiatives that help Seekers transition from origin to sought more easily.
• Applying financial lenses to prioritize progress that compounds over time — where each movement builds the foundation for the next.

The question guiding this is no longer “Where do we spend less?” but “Where can progress accelerate most?”

6. Integrate Progress Metrics into Reporting

Reporting in the Progress Economy evolves beyond revenue, margin, and growth.
The CFO introduces progress reporting alongside financial reporting — translating intangible momentum into visible metrics that guide strategic decisions.

This may include:

• Progress Made per Customer – Functional and non-functional advancement achieved.
• Progress Yield per Proposition – Efficiency of each proposition in generating Seeker progress.
• Hurdle Reduction Index – Quantified drop in the friction experienced by Seekers or employees.
• Capability Leverage Ratio – The multiplier effect of newly integrated capabilities.

By embedding these into regular dashboards and board packs, the CFO ensures that financial performance reflects genuine movement — not just motion.

7. Enable Progress-Driven Business Model Innovation

Because service credits (money) are just one implementation of exchange, the CFO becomes central to business model innovation.

They explore new ways to represent, trade, and recycle effort of service — including:

• Subscription and tokenized access models.
• Dynamic pricing based on progress achieved.
• Progress-based financing, where Seekers pay as they make measurable progress.
• Internal credit systems that reward employees and partners for enabling others’ progress.

By reengineering how effort and outcomes are exchanged, the CFO helps the organization align financial innovation with human and customer progress.

8. Embed Progress Literacy in Decision-Making

Finance is often seen as the rational counterweight to vision. In the Progress Economy, the CFO becomes the rational translator of vision — ensuring every leader understands how their choices affect both financial and progress outcomes.

That means teaching progress literacy to all budget owners, equipping them to:

• Identify progress multipliers rather than cost centers.
• Evaluate trade-offs through the lens of hurdles and enablement.
• See spending as investment in future progress velocity.

In short, the CFO ensures that money speaks the language of movement across the organization.

10. Redefine Financial Stewardship as Progress Stewardship

The CFO’s ultimate responsibility is stewardship — but not only of capital.
In the Progress Economy, stewardship expands to include the stewardship of collective progress: ensuring that the organization’s pursuit of progress does not create regress elsewhere — socially, environmentally, or emotionally.

That means embedding ethical progress principles into investment criteria, supply chain design, and risk management frameworks.

True financial leadership becomes the art of sustaining forward motion without leaving damage in its wake.

Introducing progress owners

Remember we touched on updating Drucker’s definition of a firm when we discussed innovation to

the purpose of a firm is to obtain service exchanges, as such, it has 3, and only 3 key functions: marketing, innovation, and execution

An implication of this is that firms should have a progress owner. This role is a supercharged “product owner” that you may already be familiar with. They should be responsible for the triad of functions in the definition above, that is:

• understanding Seekers’ evolving progress origin/sought (marketing)
• improving Seekers’ progress (innovation and sales)
• executing progress proposition(s) (execution)

In smaller organisations this is the CEO, larger organisations may have several progress owners, one for each distinct proposition offered.

Why this matters