Progress Helpers | The Progress Economy

What we’re thinking

Progress Helpers offer progress propositions: supplementary capabilities intended to help a Seeker make better progress than they could achieve alone. The are attempting to reduce a Seeker’s capability hurdle.

These supplementary capabilities have been created, discovered, developed by the Helper when solving their own lack of capability (or by transfer from another Helper in training, etc).

When a Seeker engages a proposition, the Helper effectively becomes a temporary employee during the progress attempt. The Helpers role may also be as a facade into a service system, co-ordinating various Helpers to offer a more complete scope to the Seeker’s progress journey.

Helpers may judge progress from their perspective, choosing to withdraw access to their capabilities if they see low potential to complete a service exchange (we don’t all get to test drive super cars). Although, conceptually, the Seeker remains the primary judge of progress.

Importantly, Helpers are themselves Seekers. Their purpose in offering a proposition is not just to enable a Seeker’s progress. They wish to gain access to capabilities they lack for their own progress journeys. They are looking for an exchange. Additionally, helping a Seeker may fulfil a Helper’s progress sought such as gaining customer insights.

Why this matters

Helpers are a natural consequence of the basic human interest in making better progress.

The uneven distribution of capabilities across actors, and that every actor is fundamentally a Seeker, are the driving powers behind economic activity.

What are HelperS?

Progress helpers are the heroes in The Progress Economy.

They can be an individual, or an organisation. Sometimes they are a facade to an ecosystem of helpers. Consider a modern retail organisation. It acts as a facade to payment, warehousing, and distribution/delivery helpers. Here the organisation acts as a ‘value network architect’ (Lusch et al., 2010: Service, Value Networks and Learning) or a value network’s ‘prime integrator’ (Lusch et al. (2007)).

If we open up an organisation we find a number of internal helpers (finance, hr, it, legal etc) contributing to the operation of the organisation. Some of these may be outsourced to, or augmented by, other Helper organisations.

What do they do?

A Helper offers supplementary capabilities, in the form of a progress proposition, aiming to enable Seekers to make better progress than the Seeker can on their own.

They offer to help a Seekr reach a state of progress offered from an assumed progress origin. Seeker’s compare those to their current progress origin and progress sought and this contributes to their phenomenological judgement of the proposition’s value to them.

Part of the proposition is a proposal on who performs the proposed progress-making activities. That can range between fully Seeker performed to fully Helper performed. The Helper is effectively a temporary employee of the Seeker for the duration of the progress attempt.

Sometimes the Helper freezes their capabilities (or some go them) into a goods for distribution in time and space. In such cases, the Seeker is usually performing the progress-making activities using the goods. The Helper is still effectively an employee..

How do they arise?

Helpers have overcome the capability hurdle for a specific progress journey – and choose to offer those hard-won new capabilities (skills, knowledge, physical (like strength) or abstract (like time)), to others as progress propositions,

They may have overcome that hurdle through:

personal trial and error as a seeker
deliberate efforts to improve progress
training (knowledge/skill) transfer from other helper

The purpose of a progress helper

A Helper offers their supplementary capabilities because they are lacking capability in other progress they are Seeking. They wish to enact an exchange of the application of capabilities (aka service).

Understanding the dynamics of the progress economy as service exchange enables us to understand the simple purpose of a progress helper. Peter Drucker famously said:

the purpose of a business is to create a customer – as such it has two, and only two, functions: innovation and marketing.
Drucker, P. F. (1954) “The Practice of Management”

We can interpret this in the progress economy terminology.

the purpose of a Progress Helper is to attract direct or indirect equitable service exchanges in pursuit of their own progress sought – as such a progress helper has two, and only two, functions:
marketing – continuously discovering seekers’ evolving progress sought and origins
innovating – continuously improving progress offered and progress origin to close that gap [and minimise six progress hurdles]