Well-being emerges through progress
Forget value. It is your well-being you increasingly improve as you seek to make progress towards your progress sought. Discover the actionable model that will accelerate your sales, innovation and growth.
Well-being recognition
Emerged value (through progress) needs to be recognised by a Seeker – in a process akin to revenue recognition – for it to be meaningful to them.
Well-being destruction
Value (improvements in well-being) can be destroyed y one or more actor in the progress attempt hinders progress.
The Progress Economy
your new operational model for innovation and growth
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well-being
When we argue that value is a less than optimal unit of strategy for our modern world, what should we use instead?
From creating value to improving well-being
I’ve argued that value is sub-optimal as the unit of strategy. Even a shift in model thinking from value-in-exchange to value-in-use (or -in-context) still leaves issues.
Identifying a better unit of strategy is a journey of understanding what the concept(s) of value have been pointing towards all along.
First Christian Grönroos’ observed that customers do not seek products, services, or even experiences for their own sake. Rather, they seek to become better off.
Value for customers means that after they have been assisted by a self-service process (cooking a meal or withdrawing cash from an ATM) or a full-service process (eating out at a restaurant or withdrawing cash over the counter in a bank) they are or feel better off than before.
Grönroos, C. (2008). Service logic revisited: who creates value? And who co-creates?”. European Business Review 20(4) pp 298-314
Service-dominant logic follows a similar line of reasoning. Vargo and Lusch argue that value creation is ultimately concerned with improving the well-being of actors.
Value creation is ultimately about improving the well-being of actors.
Vargo, S. & Lusch, R. (2016). Institutions and Axioms: An Extension and Update of Service-Dominant Logic.
Vargo, Peters, Kjellberg, and Koskela-Huotari re-emphasise value not as something produced or exchanged, but as an emergent change in an actor’s well-being — one that may be positive or negative.
value – an emergent change in the well-being or viability of a particular system/ actor, which can be positively or negatively valanced.
Vargo, Peters, Kjellberg, Koskela-Huotari (2022). Emergence in marketing: an institutional and ecosystem framework; Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 51(4)
Towards a new unit of strategy
These lines of thought allow us to say that adding/creating value is no longer the objective itself. Instead, value becomes a phenomenological assessment of a change that could occur, is occurring, and has occurred.
And, if value is fundamentally a judgement about change, then the phenomenon that strategy, innovation, marketing, and sales should seek to understand is not value itself, but that change and how it is actioned, judged, measured, and felt by the actor(s) affected by the change.
The Progress Economy Perspective
Yet improvements in well-being risks becoming as abstract as creating/adding value. We need a more solid foundation to the phenomenon.
The Progress Economy choses to operationalise changes in well-being through progress: a move over time to a more desired state.
This opens up progress states, progress attempts, progress-making activities, measurements of progress, judgements of progress and other tools. Progress is the change; value the phenomenological assessments before, during, and after the move..
As such, progress should be the preferred unit of strategy.
Progress and changes in well-being are synchronous in nature. But importantly, emerging improvements in well-being need to be recognised by the Progress Seeker for them to be meaningful to them – a process akin to revenue recognition in finance.
