#168 Smart Leaders. Stalled Change. Here's Why.

Smart leaders. Stalled change. Here's why: most leadership teams say they "support" customer experience — but support isn't the same as action.

It's been over a dozen years since "Outside In" was written and Megan Burns shared the six CX disciplines as their working model.

I was curious about what has changed since those days - what would she include today that wasn't in the book.

In this episode, we dig into why "we need leadership support" is the wrong ask, what actually moves change forward (funding, policy shifts, real decisions), and why that truth exists alongside a harder one: leadership support is genuinely difficult to earn, and change leaders still need a real strategy to get it.

We go behind the scenes of the 6 Disciplines customer experience maturity model from Outside In — why it was built on behavior instead of attitude, and which disciplines companies most often fake their way through (customer understanding, governance, and culture top the list). We also unpack engagement strategy: how to find the "power core" inside an organization, build coalitions, and win the small battles that make bigger change possible. And we close with the one question every CX leader should ask before diagnosing any gaps: what are we already doing right?

Show Notes

🔗 Episode 41 — How Do We Activate Employees to Deliver Consistently Good, Strategically Amazing Experiences? https://bit.ly/4gUlJWB
📖 Book: Outside In https://amzn.to/4xcilMJ
🔗 Connect with Megan Burns https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganburns/
🔗 CX Index — Forrester https://www.forrester.com/research/cx-index/

Topics covered:

• Why "leadership support" is the wrong ask — and what real action looks like
• The paradox: support is hard to get, but that can't become the excuse for inaction
• Building an internal engagement strategy: finding the "power core" and building coalitions
• The origin story of the 6 Disciplines maturity model (built at Forrester, 2010)
• Why "behavior, not attitude" was the core design principle
• The 6 disciplines: Strategy, Customer Understanding, Measurement, Design, Governance, Culture
• Where companies most often perform "superficially" (and think they're excelling)
• Why leadership and change management were intentionally left out of the original model — and what Megan would do differently today
• The one diagnostic question to ask before any CX gap analysis