What happens when you combine the best of British design practice with Brazilian heart, Western philosophical insight and timeless Eastern spiritual wisdom? A powerful antidote to the excesses of those business cultures which only value exponential growth at all costs, and which have lost sight of what humanity and being human really means. This pioneering book explains how a whole organisation can come together to evolve an entirely new soulful way of being in the world. It introduces the Holonomic Circle, a new tool which provides a holistic framework for designers, entrepreneurs, leaders, managers and those starting a new business to explore the principles underlying the dynamics of soulful experiences. Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson share in-depth, visionary interviews from entrepreneurs, CEOs, designers, artists and philosophers. Their insights will help you: - take a radically new approach to customer experience design; - fully integrate purpose, goals and strategy with customer experience; - implement human values across the whole organisation; and - develop long-term and more meaningful relationships with your customers. Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design will shift your understanding of design, innovation, strategy, leadership and branding. It provides the guidance needed for developing, structuring and implementing customer experiences with soul, teaching entrepreneurs of the future how to build and grow authentic businesses and organisations which honour what it is to be human in our world.

1. Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design!
Key Extracts!
Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson

2. What happens when you combine the best of British design practice with Brazilian
heart, Western philosophical insight and timeless Eastern spiritual wisdom? A
powerful antidote to the excesses of those business cultures which only value
exponential growth at all costs, and which have lost sight of what humanity and
being human really means.
!
This pioneering book explains how a whole organisation can come together to
evolve an entirely new soulful way of being in the world. It introduces the
Holonomic Circle, a new tool which provides a holistic framework for designers,
entrepreneurs, leaders, managers and those starting a new business to explore
the principles underlying the dynamics of soulful experiences.
!
Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson share in-depth, visionary interviews
from entrepreneurs, CEOs, designers, artists and philosophers. Their insights will
help you:
!
• take a radically new approach to customer experience design;
• fully integrate purpose, goals and strategy with customer experience;
• implement human values across the whole organisation; and
• develop long-term and more meaningful relationships with your customers.
!
Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design will shift your
understanding of design, innovation, strategy, leadership and branding. It provides
the guidance needed for developing, structuring and implementing customer
experiences with soul, teaching entrepreneurs of the future how to build and grow
authentic businesses and organisations which honour what it is to be human in
our world.

3. “The ability to develop customer
experiences with soul means
having the ability to relate from
within, a ‘within’ which must be in
harmony with the essence of the
company. If not, there will be
incoherence between how you
express yourself, what you mean,
and how you act and interact with
those around you.”
Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson!
Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design

4. “Your brand is the collated gut instinct of the
world at large towards your company and
everything you do. This means that you, and
everyone in your business, need to live your
brand. You have to live the values and the
mission, internally and externally, and then let
the customer decide what your brand is about.
Only by being consistent, engaging, open,
honest and congruent can you start to build a
brand in the twenty-first century.”!
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James Watt, BrewDog

5. “The most powerful tool that a business leader has at their disposal is
thinking and the understanding of the relationship between thought,
language and experience. Just as it is important to exercise continually to
keep our bodies healthy, it is equally important to exercise our mental
muscles, continually challenging ourselves to think and see in new ways.”
Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson
Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design

6. “Every single person in an organisation has a role to play in
delivering customer experiences with soul, starting with
those at the very top and the stories they chose to tell.”!
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Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson
Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design

7. “Many people are so comfortable and
rooted in this way of knowing reality
that they are unable to engage in any
meaningful dialogue, being so sure of
the ‘facts’, and that their version of
‘reality’ is the true one and nothing
else possibly could be.”
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Simon Robinson and
Maria Moraes Robinson
Customer Experiences with
Soul: A new Era in Design

8. “In most working environments we
do not often think about why it is that
we have the experiences which we
do, and how we participate in reality
and interpret the world. By taking
this more philosophical approach to
customer experience design, we can
ask questions such as ‘is there an
objective reality out there waiting to
be discovered?’ or ‘do we each
inhabit a subjective reality with no
meaning?’ If we are to really
understand customer experiences
and how customers are interpreting
our products, services and brands,
we need to develop new organs of
perception, and explore the way in
which language and reality belong
together.”

9. “If we stick to traditional methods of describing the customer experience,
we end up with an objectified description of experience. We need to be able
to make the subtle shift into the experience of what is experienced, the
seeing of what is seen, or the saying of what is said. We need to be able to
shift our attention into the place where the world appears.”
Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson
Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design

10. “By complementing an empirical
approach to product and service design
with this phenomenological approach,
we can discover that on occasions what
makes the difference between a good
experience and an exceptional
experience, which can often be found in
one small detail. !
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For example, no matter how good the
other aspects of a hotel may be, one
detail which can leave a lasting
impression is the feeling we get from
starting our day with a great cup of
coffee. This may seem like a trivial
point, but there is something significant
to learn about customer experience
design. !
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Sometimes we can find a phenomenon,
such as the coffee in a hotel, which
contains the whole essence of the
brand, the company, the values, the
experience as a whole; and when we
find this archetypal experience, it is
worth a thousand less archetypal
experiences.”

11. “When the five universal human
values of peace, truth, love,
righteousness and non-violence are
present in an organisation,
relationships between customers and
brands become more solid, wisdom is
developed, people are able to make
better choices, and lives become
happier. Human values improve
relationships between each individual
in an organisation, team, network or
ecosystem. Leaders must stimulate
the spirit of learning within teams,
with clients, partners along the value
chain, and principally, with
themselves.”!
Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson
Customer Experiences with Soul: A new Era in Design

12. “Living the human values allows us to more fully understand the underlying
reasons for someone’s behaviour and why that person is acting in any
particular way. When you live the human values, you can see more about a
situation. If someone manifests behaviour in a way which we do not expect and
our lives do not have the grounding which the human values provide, we do not
know what to do or how to respond.” !
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Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson!
Customer Experiences with Soul: A new Era in Design

13. “The five universal human values of peace, truth, love, righteousness and non-
violence form one of the key pillars of Holonomics. When these human values are in
place, there is much less reliance on rules, bureaucracy and control, allowing
organisations become agile, resilient and sustainable, being better able to evolve as
changes in the environment demand. No matter what life may throw at us, with
human values operating we are all able to align ourselves behind a single vision; we
are valued as human beings, and solutions can emerge naturally, as and when they
are needed.”!
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Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson
Customer Experiences with Soul: A new Era in Design

14. “Holonomics is such a powerful approach to
customer experience design because it fully
integrates artistic vision and consciousness into our
conception of how we make sense of the world, how
we explain our place in the world and how we relate
to others, both other people and our environment.”
Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson
Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design

15. “We have become out of balance, and
our thinking has become dominated by
the left brain way of seeing, especially
in Western economies. In the modern
business world, dominated by
technology, ‘thinking’ is valued above
all other ways of knowing the world.
This is the logical, rational and
symbolic way of thinking which gives
us a sense of separation from the
world.”
Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson
Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design

16. “Through experiential training we can
learn to develop an expanded mode of
consciousness, a deeper way of
seeing which has monumental
implications for creativity,
communication, leadership, strategy,
innovation, in fact every single
dimension of organisational life. With
this expanded level of consciousness
the dichotomy between hard and soft
begins to dissolve as the whole
organisation shifts into a focus on the
quality of relationships, developing a
higher purpose, longevity, qualitative
success metrics and a more systemic
view of life.”
Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson
Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design

17. “Those leaders who are capable of
developing organisations which deliver
customer experiences with soul have
found a balance in the four ways of
knowing and fully utilise all of their
faculties of knowing; thinking, feeling,
sensing and intuition. We call these
four ways of knowing the ‘holonomic
operating system’. Holonomics
explores this mental operating system
in depth, explaining what this means
both for our own ways of
understanding the world, and also in
terms of the implications for the
design, implementation and
communication of customer
experiences with soul and of
sustainable brands.”

18. “Martial artists, sports people and
musicians (to name just a few
disciplines) see no separation between
mastery and practice. There is a degree
of self-awareness that allows athletes
and artists to continually monitor their
actions and performance. In many
corporate environments this sense of
what mastery means is missing, and so
the battles are ones of clashing egos
rather than valiant efforts.”
Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson
Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in Design

19. “Leaders in an organisation must continually balance both order and chaos,
since too much control leads to an oppressive environment where creativity is
stifled, but too much chaos on the other hand leads to collapse.”

20. “As we move into our networked age, we hear a lot
about co-creation, the collaborative economy, the
networked economy, conscious innovation and
conscious capitalism. However, simply introducing
words like ‘co-creation’, ‘network’ and ‘collaborative’
is not enough. The reason is ego, and it is ego which
results in counterfeit knotworks instead of authentic
networks.”!
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Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson
Customer Experiences with Soul: A New Era in
Design

21. “Humility is one of the most powerful personal qualities
we can possess. When we are humble, we have an ability
to see. We are able see more, literally. We see the
patterns, the causes, the motivations and ego which
drives a person’s behaviour, patterns which sometimes
they themselves cannot see or are not aware of. When all
our actions and desires come from an expanded level of
consciousness, we act from a place that has the desire to
benefit the whole – a whole group, a whole team, a whole
family, a whole organisation, a whole tribe, a whole
society, a whole planet.”!
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22. “The most disruptive word you can use in
innovation is ‘soul’. A customer
experience with soul is a sacred
experience which honours what it is to be
human in our world. Entrepreneurs of the
future will be those who disclose new
ways of being in the world, which
reconnect us to the sacred.”!
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Simon Robinson and Maria Moraes Robinson
Customer Experiences with Soul:
A New Era in Design