It’s time to hire ecosystem engineers. Experiences can’t work without them.

Every customer and employee experience is created by a complex ecosystem of technology, data, teams and processes designed to meet needs that have been defined by a variety of evolving influences. They grow organically over time, dispersed over different teams who have different goals and motivations. They are complex and messy, which is why, in part, transformations struggle to deliver against expectations 70–80 per cent of the time. Every change has a systematic impact, so to beat the odds, organisations need people who can engineer entire experience ecosystems, not just one part of them.

Ecosystem engineers are a natural phenomenon

The term ‘Ecosystem engineer’ was coined by Jones et al. (1994) to describe an organism that shapes ecosystems and habitats. Earthworms create tunnels that change the oxygen and water in the soil and create space for roots, just as bettongs, potoroos, bilbies, bandicoots and echidnas also improve soil health and sometimes water filtration. Beavers impact water distribution by building dams and creating ponds. In Africa, the sociable weaver bird (Philetairus socius) builds large, compound, communal nests for other birds and small tree dwellers, while providing shade and shelter for larger animals (the inspiration for a joint venture of my own, Sociust).

Ecosystem engineers are mutualistic, meaning that the benefits they provide to the ecosystem benefit them and the ecosystem equally. Mutualism is also central to a healthy and functional organisation. It relies on cooperation and the pooling of complementary skills and resources for the mutual benefit of all and the ecosystem as a whole.

Experience ecosystems — the ecosystems that enable organisations to deliver customer and employee experiences — need engineers that know how to collaborate to orchestrate disparate experience components together. Not swathes of people battling it out, just a small collaborative team of whip smart service designers, architects, strategists and analysts whose purpose is to map and illustrate ecosystems as a team, before diagnosing where to focus for the highest impact. They are the best chance organisations have of ensuring the entire ecosystem will work even better than before. Every organisation needs them but like the ecosystem engineers of the natural world, they can only thrive when the habitat they exist in allows them to.

Create a habitat for Experience Ecosystem Engineering

If you want to get started with experience ecosystem engineering, do these 4 things:

1. Enable a small team of systems thinkers who have the skills to research, map and diagnose people, processes and technology connections, while also knowing how to create combined maps and diagnostics. Easiest place to start is a combination of experienced Service Designers + Enterprise Architects + Ops strategists with decent visualisation and mapping skills.
2. Give them access to all the information they need with candour and honesty, and expect to invest in research. They will also need the authority to bypass political barriers. If they have to spend all their time just trying to access information they can’t do their jobs.
3. Be prepared to address complex issues about how you operate, as well as overruling individualists who don’t value the ecosystem above themselves. If you are only prepared to implement a tiny change to one part of your business, your evolution will only be temporary. This is ecosystem engineering after all.
4. Understand how automation, ML and AI could do this better in future, but know that we are not there yet. Highly skilled and creative systems thinkers collaborating is still the best way to engineer experience ecosystems.

There’s no time like the present, and it’s calling for ecosystem engineering.