The Case for Value Centrism

Replaceable Leadership and Value-Centric Design are the twin pillars of sustainable businesses. You’ve got to design (i) systems the next person can grow, and (ii) businesses that inspire loyalty. Ari's is an optimization practice, mine a cultural one. Together, they help build institutions. Here's more on my method:

In April, we’ll release our next masterclass, Speak Human: How to Inspire Loyalty (and Talk to Machines), which makes the case for value-centric design.

To introduce my organizing idea, a Hierarchy of Organizational Values, Speak Human traces the development of human-centric design from Aristotle’s human-scale architectural principles to Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, culminating in IDEO’s codification of the pillars of Design Thinking.

Speak Human argues that BJ Fogg’s behavioral design equation, Behavior = Motivation X Action X Prompt, represents the terminus of human-centric design — the point at which AI can be trained to give humans whatever they want, whether it’s good for them or not.

As head of Stanford’s Behavioral Design Lab, Fogg and his equation have had as big an impact on this century as Einstein and his e=mc² equation did on the previous one. Depending on who you ask, B=MAP is as important a framework for humanistic psychology as Maslow’s hierarchy, OR it helped a generation of social media and game designers turn us all into addicts. Either way, with AI’s sudden emergence as a Very Present Reality, human-centric design needs a re-think.

Facebook’s algorithm, which provides us with a never-ending stream of Stuff We Like, is the apotheosis of human-centric design, which “seeks to deeply understand users’ needs, behaviors and experiences to create effective solutions catering to their unique challenges and desires.” (IDF)

It is an example of What We Want AI, enabled by advances in behavioral science that can now train a virtual avatar to create a following with fully automated and autonomous content. So, where should What We Want AI be superseded by What We Need AI, and where does human-centric design need to become humanity-centric design?

In Speak Human, I argue that grappling with that question is not simply a moral question, but a marketing one. We live in the Impact Era, powered by a viral, transparent web, where the cost of disruption is all it takes to articulate a better value. It’s no longer enough to provide us with the Look, now a brand needs to Inspire us to lead fearless lives.

In short, Moving humanity forward is the new cost of doing business.

When I began Speak Human, which proposes every organization needs a Hierarchy of Organizational Values, it was a book for business and brand designers. Indeed, the hierarchy came out of a marketing discovery interview I’d honed with two superstar CMOs, with whom I’d co-founded a brand design shop.

As I started to pull together the most critical questions, I discovered they articulated a brand’s most critical values.

What is your purpose? What do you promise customers? Why Now? Where’s the Open Road? What will drive customers to buy? What leads them to return? And, ultimately, how do you capture, and then move a market?

Over time, the 17 Questions Every Brand Needs to Answer became the 17 Values Every Business Needs to Codify.

And here’s where it gets interesting: Those are the same values you need to communicate to a GPT to establish your brand voice.

More on that soon. For more on that, read Driving Meaning With GPTs.

To get notified when Speak Human is available, Click Here.