Value Propositions Where People and Planet Matter

1st June 2015
Simon Robinson
Value Propositions Where
People and Planet Matter

© Holonomics Education 2015
holonomics.co.uk
The business of business isn’t just about creating proﬁts for
shareholders — it’s also about improving the state of the world
and driving stakeholder value.
!
The declaration above comes from Marc Benioff, Chairman
and CEO of Salesforce, writing in a recent article in The
Hufﬁngton Post (source). And as Steve Denning notes, a
commentator who has been writing about this theme for a long
while now, while the concept of stakeholder value remains the
conventional wisdom throughout much of big business,
“What’s different now is that a consensus is forming around a
better idea”
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

holonomics.co.uk
Wishing to open up a dialogue about stakeholder value, The Aspen Institute in their study
Reopening the Question of Corporate Purpose offered these four questions:
!
• How do we define “long term” and “value creation”?
• How can we describe the real world complexity of business while capturing our aspirations for
corporations?
• When it comes to purpose, does one size fit all? If not, how do we define the roles and
responsibilities of business leaders? How and what do we teach business students?
• How do we achieve accountability?
!
These are excellent questions, and a real indication that we are moving from a primarily financial
and shareholder-focused view of business to a values-based business. However, this shift is by
no means simple for people make, since it requires an entirely new mindset, a shift from
economics to holonomics – where people and planet matter. This shift is central to our book
Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter, in which we introduce the Holonomics
platform.

holonomics.co.uk
The Dynamics
of Seeing
The Dynamics
of Nature
The Dynamics
of Business
Human
Values
The Holonomics Platform

holonomics.co.uk
In executing any profound transformational strategies or implementing
change programmes, before we can introduce new business models we
require a systems view of the organisation. However, this systems view
can not be mechanistic or Cartesian, since any attempt to introduce the
new business model (and value proposition) will still be articulated and
understood using the old logic, and therefore are likely to fail.
!
Holonomic Thinking inspires new strategies by helping executives to
upgrade their mental operating systems and developing a dynamic new
way of seeing the whole organisation:
!
Systemic – Understanding the organisation as an organic and dynamic
system of interrelated organs.
!
Experiential – Understanding the lived experience of each person –
employees, management, leadership, stakeholders and the community.
!
Meaning – Understanding how shared meaning emerges in the
organisation over time, allowing the organisation to be able to become
agile, efﬁcient and transparent – an authentic whole.
!
Ethical – Understanding how human values are the foundation of
authenticity, agility and change
!
These four components – systemic, experiential, meaning and values –
are exactly what is required to develop future sustainable business
propositions.
Como transformar estratégias e
resultados por meio de um novo
sistema operacional mental.
Maria Moraes Robinson e
Simon Robinson
HOLONOMICTHINKING
82 Harvard Business Review Abril 2014

holonomics.co.uk
So now having made this central point that future value
will only be authentically developed in organisations who
are able to both transform and develop a higher level of
consciousness, I thought I would take a look at two books
which focus on Value Propositions, what they are and how
they are created; the recently published Value Proposition
Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers
Want by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory
Bernarda, Alan Smith and Trish Papadakos, and Creating
and Delivering Your Value Proposition: Managing
Customer Experience for Proﬁt by Cindy Barnes, Helen
Blake and David Pinder.
!
In order to understand the strengths of these two books, I
thought I would start with a brief history lesson, in order to
take a look at the manner in which organisations
described their value propositions prior to the
development of a more visual approach and the utilisation
of business canvasses.

holonomics.co.uk
The picture above shows the front page for the Gate
0 template used at Genie and BT Cellnet (I will
assume that readers are familiar with phase – gate
innovation processes). The document was written as
part of the larger project to develop Genie into a
global entertainment portal. I thought it had
historical interest due to showing how mobile
networks and portals were developing their music
propositions prior to the watershed moment when
Apple entered the fray.

holonomics.co.uk

holonomics.co.uk
As you can see from the template, all the major elements
of the value proposition, the customer experience and the
nascent business case ﬁnancials have to be in place,
even at Gate 0.
!
In 2004 Alex Osterwalder, in his thesis The Business
Model Ontology: A Proposition in a Design Science
Approach proposed that a business model consisted of
nine key pillars. Following this work, in 2008 Osterwalder
proposed a business model canvas (source), which is a
visual chart for describing a business model.
!
There can be no doubting the incredible impact that the
concept of the visual business model canvas had across
the world, introducing in one simple chart a visualisation
of a proposition which could facilitate more holistic
understanding across organisational bunkers. Although of
course the Business Model Canvas does feature the
concept of value proposition, if an organisational or
group-wide mental model is one focused on stakeholder
value, no matter what the tool, the thinking will be focused
on this and not customer value generation.

holonomics.co.uk
It has therefore been excellent to see the launch of
Osterwalder and gang’s new book Value Proposition
Design, in which the Value Proposition Canvas is
introduced. The Value Proposition Canvas has two sides;
the Customer Profile which articulates the manner in
which the customer is understood and the Value Map
which describes value is created for that customer. The
idea is that the organisation achieves a fit between the
two.
!
Many criticisms of the work of Osterwalder and the team
behind this work is that it is obvious, and only really
suited to people who have not worked in the area of
business model development of value proposition
development. I am slightly schizophrenic in that while I
do have one foot in this camp, it is quite obvious from the
success of the many thousands of workshops and
lectures given by Osterwalder himself to senior
executives that despite reaching their positions in their
businesses they have clearly benefited from this as a
tool.

holonomics.co.uk
Despite being the very people who should live and
breath customer value, their elevated positions have
taken them far from their customers and the daily lived
experience of their customers, meaning they have lost
sight of what makes a company great. What Value
Proposition Design has done is to provide a new level of
granularity, allowing people to now zoom in and out of
their conceptualisations of value, in a way in which is now
truly powerful and beneﬁcial.
!
If I was introducing students to the concept of business
models and value propositions for the very ﬁrst time,
there is no question that the best place to start than
Business Model Design and Value Proposition Design.
However, one quite major element still missing, and this is
an element I think they should address in future work, is
the creation of the business case.
!
Business cases are technical, hard, they require the
participation of the organisation’s management
accountants, and in an uncertain world, have to provide
revenue, costing, and return on investment predictions
across time scales which are measured in years and not
months. I have seen people create business models with
no business case, and this is where the rubber hits the
road so to speak, and separates well-conceived and fully
comprehensive models from the incomplete.

holonomics.co.uk
Creating and Delivering Your Value Proposition was
published in 2009, and starts by looking at three
different approaches to value creation. The first is the
inside-out approach, where the attitude of the business
is “here’s our offering. Take it or leave it.” The second is
outside-in, where the attitude of the customer is “I want
what I want. If it bankrupts you, it’s your problem.”
!
Neither of these approaches are sustainable in the long
term. The third approach taken by the authors is the
value-focused approach.
!
In this simple diagram the authors capture the essence
of a sustainable business model. The proposition has to
work both in terms of customer needs, and the financial
needs of the business. From a holonomic perspective,
and the perspective of social or conscious business
models, when the definition of us expands beyond
shareholders to stakeholders, both people and planet,
then we have an authentic value proposition that has an
authentic level of value, including what I have termed
holonomic brand value.

holonomics.co.uk
There are two excellent elements to Creating and Delivering Your Value Proposition that make it both
stand out from books on a similar theme, and which also allow it to complement and dovetail nicely with
Value Proposition Design. The ﬁrst is that not only does it explore in detail what a value proposition is,
what is expertly provides in detail is the Value Proposition Builder™, a step-by-step process required to
develop and implement a value proposition in practice.
!
The second aspect of Creating and Delivering Your Value Proposition which is somewhat more subtle,
but extremely powerful, is the insight that “a value proposition is not what you do. It is the value
experience you deliver”. As the author’s point out, before you can step into another’s shoes, you have to
take off your own. Therefore we end up with the conclusion that “the real power of value proposition
thinking is in the process”.

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Stepping into another’s shoes is also one of the focal exercises in Value Proposition Design, as they
describe in this exercise.

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What this means is that while many talk of business
ecosystems, thus breaking out of the straitjacket of
shareholder value, these new concepts are often discussed in
a Cartesian manner, meaning that both the customer
experience itself, as well as these processes of developing
customer value, become codified. But when you go into the
act of seeing itself, you develop a sensitivity to the lived
experience of others, you discover how your own way of
conceiving what to you may be quite obvious and solid and
shared experiences, are anything but. And on the other hand,
you discover that when you explore the lived experience of
others, you not only differentiate other’s experiences to your
own, you also at one and the same time, relate.
!
Our business models become holonomic when we discover
their intrinsic wholeness. The customer experience is no
longer merely quantified using traditional measures, but also
quantified, as each and every person in an ecosystem comes
to develop a shared understanding and meaning.

holonomics.co.uk
!
“We are looking for what I would call a new
trinity, a "soil, soul, society" philosophy -
soil for the environment, soul for the
spiritual dimension, and society for the
social justice that is essential.”
!
Satish Kumar

holonomics.co.uk
Now that Holonomics has been available for a few months, it has been brilliant for Maria and I to hear
from many different readers with many different backgrounds, including people from the areas of
sustainability, social enterprises, consultancy, innovation, banking and many more. We have heard
how Holonomics has inspired people to develop their own new and exciting business models, to help
develop unify organisations while not losing diversity, and to help implement new strategic plans and
transformational change management programmes.
!
What Holonomics is doing is fermenting within people a new dynamic way of understanding
experience, and when this new understanding is then combined with the excellent tools and
processes within Value Proposition Design and Creating and Delivering Your Value Proposition, the
outcome is a new conception of future value generation, where people and planet matter.
!
These are exciting times for those developing more conscious business models for a new
consciousness which as we speak is being born amid so much confusion, corruption and competition
born of ego. I can strongly recommend both books, as they will help those of you with wonderful ideas
progress to the point where you prototype, test and then really grounding them in a manner which has
lasting and effective impact.
!
I wish you all the very best of luck in your ventures developing sustainable future value for our future
generations.

Simon Robinson
!
Simon Robinson is the founder of Holonomics Education, a consultancy
which helps organisations to think and innovate differently, allowing the
development of high value customer experiences, the development of
powerful and effective strategies, and of meaningful and sustainable brands.
!
Simon is an international keynote speaker at innumerable conferences
including Sustainable Brands, London and San Diego and TEDx
Florianópolis. He was one of the co-founders of the world’s ﬁrst mobile
internet portal, Genie Internet, which received many media awards for
innovation, and has been a developer of cutting-edge innovations in
technology and new media at BT, O2 and Digital Bridges. He is the editor of
the blog www.transitionconsciousness.org and is a Harvard Business Review
Brasil author.
!
!
Maria Moraes Robinson
!
Maria Moraes Robinson is an internationally recognised expert and keynote
speaker in strategy, change management, sustainability, human values and
the Balanced Scorecard methodology. Recent conferences she has
presented and run workshops at include Sustainable Brands, San Diego and
London, and Harvard Business Review Brasil summits on both Corporate
Education and Leadership, and she is a published author in Harvard
Business Review Brasil.
!
As a business consultant Maria has helped to introduce Kaplan and Norton’s
Balanced Scorecard methodology into Brazil across many sectors including
telecoms, technology, petrochemicals, steel, energy, transportation and
education. Her current work is focused on developing innovative new
business courses which integrate insights from the Indian programme
Human Values in Education and complexity science, with business strategy,
change management, sustainability and organisational redesign.
Contact Information!
!
www.holonomics.co.uk (English)
www.holonomics.com.br (Portuguese)
www.holonomics.org (book)
www.transitionconsiousness.org (blog)
@srerobinson (Twitter)
@DoraMoraesR (Twitter)

Value Propositions Where People and Planet Matter

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