Rick Denton (00:19)
Hey there, CX Passport listeners. Today we're heading to Norway for the very first time. Y'all know how much I love getting to hear perspectives from a new country. Joining me is Helga Tenna, introduced to me by Michelle Stevens back in episode 227. Helga's path in CX, it didn't start with a traditional customer experience role. It was actually running workshops where people talked about change.

but no one could really define what was changing. That line of thinking kept pulling him back to the human at the center of it all. In his work, Helga has focused on helping organizations shift their mindset from product first to customer first. It's about moving that conversation from customers buying products to customers solving needs. And when he's not thinking about how companies can connect with customers, Helga is out on the trails running 50

K's alongside his ultra runner wife. I don't know about you, but the idea of running that far is just blows my mind. I'll stick to the shorter distances and let Helga handle the ultras. Helga, welcome to CX Passport.

Helge Tennø (01:30)
Thank you very much Rick for having me.

Rick Denton (01:32)
It really does blow my mind about the 50K. So I will try not to be overly distracted by that. It shows me the discipline and the just the endurance that you have. And endurance is something we definitely need when we're talking about change and we're talking about workshops and we're talking about customer experience. So take me back to those days and those early workshops when people were talking about change, but no one could actually explain what was changing. How did that shape the way you think about the human at the center of transformation?

Helge Tennø (01:34)
⁓ The same.

Yeah.

So, so to me, it's, it's all about problem solving and identifying like, what is the reason for this thing happening in the first place? And, and as you mentioned, I was doing this workshop or participating in these workshops where people were talking about change and nobody could figure out what was the change. So I thought business opportunity, let's help them figure out what the change is tangibly so they can fix it then.

Everything I kind of ventured into I ended up in the same place. I came back to that human at the center of things. So the natural thing to do is not to stop with human of course, is to figure out what motivates these human beings. And that's when I ventured into anthropology and ethnography. I came across Madsbjörk and Red Associates.

Rick Denton (02:43)
Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (02:53)
Madsberg had written an HPR article called When an Anthropologist Enters a Bar. It had a huge impact on me. And he published a book called Sense Making. I remember it had a massive influence. It's always a quest to find out what gets this whole thing started.

Rick Denton (03:06)
Mm-hmm.

You heard me chuckle on what tripped me up there. Walk me through some of that anthropology piece of it. I mean, it's been a couple hundred episodes, but I don't remember talking about anthropology specifically. How did that play into how you started reshaping what you did then and even what you're doing today?

Helge Tennø (03:32)
Yeah. So anthropology, there's like two versions of it. It's like the old one, old classic one, which you kind of are familiar with. I didn't venture too far into that stuff. That's a deep rabbit hole. But then there are a lot of anthropologists. they call it ethnography now. So it's kind of, there's kind of nuances of it.

Rick Denton (03:39)
Mm.

Okay.

Yes, okay.

Helge Tennø (03:52)
And I remember specifically reading a book called Why the World Needs Anthropologists, where a lot of the people are interviewed for that book, a lot of the anthropologists writing for that book, they are doing digital. They are literally looking at these people. I remember there's a Danish anthropologist called Rikke Ulck, and she asked this statement, she's saying she's very frustrated with the use of the term user because it removes everything that makes them human.

we turn them into operators of the tools we produce. And I feel the same about this term called customer. I do use it myself because it is a generalist term that kind of points us in the right direction. But a customer is literally a wallet with a human attached to it. Like its purpose is to purchase something. And so when you go into anthropology, you're like, but why do they become customers in the first place? Well,

Rick Denton (04:32)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (04:49)
they're motivated to achieve something, what drives that motivation? And it's the culture, of course, it's the relationships that influence them, it's the situations they are in, the technologies they use. And it's a beautiful landscape that kind of appears once you break apart that customer box and start looking into this world of understanding human beings and the societies we're a part of.

Rick Denton (05:13)
⁓

I want to get into that why a little bit later. You've already opened my eyes in two areas. One, I did not expect us to talk about anthropology. I did not expect us to say that, you I don't really like the term customer. So forgive me if I continue to use customer because it's habitual for me going forward, but I get the point, right? That a customer, if just that term is a spender, whereas a human has so much more to them. you talk about this phrase,

Helge Tennø (05:22)
Sorry.

I did too.

Rick Denton (05:37)
business design. think that was something that you and I talked about earlier. And it's that blending of the business understanding with customer understanding. And that's not something companies tend to get right. What does it look like in practice when it's done right? And then why do so many companies just simply get this wrong by focusing on one side or the other?

Helge Tennø (05:57)
So I think it's because we silo our expertise. Like when you go to university and study, you can study economics or finance or kind of manufacturing or you can study anthropology. But they're all siloed. But in reality, all these things are the same. Like the world is just one thing. It's not a siloed thing. It's us who decided to break it into parts. So when people venture into the business world, they bring their expertise with them and they can see

Rick Denton (06:01)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (06:25)
what their language allows them to see. Now, specifically the idea behind business design, this comes from ⁓ Roger Martin and the Rotman School of Design. they were the one who marketed it and commercialized it and put it into a usable framework. What made the people in the company where I used to work kind of understand it is when I just drew

Rick Denton (06:28)
Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (06:47)
circles as a one diagram. And one of the circles was business needs, like what is the impact that we desire, and the other circle is customer needs. And you ask the organization, you say this is not for all organizations, but for many organizations you're dependent on your customer to create the impact you want. But the customer isn't going to do what you ask them to do just because you want to.

Rick Denton (06:54)
Mm.

Thank

Helge Tennø (07:14)
They're going to do what they want to do because they are trying to achieve something. And the way people try to achieve something is usually by making an effort. And then to make that effort, they sometimes need to get help. That's when they reach out to companies to get that help. And so that's when they become customers, when they're trying to achieve something. Like our goal is not to...

Rick Denton (07:24)
Right.

Helge Tennø (07:39)
help the customer do whatever they want because most of that stuff is not commercially viable for us. And also we're not supposed to push all the things down on the customer that we want because a lot of that stuff is not very helpful and valuable to them. So our job is to figure out when does the customer needs overlap or align with the business needs. When we drew that circle, that was when people started thinking, ⁓ it's not about charity. It's not about toxicity.

Rick Denton (07:52)
Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (08:08)
It's actually figuring out that sweet spot in the middle. And so that was key that unlocked this motivation in the organization to venture into this world. And then the second thing that we needed to do was that the customer often presents itself as like fussy, messy, soft, emotional data, which is business people don't like that.

Rick Denton (08:18)
Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (08:38)
graphs. They're like hard, simple facts. And so the second thing we needed to do was to figure out what is the data that we can capture and how do we translate it from this messiness that it's where it comes from and into something that's more comfortable for business people to make decisions on. When we did those two things, we started kind of seeing this kind of train moving out from the station.

Rick Denton (09:41)
What I like about that is, you know, we talk about in the CX world, we do talk about, you know, showing the business result and those kinds of things, but you're getting at it, not necessarily from a results perspective, but almost that fundamental just way of thinking perspective, the soft, the messy, along with the tangible and the deliverable. And that thought really starts to resonate. You've definitely pushed some boundaries. Let me use that phrase when it comes to, heck, you even just told me that the definition, that use the word customer, wasn't right.

Helge Tennø (10:05)
Bye.

Rick Denton (10:10)
You've also said, that sometimes the smartest move is to simply just stop talking about CX. But the job is to enable people to do their work, not make them learn our label. How do you reconcile that need, the idea of we're not even going to say CX, we're not going to talk about customer experience, but how do you balance that with the need to still prove customer experience's relevance to the business?

Helge Tennø (10:19)
Yeah.

Yeah. So that is a good question. that's a real story where the problem is that as subject matter experts, we usually see our world, but it's harder to take a step back and see every other world that kind of interacts with our world. And we were working in these cross-functional teams. So I would be the CXR, we would have a data analyst, we would have

Rick Denton (10:49)
Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (11:03)
an agile person and we would have a marketing technology expert and everyone had their own frameworks. Everyone had their own language and their own terminology and our job was to upskill this massive organization into all of these things. But like all of them individually and also together and people weren't coming to work to learn our stuff. They were coming to work to do their own work. So we were just like cognitive overload. And so we thought, well, why are we

Rick Denton (11:20)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Helge Tennø (11:32)
teaching these people that they're doing CX. Like, it doesn't really matter that they know our label. What matters is that they're doing good customer work. we just said, well, our job is to make them do the right thing, not learn the right terms. what we did is that we put all of our kind of capabilities.

into something that they were familiar with, which was the marketing strategy framework. And we didn't tell anyone. And so they were just thinking we're doing marketing. And but there was like a hugely customer centric marketing framework. I don't think we would have been able to do it if we had kind of stood our ground and folded our hands and said, no, everyone's going to know they're doing CX. just that we just people will just shut their

Rick Denton (11:55)
Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (12:19)
kind of blinders down. But it brings me to this other, this other problem that I think we need to solve. Because when I started doing CX-ish kind of issues, it's back in 2010. And back then, like we were like CX, it was at the top of the organization. So the leadership figure, top level leadership figured out that if we can get everyone to align around the same customer,

then we will work better together. Now, that was great. But what happened is that the customer got pushed down, down, down, down, down, operationalized into the organization. Now, 15 years later, there's not like one customer everyone has in common. Everyone has their own customer, even if it's the same person.

Rick Denton (12:59)
Mm-mm.

Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (13:11)
Everyone has their own terminology to describe this person. Everyone has their own data. Everyone has their own methodology. And so now the customer is a divider. It enforces silos instead of putting them together. And I believe one of the reasons why is because we're just very close to just being a tool. And so we need to be disrupted in the same way that other companies and industries and

ways of thinking needs to be disrupted. So this is one of my things that makes me very unpopular is that I'm saying, hang on guys, like are we ripe for disruption? Have we become tools? And that's why we haven't got the influence and we need to like disrupt, not just incrementally improve. We need to disrupt what we're doing in order to get back up there with the main decision makers and have influence.

Rick Denton (13:47)
Yeah.

Yeah.

I think we're seeing that disruption, whether we're asking for it or not in the, in the job turmoil that exists in this particular type of function, however it's labeled customer oriented roles have such a significant job disruption. What does that, if we're going to do what you're describing, what does that look like? you have the magic wand.

Helge Tennø (14:02)
Cool. Yeah.

Rick Denton (14:22)
How do you disrupt this industry?

Helge Tennø (14:25)
So what we did or what I did was that I tried to figure out like what is it that I'm actually doing? Because a customer is like it's an entity, it's a unity. ⁓ but I'm not like, I'm not really good at the human being. What I'm good at is understanding a external force of influence that the company can't control and figure out how that external force of influence influences

Rick Denton (14:47)
Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (14:54)
our business decisions and our impact. It can be a human being. But if you're humble enough and kind of have the tools to kind of figure out the human part, the customer parts, you can also figure out all the other stuff. And then once you figure that out, you see, hang on a minute. You don't really get much better by saying customer centric because the customer is also just one of a lot of influences.

Rick Denton (14:55)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (15:21)
So if you're too customer centric, you can't see the other influences. So we started saying, the customer is not the customer, it's the system is the customer. So we took a step back and we tried to use our kind of expertise in taking this wide angle external lens. We started applying it to the other forces of influence on what creates business impact.

Rick Denton (15:32)
Mm-hmm.

I

Helge Tennø (15:48)
Some people call it systems thinking. I'm not sure the systems thinkers would approve of us, like this was, we just tried to say to think bigger because we felt that what we had become was a little bit too myopic.

Rick Denton (16:10)
Helga, I'm gonna need some time to process what you've said there. My

is blown a bit. So we're gonna take a little break here. We're gonna stop down. We're gonna enter the first class lounge, take a break, have a little bit of fun here as we move through the first class lounge. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Helge Tennø (16:26)
Tokyo. I come back to that country again and again and again. I just, I don't know why, but it's just, I just feel so much better when I'm there.

Rick Denton (16:27)
Yeah.

What a great description. I've had people that want to go to Japan, that have been there, I've been there. I like that description. You just feel better. Absolutely, and I completely agree with that sentiment. What about looking forward? What is a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Helge Tennø (16:58)
So my, I want to go to Bangkok. I don't know why. I don't know if it's a chess song or something else, but I just, that's the, if I have on my list, there's Bangkok on the top of it. That's the place that I really want to see next.

Rick Denton (17:02)
⁓

I really hope not.

Nice.

I have some Thai family members and so we've had the opportunity to go there. Great food. my gosh. Beautiful, wonderful food. So yes, it's on the top of your list for a reason beyond that song. I promise it is. Definitely get there. I mentioned food. What is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Helge Tennø (17:24)
⁓ yeah.

I hope so.

So I'm Norwegian so the food is not, we're not known for our fabulous cuisine. But at the moment I discovered something wild, of online, an online recipe while I was just shopping the simplest type of food. It's a pasta dish with sausage in it and tomato and cream. It's just four ingredients. It's just super simple, but I just can't get enough of it at the moment.

Rick Denton (17:40)
Ha ha.

huh.

What is

it again? Say what it was.

Helge Tennø (18:04)
So, salsiccia is a sausage, it's a sausage type, and then just pasta, and then it's just tomato sauce and some cream in it. But I use that salsiccia, think the salsiccia taste just served me in the right way.

Rick Denton (18:05)
Okay, got it.

you

That sounds really, really,

really good. what is something, well, that you were forced to eat growing up, but you just hated as a kid?

Helge Tennø (18:24)
Yes, true. The only thing my mum told me I didn't have to eat because she could kind of clearly see that this was not... I wouldn't be able to. Was something... It's called bakalau. I don't know if you've heard about it. It's very popular in Norway and very popular in Portugal. I think it's dried fish in a tomato soup sauce with some vegetables and onions and tomato. Not exactly sure, but I just...

Rick Denton (18:48)
Yeah.

Helge Tennø (18:53)
I started crying, I refused to eat it. They put me to bed at five o'clock in the afternoon. I had to stay there until the next day. But she just got it like that. She was, I wasn't playing up. Like generally, I hated it. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rick Denton (18:55)
You

Right. This was real. It's not going in mom. Let me explain.

Yeah. I, nothing you described there sounds like a kid would go, yes, I can't wait to have this. Yeah. Kind of seconds please. Sadly, it is time for us to end that break. have to leave the first class lounge. What is one travel item, not including your phone, not including your passport that you will not leave home.

Helge Tennø (19:14)
Yeah, yeah, give me more!

So you mentioned my running in the beginning and every time I go somewhere and I'll stay there for a night or a morning, I always bring my running shoes and shorts so that I can try to get a short or longer run in the city.

Rick Denton (19:50)
That's something that I've talked about with other guests on CX Passport before as well is that idea of by getting down on ground level, whether you're running or walking, it gives you a totally different flavor of the city than in transportation or staying in a hotel ballroom for a meeting or something like that. You really get a unique flavor of a city. I would love to keep talking travel with you. Trust me, I would like to keep doing that.

Helge Tennø (20:05)
⁓ yeah.

Rick Denton (20:13)
But you've got some other things that I want to learn about and you have talked about and I've seen them, right? We've all seen technology transformations fall absolutely flat. And then later succeed when the customer was part of the story. In your experience, What have you seen when that focus shifts to the needs instead of just products or processes?

Helge Tennø (20:35)
Yeah. So as I came into this giant organization back in 2019 as a part of a digital transformation team. Now, we were not popular, I would say, because we kept kind of like force feeding people on technology. But the problem is that these people that have to use the new technology, they're asked to come in to do the same work in the same way, producing the same output and being measured in the same way.

Rick Denton (21:03)
Mmm.

Helge Tennø (21:03)
you just

have to use new technology to do it. So they don't get it. And so I was part of this cross-functional team with CX and Agile and Analytics and Technology. So we said, well, let's change it. Let's lead with customer. so because if you change the mindset, so simply changes from a product perspective to a customer perspective, you change the language. So people start using different terms.

Rick Denton (21:29)
Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (21:31)
That means that they're going to start asking new questions. Now, once people start asking new questions, they're going to demand new data and this data is going to lead to new insights and that insights is going to lead to them discovering new opportunities. And these opportunities will demand new technologies and to be able to deliver on those technologies, they would need new competencies and new skills and new ways of working. And in order to get all of that done, then you need new measurements.

Rick Denton (21:39)
Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (21:58)
And then once I kind of put it together in that chain, I understand, well, hang on a minute, that's the narrative. Like when you start with the human beings behind your customers and your employees and you change the language and change the questions, they are going to demand the change. You're not demanding them to change. They're demanding from you, the capability builders.

Rick Denton (22:18)
Mmm.

Helge Tennø (22:18)
that you start

giving them the stuff that they need because now they're asking for new things. So that's when I came back to the customer. Customer is the key to kind of unlocking this new demand in the organization. And when we started doing that, it started working.

Rick Denton (22:34)
Yeah,

it's interesting. You're almost, you're getting a little meta there that you're, you're having them focus on their customer. You are by focusing on your customer's needs, they're then now asking you to pull this technology. And, and certainly the idea of being pulled to deliver something rather than pushing it on someone clearly is a way to make that transformation succeed. I like that, that switch. Can we go back to something that you talked about? You talked about that story where you were a small CX team.

Helge Tennø (22:48)
Yeah, yeah.

Rick Denton (23:03)
and you're influencing a larger sort of marketing organization. Can you get real tactical with me? Because I know there's a lot of CX teams, we talked about the job disruption, that are smaller than they were before. Marketing and other organizations continue to maintain their size in many organizations. How can that CX team really tactically get their insights woven into something as big as the large marketing organization?

Helge Tennø (23:27)
Yeah. Hitch it to something bigger. That was our philosophy. So we just went hunting. Like this organization was huge. There was like maybe a hundred different initiatives. Some of them were tiny. Some of them were getting traction. Some of them were hugely kind of visible. And we just thought like, how do we hitch what we know to what's already moved? Like what's already got its stakeholders in place? What's already moving? And like, I

most often in life, we were lucky. Like we had this huge redoing of their marketing strategy for the entire enterprise and they needed to introduce the customer and our team was the team that had kind of done that quite thoroughly over the last five years. So we just leaned in and started working with this team and were lucky enough to hitch our wagon to one of the biggest other wagons in the company.

Rick Denton (24:23)
hitch it to something bigger. could hit stop right now. Folks, if you just listeners, if you want one nugget, there it is hitch it to something bigger. That's such brilliance there. I could stop, but there's actually one more thing that I want to ask you about Helga. Cause you talked about it earlier as well. And I, I let it slip, but I wanted to come back to it. Data marketing knows what customer did. And even not just marketing companies know what a customer did, but often not the why you talked about the why being so important.

Okay, well how? How can we get at that? Why? How do you see companies closing that gap between understanding the what and the why?

Helge Tennø (25:01)
Yeah. So, so the first thing we had to do, you have to unlearn something. And this is probably the hardest part because I think in most organizations, like what you will see is that people make decisions based on the data they have. And they would say, my date, my decisions may be not like perfect because the data is not perfect, but I'm going to make decisions based on the data I do have. And so we went after the data and we told our

Rick Denton (25:19)
Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (25:31)
kind of leaders that we have a customer data gap in this organization. Like literally the data we use every day to make decisions about our customers is product data and channel data. But these are things, these are technologies, they're not human beings. And so we demonstrated this kind of gap between like our channels, which are like channel optimization metrics and understanding human beings. So this was kind of widely accepted, like people had not an issue with that.

Rick Denton (25:41)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (26:00)
It's hard for the people who own the engagement metrics especially to get told that you're not measuring value, you're measuring engagement. But once you get that, you create this gap. You're saying what you used to measure to assume business value, which was engagement, that's not a thing. You created this gap now in the measurement chain. And so what we were lucky enough to do because we had our Venn diagram with customer needs equals business needs.

is that we were able to set up our strategy ⁓ framework based on that. So we asked these simple questions. What is the customer needs that applies to account alliance with our business needs? What is our value proposition to offer value to that need? And what is the behavioral change that leads to business value to behavioral change leads from us bringing them value. So it's a very simple kind of chain of events. So you would measure engagement because you would still measure engagement.

Rick Denton (26:31)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (26:59)
And then you would measure, that engagement bring value to your customers? Now, I'm going to very simple analogy here. So for us, was very, very common that our marketing, like people, physicians would engage with a pharmaceutical company's marketing to learn something like trying to learn about your product or your tasks or something. So learning. we figured out, well, just let's just measure if they're learning then. Let's measure if they're engaging with us, but also let's measure next if they're learning.

Now this is a mindset change because that is not hard to measure. Like that is so easy to measure if people are learning, but we're not doing it. So every learning experience, usually if you go to Coursera or LinkedIn Learning or Maven or wherever, it's an interactive experience, which means we give you the content, then we give you a test. So if we do that, you use the test to figure out

Rick Denton (27:48)
Mm-hmm.

Helge Tennø (27:55)
You don't ask them if they learned something, you use the test to figure out if they were learning. Now, the second thing we found out is that once we learn if they're learning something, know, everyone knows, physicians, they don't have a lot of time, like their time pressure. So they want to learn as fast as possible. So if they can learn something in 30 seconds compared to 30 minutes, that's massively valuable to them. And then you look at how we measure value in terms of engagement. We make the assumption

Rick Denton (28:10)
Yeah.

Helge Tennø (28:25)
that more time equals more value. But when you look at the value measurement of learning and measure time as well, you figure out, it's actually the opposite. They want to stay as short as possible. Shorter is better. So you can find it. You can see clearly how we're kind of messing it up completely by doing too much engagement metrics. Now, once you measure that, yes, they're learning, you want to measure if that learning leads to something of value to the business. So there's a

Rick Denton (28:34)
Wow.

Helge Tennø (28:53)
amplification or a change in behavior and then you measure if this behavior leads to the business value.

Rick Denton (28:59)
You, you saw me like you saw, and if, if listeners, you can't see me, but viewers, can kind of that almost slack jaw, just, Whoa, I hadn't thought of it that way. And exactly that, because how many companies like, man, it's sticky. We're so used to even are the videos. did they watch the a hundred percent of the video or not? No. But did they extract the nugget that mattered to them in the fastest way possible? Awesome. That's the way it should be.

Helga, you can tell that I've learned things already. My mind's been a little bit blown. If folks wanted to get to know a little bit more about you, have their own minds blown or get to know just a little bit more about your views on the overall customer and experience in general, what's the best way for them to...

Helge Tennø (29:40)
So it's always LinkedIn of course. Apart from that, I do publish a lot of too much content, maybe on LinkedIn, on Medium. So I'm at everything new is dangerous at medium.com or dotmedium.com. So that's where I publish most of my stuff. I spend too much time trying to figure out why the world works the way it does and how it should be better. And I need an exhaust pipe. And so I put it on Medium.

Rick Denton (30:07)
I will definitely get those links into the show notes so you can go to LinkedIn or to Helga's medium content, his exhaust pipe, if you will, as you described it. Helga, this has been a delightful conversation. I've learned, I've enjoyed, and I've laughed, and all of those are things that I love in an episode of CX Passport. Helga, thank you for being on CX Passport.

Helge Tennø (30:15)
Yeah, yeah. Suffer.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me, Rick.