CX Methods
Define the future state before you brainstorm
Never brainstorm fixes until you have defined what easy, fast, and hard-to-get-wrong looks like for the journey.
Most journey workshops map the current state and jump straight to fixes. Without a defined future state, ideas get judged by volume and seniority instead of a shared bar. Defining the target first turns a wall of sticky notes into a disciplined investment case.
The familiar scene: a team maps the customer journey, the wall fills with sticky notes, and someone says, 'So, ideas?' Brainstorming starts with no definition of success. Every idea sounds plausible, the loudest voice wins, and the output is a scatter of fixes nobody can rank. The missing step is the future state: a written, agreed description of what easy, fast, and hard-to-get-wrong actually means for this journey, set down before a single solution is proposed. That target is the pivot between diagnosis and design.
Why it matters to the business
The gap between mapping and action is where journey work dies. Gartner's 2021 Customer Experience Management Survey found 83% of organizations struggle to use journey maps to identify and prioritize CX efforts. A map describes problems; only a target lets you rank solutions. And ranking matters, because journeys carry real money: McKinsey's journey research found that in insurance and pay TV, a one-point gain on a ten-point journey-satisfaction scale matched at least a three-percentage-point higher revenue growth rate, and that the three journeys that matter most drive over a quarter of total satisfaction. A defined future state is what connects workshop energy to those outcomes.
How to use it
- Map the current journey from customer research, then stop before anyone pitches a fix.
- Write the future state as testable statements: what easy, fast, and hard-to-get-wrong means at each stage.
- Get the target signed off by the people who own the budget, so the bar is shared before ideas exist.
- Generate ideas against the target: every idea must name the gap it closes.
- Convert the survivors into a prioritized opportunity list with owners, dates, and dollars at stake.
Where teams get it wrong
Teams treat the workshop as the deliverable. Brainstorming energy feels like progress, so ideas get judged by enthusiasm instead of against a target. Months later the map is wall decoration, the ideas are unfunded, and the journey is unchanged, because nothing ever had a bar to clear.
Ask your team
- For our most important journey, can anyone show me the written future state we are designing toward?
- How do we decide which journey fixes get funded: against a target, or by who argues hardest?
- What happened to the ideas from our last journey workshop?
A map tells you where you are. Only a target tells you which ideas matter.
Apply this
Reading about define the future state before you brainstorm is one thing. Seeing where it applies in your journey is the useful part.