The Practitioner’s Lab Small Teams Edition
The Designing Customer Experiences with Soul Practitioner’s Lab is an intensive three-session programme, delivered over three weeks, in which you learn how to apply the frameworks from the book to a real customer experience challenge from your own organisation.
It combines expert-led learning with hands-on application. Rather than simply studying customer experience concepts, you bring your own real challenges into the Lab and work through it using the Customer Centricity Strategy Framework, the Holonomic Circle and a suite of practical tools for connecting customer experience with strategy, leadership and organisational transformation.
Working in a small group directly with Simon Robinson, you will diagnose what is really happening in your organisation, explore where and why your customer experience is breaking down, and develop a practical approach for creating systemic change.
In other words, this is where the ideas and frameworks in Designing Customer Experiences with Soul become something you can actually use inside your organisation.
- Bring real customer experience challenges from your organisation or group and work on them throughout the Lab
- Learn how to apply the frameworks and tools from Designing Customer Experiences with Soul
- Work directly with Simon Robinson in a highly interactive small-group environment
- Develop a practical roadmap for connecting CX with strategy, leadership and organisational change
- Every participant receives a private 45-minute 1:1 strategy session with Simon Robinson, focused on their own challenges and how they can apply the learning within their organisation.
The Small Teams Edition
The small teams edition of the Practitioner’s Lab has been created to cater for small groups within organisations, and also groups of individuals who would like to take part by forming their own cohort.
This creates the opportunity to work on shared challenges, build alignment, and apply the frameworks directly within your own context. The format is particularly effective where there is a need to align leadership, strategy, and customer experience across teams.
The Lab is not just aimed at customer experience professionals, It is also ideal for leadership teams wishing to develop more customer centric strategies, pre- and post-sales operational teams and any front or back office professional who works in sales, marketing, business development, customer service, IT, operations or has a leadership position.
What you will experience
The Practitioner’s Lab sits between a learning programme and a strategy workshop.
You will learn the thinking, frameworks and tools behind Designing Customer Experiences with Soul, but you will learn them by applying them to a real challenge from your own organisation.
Following the group sessions, every participant has a private 45-minute 1:1 strategy session with Simon Robinson. This is an opportunity to step away from the group discussion and explore your own perspective, challenges and responsibilities in greater depth. Together, you can examine how the frameworks apply to your particular context, refine your thinking and identify practical next steps.
Across three live sessions, you will move from understanding the challenge, to diagnosing it systemically, to developing a practical response. Between sessions, you will continue the work inside your own organisation. You will then have a private 1:1 strategy session to refine your approach and consider your next steps.
The aim is not simply to leave knowing more about customer experience. It is to leave knowing what you can do differently.
Over three weeks, you will:
- Work on real challenges from your organisation
- Apply the Customer Centricity Strategy Framework (CCSF)
- Translate insight into practical, systemic change
- Receive direct feedback from the author
- Leave with a clear, actionable roadmap
This is where strategy, leadership and customer experience become one system.
You do not need to have read Designing Customer Experiences with Soul before taking part in the Lab. Everything you need will be introduced and explained during the sessions. However, we recommend having a copy of the book available throughout the programme, as it provides additional depth and a useful reference for the frameworks and tools we will be working with.
Who this is for
This lab is designed for:
- Business leaders shaping strategy and transformation
- Customer experience, service and HR professionals
- Change agents and transformation practitioners
- Entrepreneurs, business owners and operators
- Anyone responsible for turning insight into real change
- Organisations wishing to develop customer experience excellence
How it works
A three-week learning loop designed for real transformation:
Week 1 — The Deep Dive (2.5 hours)
You build the foundation.
- The evolution of customer experience
- How experience is truly formed and measured
- Empathy mapping and Leadership Experience (LX)
- Value proposition and brand authenticity
- The Holonomic Circle and the meaning of ‘soul’ in organisations
Between sessions:
You apply an interactive checklist to diagnose core frictions and opportunities
Week 2 — The CX Strategy Lab (2 hours)
You translate insight into strategy.
- The Customer Centricity Strategy Framework (CCSF)
- The role of the customer lifecycle as execution architecture
- The New 4Ps: Platforms, Purpose, People, Planet
- Alignment across teams and functions
- Communication and engagement across the organisation
Between sessions:
You apply the framework to a real problem inside your business
Week 3 — Integration Workshop (1.5 hours)
In this workshop, Simon Robinson will present two real-world case studies which demonstrate how the Customer Centricity Strategy Framework fully integrates with the Holonomic Circle to deisgn the most powerful and transformative customer experiences with soul. In this workshops, you will also have the opportunity to:
- Present your own work
- Receive structured feedback
- Refine your approach
- Learn from others’ real-world challenges
Private 1:1 Strategy Session (45 minutes)
Every participant receives a private 45-minute session with Simon Robinson following the three group sessions.
This is your opportunity to explore the implications of the Lab for your own role and responsibilities, discuss challenges in confidence, and work through how you can put the frameworks into practice within your particular organisational context.
You will leave the session with greater clarity about your own next steps and how you can contribute to the wider changes your group has explored during the Lab.
What you will leave with
By the end of the Practitioner’s Lab, you will leave with more than a certificate. You will leave with clarity.
- You’ll know exactly where your customer experience is breaking down — and why previous attempts to fix it haven’t held
- You’ll have a system-level view of what’s driving the problem, not just its symptoms
- You’ll have worked on a real intervention — something built for your organisation, not a generic template
- You’ll carry a set of working tools you can use the moment you’re back in the room with your team
- You’ll have a roadmap with clear next steps — one you’ve already stress-tested with peers and an expert
- You’ll hold a Practitioner Certificate recognising your commitment to strategic CX leadership
You’ll leave knowing exactly what to change, why it matters, and how to bring others with you.
What participants have said
The Practitioner’s Lab brings together experienced professionals working in customer experience, strategy and organisational transformation. These two reflections show how the Lab can translate into new ways of thinking about and working with customer experience.
“The experience reinforced an important principle: meaningful customer experience improvement requires more than fixing individual touchpoints. It means understanding the processes, relationships, decisions and organizational structures shaping the entire experience.
What I learned through this Practitioner’s Lab will directly influence my CX consulting work, particularly how I help organizations connect customer lifecycle design with process improvement, employee experience and organizational alignment.”
Rosecita L. Jeffers, MBA, CCXP
Experience Intelligence
“It was an invaluable learning experience. A space and an opportunity to discuss and learn the frameworks, tools and reflect on experiences from the author himself.
What interested me the most, in addition to the common CX frameworks, principles and tools, is the profound attention to the Human Connection and the Genuine Intention behind the customer experience design and implementation ecosystem.”
Hatim Bawazir
VX/CX & MarCom Leader
Tools and frameworks included
You will receive:
- The Voice of the Customer Canvas
- Customer Centricity Strategy Framework (CCSF)
- The New 4Ps Canvas
- The Elevated Value Proposition framework
- Customer Lifecycle Canvas
- CEX Strategic Relationships Canvas
- The Empathy Action Plan
- The Employee Lifecycle
- Miro-based working templates
- Holonomic Circle interactive checklist
These are not just concepts — they are working tools used in real transformation programmes.
What do we mean by soul?
Soul in organisations is not a metaphor. It is something your customers already recognise — and your employees already feel — even when neither can put it into words.
It is the difference between an organisation that merely functions and one that feels genuinely alive. Between a brand that performs its values and one that actually lives them. Most organisations have a gap between what they say and what they do. That gap is what people feel in every interaction, every touchpoint, every moment of contact.
The Practitioner’s Lab brings together two things that the best organisations already know are inseparable: the human quality that makes experiences memorable, and the strategic rigour that makes them sustainable. The frameworks you will work with — including the Customer Centricity Strategy Framework — have been developed and implemented across some of the world’s largest businesses and international who have recognised the impact of our unique approach to customer experience design.
This is where you will learn to design experiences that people genuinely love — and build the systems that deliver them, consistently, at scale.
Your instructor
Simon Robinson is one of the world’s original pioneers of customer experience strategy. In 1995, he co-authored what is widely regarded as the first strategic article on the subject — formalising how customer understanding could be connected to competitive advantage at a time when most organisations hadn’t yet imagined the discipline.
Simon co-founded Genie Internet — the UK’s first mobile internet portal — which reached a £1 billion valuation before being acquired by Telefónica. At BT and BT Cellnet, he led innovations that were years ahead of the market: Genie launched its first public services in 1997, more than three years before Vodafone and Vivendi unveiled their rival platform Vizzavi — and by the time Vizzavi was preparing to launch, Genie already had 900,000 registered users.
Among the services he built was G Live Music — one of the world’s first mobile music portals — creating a direct line between artists and fans through their phones, long before streaming or social media made that connection commonplace.
Over three decades, Simon has built one of the most distinctive bodies of work in his field — as a Harvard Business Review author, CMSWire and UX Collective author, global keynote speaker and guest professor at leading business schools in the US and Brazil, and author of four bestselling books: Holonomics: Business Where People and Planet Matter (2014), Customer Experiences with Soul (2017), Deep Tech and the Amplified Organisation (2021) and Designing Customer Experiences with Soul, Second Edition (2026).
Recognised as a “Trailblazer” by Technology Magazine, the frameworks he has developed — including the Customer Centricity Strategy Framework and Soul-Guided Systems® — are used by leaders worldwide to navigate strategic transformation.
Pricing and Value
Investment:
Groups of 5 – 6 people: $400 (US) per person
Groups of 7 – 8 people: $375 (US) per person
Groups of 9 – 10 people: $350 (US) per person
Includes:
- 6+ hours of live group sessions
- A private 45-minute 1:1 strategy session with Simon Robinson for every participant
- All tools and frameworks
- Certificate of completion
- Direct access to a CEO and author, working on your real business challenge, in a small group setting.
For larger in-company editions and half and one-day versions, please get in touch so we can discuss your specific requirements and group sizes.
Structure
Because the Practitioner’s Lab is being offered to individual groups, the booking of each session is flexible and based on the needs of each group. A typical programme would be as follows
Live Session Schedule
- Week 1 (typically a Thursday or Friday) – The Deep Dive (2.5 hours)
- Following week (typically a Thursday or Friday) – The CX Strategy Lab
- Third consecutive week (typically a Thursday or Friday) – The Integration Workshop
+ Private 45-minute 1:1 strategy session
Scheduled individually in the week following the final session
Time
Small Team Labs editions can be arranged to suit specific circumstances and time zones for each group.
Structured for Productivity
These sessions are structured to create protected time for focused work.
Most participants are operating in demanding roles, where stepping away during the week is difficult.
This format allows you to engage fully — without interruption — and to think clearly about the challenges you are working on.
We are able to provide the Lab on Saturdays at a time most suited for your geographical location, if this is required.
How the Format Works
This is not a passive course.
Each session is a live working environment, where you:
- Apply the frameworks to a real challenge from your organisation
- Work through structured exercises and canvases
- Receive direct input and feedback
- Build something you can take back and use immediately
Between sessions, you continue the work in your own context — observing, applying, and refining.
What to Expect
- A small cohort
- High levels of interaction and discussion
- A structured progression across three sessions
- Tangible outputs from each stage
- A final 1:1 session to consolidate your approach
A Note on Commitment
This is designed as focused, high-value time.
Each session builds on the previous one, and the real value comes from applying the work between sessions.
Most participants find that what they develop during the lab can be immediately used in their organisation.
This Is Where the Work Begins
The first Practitioner’s Lab launched in June 2026. The Lab is now available to organisations and groups who would like to take part in their own dedicated edition.
Each edition brings together a small group from your organisation to work directly with the tools and frameworks from Designing Customer Experiences with Soul, including the Customer Centricity Strategy Framework, applying them to real challenges from your own organisational context.
Rather than joining an open programme with participants from different organisations, your group has its own Practitioner’s Lab. This creates the space to explore challenges in depth, develop a shared understanding of what is happening, and work together on how customer experience can be connected more coherently with strategy, leadership and organisational transformation.
If you would like to bring the Practitioner’s Lab to your organisation or group, we invite you to apply for an edition.
Please contact us to join the waiting list for the next edition.
Would you like to find out more?
Please contact us to learn more and to discuss your specific requirements.
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