At one of my recent team building engagements, the client had hired a firm of industrial psychologists to do some assessments and present the findings as part of the day.

Since the industrial psychologists’ session was ahead of mine, I was in the room during the presentation.

They made an error, one that cost them.

The error the industrial psychologists made was to believe that psychology was the job-to-be done, both a reasonable assumption and a grave mistake, and one of the reasons I write this blog; to try to elucidate for people that there’s a new game afoot.

I have no doubt that the psychologists engaged were highly skilled, that they had both sufficient credentials and experience in industrial psychology. The problem is that they thought that the job-to-be done was to convey the outcomes of their surveys and tests.

But we’re in an experience economy now, and nobody is exempt, not even highly skilled knowledge workers and academics.

In the world we live in now, to convey information is the job of an email, a report, a memo, a doc. It is not the job a person, even if that person is a highly skilled industrial psychologist.

The job the industrial psychologist, and anybody else who who shows up for something live, in person, is to not to deliver the outcome of your findings, but to re-create the steps for the audience to stumble upon your findings for themselves so that they have their own epiphany.

If you want to give them your epiphany, then write an email.

If you show up live then your job isn’t to deliver information, it’s to deliver emotion. Your job is to get the audience to arrive at an epiphany that causes a change in them. Regardless of what it says on your business card, you are a performer and your job is to create an experience that changes people.

The industrial psychologists who presented that day were mistaken about what their job was.

About a month later the same client booked my team for the same engagement with another department in their business. The psychologists didn’t get the callback.

They lost that work because they didn’t understand that we’re all in the experience business now. Being a good industrial psychologist (or whatever you happen to be) is just a hygiene factor now, and the experience you create is what’s separating the winners from the losers.

I hope you keep get the repeat business.