Natural ecosystems or business ecosystems: What’s happening in your bubble of life?

According to National Geographic, an ecosystem is “a geographic area where plants, animals, and other organisms, as well as weather and landscape, work together to form a bubble of life. Ecosystems contain biotic or living parts, as well as abiotic factors or nonliving parts.”

Breaking this definition down, an ecosystem consists of:

• 1. Independent components (plants, animals, weather, landscape) working together
• 2. Specific subsections of life (a bubble of life)
• 3. Living and nonliving things

Applying this definition to experience ecosystems. Experience ecosystems consist of:

• 1. Countless independent components working together: employees — both behind the scenes and in the front lines; digital and physical advertisements; physical products; delivery channels — in store, online, third party; customer service components; technology; customers; influencers; etc.
• 2. Bubbles of life: this depends on the industry you play in. Spotify is my “music” bubble of life.
• 3. Living and nonliving things: both seen and unseen things. For example, what is seen includes employees, products, technology artifacts, advertisements, and what is unseen includes company culture (which influences your service experience), competitive forces, pricing comparison, etc.

Back to environmental ecosystems, according to Kelsey Wooddell, assistant director of the Earth Institute Center for Environmental Sustainability, “when you lose one species, it affects the ecosystem and everything around it gets a little bit more fragile while it adapts to change. . . even if it’s not a keystone species [a species that others in an ecosystem depend on], its loss will weaken the functionality of the entire ecosystem, which just makes it easier for that ecosystem to stop working.” Similarly, in business, when one “thing” is affected, the whole company and designed experience is affected which sometimes then affects other companies’ ecosystems. For example, the industry for CD-Roms became incredibly fragile when Napster and iTunes came into the market and Spotify introduced its freemium business model.

So, as designers, we must continually think about the ecosystem in which our experience, company, people, etc. reside. Nothing exists in isolation. Moreover, noteworthy experience designs also have a designed context. Spotify designed a context for listening to music that doesn’t make the user go and find preferred music depending on her or his mood or reason for listening. The company also brilliantly realized that independent hardware pieces do not exist in isolation — when listening to music on my iPhone, I can see that being displayed on my Mac, and Amazon Echo and Google Home now link to Spotify to play desired playlists.

Change is a scary word, but finding an effective solution can start with thinking about the ecosystem mentioned above: independent components working together, the bubbles of life you’re operating in, and the seen and unseen forces impacting an experience. According to Risdon in Orchestrating Experiences, “the road to ad product and service experiences is littered with solutions delivered without first asking, “what’s the real opportunity here?”