The Trojan Horse of Journey Management
How journeys expose what organizations don’t want to see, and why un-designing is now a leadership imperative.
I sat down with The Experience Edge podcast to share my point of view on what experience work really looks like inside complex organizations. Journey management becomes the Trojan horse, surfacing the silos, misaligned incentives, and operating-model issues that shape how work actually gets done.
This episode brings together many of the themes I’ve been writing about: intent vs. output, ecosystems vs. ego-systems, and what it actually takes to build sustainable experience practices at scale.
If you work in design, product, service, customer experience or organizational transformation, this conversation will feel very familiar.
What we talked about
Organizational Reality
Why companies talk “experience” but ship disconnected features
Silos, pace layers, and performative collaboration
The hidden forces that sabotage journeys
How intent collapses without clarity, confidence, and continuity
Systems Thinking & Leadership
Using systems thinking for real strategic impact
Un-design as a leadership practice
Dismantling legacy patterns that block change
Navigating the tension between old structures and new expectations
Journey Management (the Trojan horse)
How journey management exposes operating-model dysfunction
The gap between mapping and actually managing journeys
Ownership issues across product, tech, ops, and service
Why journeys fail when teams confuse activity with outcomes
What real journey governance looks like
Journeys as ecosystem integrators, not artifacts
Journey management as organizational literacy
Why this conversation matters
Journey management, when done well, forces organizations to confront themselves. It reveals the seams, the disconnects, the incentives, and the structural decisions that shape how work gets done. It exposes the truth beneath the PowerPoints.
But it also creates an opportunity.
An opportunity to realign teams, rebuild trust, redesign accountability, and shift from ego-systems to ecosystems, where experience isn’t a department, but a shared responsibility.
This episode captures that tension in a way that felt honest, practical, and deeply aligned with the work I’ve been doing across industries.
Thank you to Jochem van der Veer, the entire Experience Podcast team, and the brilliant folks at TheyDo, not only for hosting me, but for the way you continue to push journey management, organizational literacy, and experience design forward.