Wearing Your Customer Spectacles – How it can shift organisational behaviour.
There is a moment in every organisation — usually subtle, often unspoken — when the internal truth drifts away from the customer’s truth.
Leaders still believe they’re customer-centric. Teams still talk about value. Dashboards still pulse green. The strategy still makes sense on the page.
Yet customers stop returning calls. Opportunities stall for reasons no one can quite articulate. Renewals take longer. Goodwill thins. Trust recedes quietly.
Most organisations never notice this drift until something breaks.
Wearing your Customer Spectacles is the discipline designed to stop that drift.
It is the pivot point in the SUCCESS framework where leadership belief is confronted by customer reality — and where Account-Based Growth either becomes powerful or collapses under its own assumptions.
The Myth of Customer-Centricity
Walk into any boardroom and you’ll hear confident declarations:
“We’re absolutely customer-focused.”
“Our customers love us.”
“We understand what they need.”
“We’ve done this for years.”
But spend 45 minutes with their customers, and a different picture surfaces:
- Processes built for efficiency, not clarity.
- Messaging that doesn’t reflect lived experience.
- ‘Insight’ filtered through internal assumptions.
- Blind spots that only a customer could reveal.
- Teams working hard, but on the wrong things.
This is not a failure of intent.
It is a failure of perspective.
Customer Spectacles is the mechanism that restores that perspective.
Why This Stage Matters So Much in the SUCCESS Journey
By the time we reach wearing your Customer Spectacles, leaders have:
- set strategic direction (Strategy & Governance)
- established shared truth (Understanding & Unification)
- focused their effort on the right accounts (Customer Segments)
Now comes the uncomfortable question:
Do we actually see these customers as they see us?
Because if the answer is no —
even partially no —
then governance misdirects, insight corrodes, segmentation misfires and execution becomes well-intended fiction.
Customer Spectacles is the moment when leaders stop navigating by internal maps and start navigating by customer terrain.
The Leadership Reality: Customers Experience Your Truth, Not Your Strategy
Growth doesn’t hinge on your ambition, your deck, your plan or your KPIs.
It hinges on where:
- customers feel friction
- trust is fragile
- expectations aren’t met
- value isn’t experienced
- relationships feel one-sided
Organisations rarely lose deals or renewals because their product was weak.
They lose them because the customer experience contradicted the story the company believed about itself.
There is a stark leadership truth here:
Customers live in reality.
Organisations often live in interpretation.
Wearing your Customer Spectacles is the bridge between the two.
The Signals That Leaders Are Operating From Fiction, Not Truth
Every organisation has these tells:
- Customers repeat the same issue… again.
- Leadership teams debate what customers “probably think” rather than asking them.
- Reports paint an optimistic picture customers wouldn’t recognise.
- Internal priorities outweigh customer impact.
- Teams become excellent at rationalising drift.
None of these signals is fatal alone.
Together, they form a story leaders can no longer afford not to hear.
Customer Spectacles forces that story into view.
The SCALE Blueprint — The Discipline of Seeing Clearly
Customer Spectacles is operationalised through SCALE, a rhythm that prevents leaders slipping into assumption.
S — See: Map the Reality
What customers actually do, not what we assume they do.
Where they stall.
Where trust fractures.
Where delight occurs.
Where confidence rises or falls.
This is not persona work.
It is truth-mapping.
C — Challenge: Test Assumptions Relentlessly
Assumptions creep in quietly:
“They value our relationship.”
“They know what we offer.”
“They’re satisfied.”
“They’d tell us if something was wrong.”
Challenge dismantles these illusions.
A — Act: Prioritise What Truly Matters
Insight has no commercial value until it shapes behaviour.
Act means:
- re-sequencing effort
- removing friction
- correcting misalignment
- investing where trust is thin
- simplifying where confusion reigns
L — Learn: Close the Loop
Did customers notice?
Did trust improve?
Did effort reduce?
Did momentum increase?
If not, the organisation has merely observed, not learned.
E — Evangelise: Spread Customer Truth Through Leadership Behaviour
This is where Customer Spectacles becomes cultural.
Leaders reference customer truth in decisions.
Teams celebrate truth-driven wins.
Stories circulate.
Insight becomes identity.
Evangelise is the moment customer truth stops being a report and becomes a rhythm.
Where Wearing Your Customer Spectacles Fits in SUCCESS
Customer Spectacles is not a standalone practice.
It is the fulcrum between clarity and action:
- Strategy & Governance sets direction.
- Understanding & Unification creates shared truth.
- Customer Segments focuses energy.
- Customer Spectacles grounds decisions in lived reality.
- Executable Plan converts that reality into coordinated movement.
- Scale expands what works.
- Sustain keeps the truth alive.
Without Customer Spectacles, the entire flywheel spins on assumptions.
The Cost of Not Seeing Clearly
When leaders make decisions based on internal narratives rather than customer truth:
- Opportunities are misjudged.
- Effort is misallocated.
- Relationships stagnate without warning.
- Governance loses power.
- Momentum corrodes quietly.
- Growth becomes effort rather than outcome.
These are not operational failures.
They are perspective failures.
And they accumulate silently until something breaks.
The Leadership Takeaway
Customer-centricity isn’t about language.
It isn’t about journey maps, NPS dashboards or slogans.
It is a truth discipline.
A commitment to see the business as customers experience it — especially when it contradicts internal narratives leaders find comfortable.
Organisations that master Customer Spectacles grow faster not because they work harder, but because:
- they correct misalignment earlier
- they focus effort where it matters
- they surface truth faster
- they build trust deliberately
- they realign continuously
Customer Spectacles is where the SUCCESS journey becomes honest.
Next in the SUCCESS Series: Executable Plan
In Part 5 — Executable Plan — we shift from insight to movement.
We explore:
- how governance becomes rhythm
- how clarity becomes action
- how ownership becomes momentum
- how teams transform customer truth into weekly progress
This is the hinge where strategy stops being directional and becomes operational.