With a career spanning some of the UK’s best-known brands, including British Airways, Eurostar and Sainsbury’s Bank, former CEO and innovation expert Hamish Taylor has seen first-hand what makes transformation succeed and where it can go wrong. Drawing on lessons from across industries, he explores why meaningful change starts with challenging established thinking, looking beyond your own sector for inspiration and understanding what customers really need, rather than simply introducing new technology or modernising existing processes.

The last issue of the magazine explored a claims landscape undergoing rapid change. How can organisations recognise when it’s time to stop improving the existing model and start questioning whether the model itself is still right?

All businesses are experiencing huge change, whether that is driven by digital transformation and AI, the growing influence of social media, or increasingly sophisticated customers with more information available to inform their decisions. You simply cannot afford to sit still.

That does not necessarily mean changing your value proposition, or what I call your customer promise, but the way you deliver it may need to change dramatically. Volvo, for example, has stood for safety for decades, but a Volvo today is very different from one 40 years ago. The proposition has not changed, but the delivery has.

In my experience, this applies to every business, whether you are playing catch-up or already see yourself as a leader. At Procter & Gamble, the philosophy was very clear: if you are in the lead, you need to run even faster because everyone else is trying to catch you.

In short, organisations should always be questioning whether their current business model still delivers the best possible outcome for customers.

When you encounter a great idea in another industry, what tells you it’s a principle worth adapting rather than simply admiring?

You have to remember that I was the non-airline guy in an airline, the non-railwayman running a railway company and the non-banker running a bank. I was surrounded by industry experts, so I had to bring knowledge and ideas from elsewhere.

For me, the best approach is not to randomly look at other industries for good ideas. Instead, redefine the problem or opportunity in a way that is not specific to your industry or organisation. Once you broaden the definition, you can ask: Who else is facing a similar problem or opportunity, and what can I learn from them?

When we introduced beds into aeroplanes in the mid-1990s, we did not define the opportunity as, How do we turn this seat into a bed? We reframed it as, How do we create luxury in a small space? That took us beyond traditional airline seat manufacturers. The best solution ultimately came from Design Acumen, a company specialising in the interiors of luxury sailing boats and motor yachts.

You can apply this thinking to almost any challenge. I once took risk and compliance managers from financial services through a rugby referees’ training course. Why? Because rugby refereeing is about keeping the game flowing rather than simply telling people what they cannot do. There were techniques that could easily be adapted to risk and compliance management.

It is also a fantastic way to motivate teams and stimulate more radical thinking. Encourage people to look beyond their own industry and they often start generating the ideas themselves.

You’ve worked with organisations that have fundamentally rethought how they operate and others that have simply modernised what already exists. What’s the fundamental difference between the two?

Successful fundamental transformation comes down to three things.

First, it’s not about you. Successful organisations build the business around the benefit they deliver to customers rather than simply describing what they do. The customer’s agenda becomes their agenda. The starting point is therefore not what exists today, but what future success should look like for the customer.

Second, they recognise that it is about more than the product. Customer experience and how you leave customers feeling are just as important as product quality, and they create huge opportunities for fundamental change. Starbucks built its brand around the experience as much as the coffee. Apple’s customer experience, from ease of use and product integration to its stores, is as important as the core technology. Disney takes that further still, grounding activities in creating magical experiences.

Third, it’s about everybody. Transformation cannot sit solely with customer-facing teams or a project department. It has to run throughout the organisation. Get everyone involved and people will identify opportunities that a small transformation team may never see.

Successful transformation starts with a clear understanding of the customer benefit you are trying to deliver. At British Airways, we stopped talking simply about what we offered business travellers, such as seats, catering and airport processes, and instead defined success as helping customers arrive ready for business, through more sleep, less hassle and better opportunities to refresh.

That changed the questions we were asking. Instead of asking how to improve existing processes, we asked: How else could we help customers arrive ready for business? That led to innovations such as the arrivals lounge, giving passengers somewhere to refresh after a flight rather than only before it.

It also gave everyone in the organisation a clear role. The IT team looked at reducing hassle in the airport and, nine months later, had found a way to remove the traditional check-in process altogether.

Ideas can come from anywhere. One hugely popular idea was to serve passengers dinner in the lounge before they boarded, giving them more time to sleep on the overnight flight. That idea came from the team working behind the desk in the lounge at New York JFK.

Customers also started listening to us differently because we were talking about their world rather than our own.

If leaders have not created a clear customer promise, they cannot expect the organisation to fundamentally rethink what it does. People will naturally look at their existing processes and simply try to improve them.

Ambition matters too. How you frame the ambition determines how significant the change will be. We are creatures of habit, so when given a new task we instinctively try to fit it into the world we already know.

The ambition therefore needs to be exciting enough that people realise different thinking and behaviour will be required. At BA, we did not ask the IT team to improve check-in. We asked them to get rid of check-in. That created a completely different mindset.

If you walk into an organisation for the first time, what tells you very quickly whether it’s genuinely customer-led or simply believes it is?

It is actually quite simple: do they understand that success is not about how great they think they are, but about moving to the customer’s agenda rather than their own?

Wherever you go within a genuinely customer-led organisation, teams should be working towards customer goals, not simply departmental objectives. Everyone plays some part in delivering the customer offer, whether they realise it or not.

Leadership therefore needs to create a clear customer promise focused on the outcome for the customer. That promise should then underpin goals and objectives throughout the organisation. Without it, businesses inevitably become more inward-looking.

Some organisations genuinely believe they are customer-led when they are not. They may put posters on walls, change their values or introduce new behaviours, but fundamentally they continue managing the business and their people in exactly the same way.

Customers do not care how you are organised or how clever you think your product range is. They care about the outcome for them. That means looking beyond the product itself to the wider experience and, crucially, how you leave customers feeling. Those elements are often what distinguish a genuinely customer-led organisation from one that simply believes it is.

Making that transition also requires a different approach to customer insight. You need to understand not only the physical outcome customers want, but their mental journey too. What pressures are influencing them? What expectations are they bringing into the interaction?

Success is not about how good you believe you are. It is about how you perform against the customer’s expectations. That is the real benchmark.

Some industries find trust much harder to earn than others. From your experience, what separates organisations that genuinely change how customers experience them from those that simply try to improve how they’re perceived?

You do not decide whether the customer experience is improving. The customer does. That is why constant feedback is critical.

Organisations also need to stop benchmarking themselves solely against immediate competitors. Do you want to be better than others in a potentially poor-performing group, or do you want to be genuinely excellent?

Trust is also not an industry-specific concept. It applies to every area of our lives, which makes it a perfect subject for looking beyond your own sector.

I recently worked with an organisation where we asked questions such as: Why do you trust a doctor? Why do you trust your car to start in the morning? Why does your dog trust you? Why do you trust your partner?

Within ten minutes, we had identified 30 or 40 different principles of trust. You can then use those principles to examine your own organisation’s behaviours and ask whether you are genuinely living up to them.

What do organisations most often mistake for transformation when, in reality, they’ve only become more efficient?

I do not think the terminology matters enormously. Whether you call something transformation, change or something else, the important question is: What are you actually trying to change?

It is perfectly legitimate to have a transformation programme focused on efficiency or profitability. But if you are transforming an internal operation, you also need to understand the impact that change has on the customer.

Where profitability or efficiency is the main driver, organisations should continually measure the customer impact of the decisions they make. At the very least, the customer outcome should remain neutral. Ideally, it should improve.

And do not forget: you do not decide whether something is an enhancement for the customer. They do.

How do organisations distinguish between preserving what makes them distinctive and preserving habits that no longer serve them?

This is something I have a very strong opinion on. What makes an organisation distinctive is its customer promise, not its product, because products will inevitably change over time.

The thing to preserve is the fundamental benefit customers receive as a result of what you do.

Your operation can change. Your routes to market can change. Your technology can change. But the fundamental value proposition you bring to customers should remain clear.

If you continually measure performance against that customer promise, it becomes much easier to identify which elements genuinely need to be protected and which habits can safely be left behind.

What’s one word that’s become so overused in business that it’s almost lost its meaning?

I am probably going to surprise you by choosing the word transformation.

Too often, it is used as a standalone phrase, but transformation by itself is meaningless. The important question is: For the sake of what are you transforming?

I work specifically in customer-led transformation, which makes the purpose clear: the organisation is changing to become more customer-focused.

There always needs to be a goal. That is why I used to get frustrated when organisations talked about digital transformation. Digital for the sake of what? What are you actually trying to achieve?

Exactly the same applies to AI today. AI is a fantastic tool, but for the sake of what are you using it?

My advice would be to stop using the word transformation unless you attach a clear goal to it. Otherwise, it becomes little more than a phrase that says, Let’s change things, without explaining where you are trying to go or why.

Hamish Taylor, award-winning business leader, speaker and adviser specialising in customer-led transformation