Between 2008 and 2010, I worked on a service innovation project at a large insurer. We sat down with business owners and talked about their companies, what was on their minds, and what they expected from an insurer. We used what we heard to improve the service. Put simply: better conversations with clients, more understanding of their situation, and stronger relationships. New propositions grew out of it later, and we saw commercial results improve.
I only grasped part of what we were doing then, and I loved it. For the first time, I was working from clients' context and lived experience, with deep qualitative insight as the starting point.
Professionally, that project was a turning point.
I ran straight into the hardest part. Those insights had to find their way into work already happening every day, done well by people with full calendars. I was optimistic. With insights like these, I figured you'd lift an organization to a new level almost automatically. It turned out to be a lot tougher, and it took me a while to understand why.
Basements and churches
When we started MCH Consultancy in 2010, I spent the first months driving across the country for an insurer's program, visiting small advisory firms. I worked in basements, churches, and cafés, sometimes with two people, sometimes with thirty. These were professionals who could feel their role with clients starting to shift. The same question came up at every table, even if hardly anyone put it this way: what will a client still need us for?
I still ask leaders of mid-sized service providers that question today. It's sharper now, and it's the same question.
A book that turned my thinking around
Around 2014, I read Service-Dominant Logic by Robert Lusch and Stephen Vargo. It turned my thinking around. Service exists to serve something beyond itself, and value emerges in use, in clients' lives, together with them. Suddenly I had language for what I'd seen at the insurer and heard in those basements.
I also saw right away that this was a different paradigm, and my work with Kotter and Bridges had taught me what a shift like that asks of people. That's when the toughness finally made sense to me. A good insight changes little if people keep seeing their work the same way. That's where service evolution and change leadership came together for me, and they've belonged together ever since.
Breaking free
In 2016, I wrote my first white paper on it, ‘Loskomen richting toekomst’ (Breaking free toward the future), for advisory firms in the insurance market. I still recognize the question I asked advisors in it: "What is my role in the market? Where does my added value for clients lie?" I asked them to let go of the idea that they were an extension of the policy production chain, and to see their clients as people with lives. Someone buying a house has more on their mind than the mortgage.
What I see now
In 2023, I laid out the vision in a keynote, The Future of Professional Services. Knowledge is everywhere, and algorithms are taking over more and more skills. A patient walks in with an AI analysis; a client emails their lawyer a ChatGPT draft. What sets professionals apart then is what people do best: making a meaningful difference in someone else's life, person to person.
Over the past year, we turned that into a model others can use: the Service Evolution Framework. It describes five positions in the client relationship: Provider, Advisor, Trusted Advisor, Partner, and Steward. It also describes eight mental shifts in how professionals see their work, and seven capabilities that carry those shifts: Observing Without Judgment, Reflective Practice, Stewardship, Making Meaning of Transition, Systems Thinking, Co-Creation Capability, and Navigating Paradox and Tension. To me, Observing Without Judgment is where it all started, with those business owners in 2008: listen first, form an opinion later.
The building blocks were familiar: service-dominant logic, research on the trusted advisor, our research, and the literature on meaningful work. What we adds is how they come together, informed by more than twenty-five years of practice.
From ladder to choice
This month, we sharpened the core. People seeing the model for the first time tend to read a ladder into it, with Steward at the top. That's never how I've seen it. To me, service evolution is a service provider's ability to choose, as its clients' context shifts, the kind of relationship through which it delivers meaning and relevance, for the organization as a whole, and for each client. Provider is a full choice in its own right, as long as you do it well.
On the way
The model is still evolving, like the clients it serves, and I have plans and dreams for it. I want to rework the Reflection so it shows, shift by shift, where an organization stands relative to the position it chooses. From there, we can work together to identify which choices and interventions fit. I'm hoping to launch the Service Evolution Masterclass in early 2027, where participants work on their own client relationships, and I expect what they discover to make the model richer. I'd love to test it further with service science researchers.
Around 2028, I dream of certifying advisors who want to work with it. If that works out, I'd like to extend the work step by step to other sectors, and later to other countries, always with mid-sized service providers.
And that toughness from 2008? It's still there. The insight is rarely where things get stuck. The real work happens next, with people who start seeing their craft differently while today's agenda keeps running.
Do you want to explore the question about your clients that you have been asking for years?