Changing industry value
How much value is lost between the people in your business?
People create value. The loss usually happens in the handovers between them.
This is a cross-industry perspective. It draws on advisory work where client knowledge sat with founders, and on Odee and Sentio as earlier and emerging ways of asking what a business already knows. Sentio has no client results to report.
01 · The industry
What is lost between one person and the next?
A customer conversation is understood one way by the person who heard it, another way in the brief, and another way by the team that does the work. A promise is remembered by one person. By the time the gap is visible, the work has been done.
The same journey shows up across industries: customer, brief, decision, delivery, learning. At each handover, context can be preserved, clarified or lost.
02 · Experience and observations
Where the context failed to travel.
In an established creative services business, client knowledge and relationship responsibility sat with the founders. The team could deliver the work that had been requested and still lack the context behind it. The advisory response was relationship ownership and client intelligence. That example is Case study 01 on How We Work.
Odee, established in 2019, asked a business to surface what it already knew through guided marketing-planning questions. It was built before generative AI and included in the 2023 sale. Sentio is the emerging platform now exploring how knowledge, judgement and experience can turn founder intelligence into organisational intelligence. It is still being developed.
In founder-led businesses, the founder often becomes the connection: the customer history, the reason for a decision, the promise that was never recorded. More decisions return to them because the organisation does not yet share the context.
03 · The economics of value
Where is value moving?
The value is not a summary of a meeting.
It is fewer misunderstandings, a decision that still makes sense to the next person, and a business that can recognise an opportunity without waiting for one memory to carry it between teams.
That shows up commercially. The next offer, the next recovery and the next relationship depend on context that survived the last handover.
That 2012 finding describes the cost of information that does not travel. It predates generative AI, and it is not a client result. The commercial point remains: knowledge a business already holds is worth little while it stays with one person.
04 · The opportunity
What a chief executive can reconsider now.
01The customer conversation
What did the customer actually say, and does the brief still carry it?
02The decision
Who can see the reason for a promise, a price or a scope change when the person who made it is not in the room?
03The lesson
What did delivery learn that sales, marketing and the next proposal never hear?
05 · The conversation
Questions worth asking.
- Which customer promises exist only in one person's memory?
- What does delivery know that sales and the next proposal never hear?
- If you added a person or a tool tomorrow, what disconnected context would they inherit?
The opportunity isn't simply to summarise the work.
It is to keep the context that makes the work valuable as it moves from the customer to the people who have to deliver, decide and learn.
If you're asking where customer context is lost between the conversation, the brief and the work, that's a conversation worth having.