At the outset of every corporate Experience Center engagement, we ask executive stakeholders what success looks like for them. While each client has their own reasons for investing in an Experience Center, one outcome most Fortune 500 senior leaders align around is that the space needs to tell the full, end-to-end company story.
Often referred to as the “enterprise” story, it’s the narrative that explains not just what a company makes, but how all of its many parts work together to create value.
This ask makes sense given that an Experience Center is often the only place, aside from the corporate website, where the whole company story is even visible.
However, plenty of these same executives go on to admit:
“Very few people inside our organization know how to tell the end-to-end story well.”
Clients attribute this scarcity to organizational size and complexity, historically siloed ways of working and selling, and frequent change via acquisitions, restructuring, and the like. “It’s hard to understand what we do,” more than one executive has bottom-lined for me.
Interestingly, many of these companies are strong at opposite ends of the brand storytelling spectrum: high-level purpose, brand, and ambition at one pole and granular product details (i.e., “tech and specs”) at the other. In between, though, things are murkier.
This gap is what we have come to regard as the “missing middle” – and it’s a key opportunity space for enterprise companies, where the fastest-growing, most strategically important parts of the business reside.
If a brand’s purpose is the organization’s why, and products are its what, the missing middle is key to understanding how the company creates value for its customers.
Finding and telling the untold stories at the heart of how a company creates value is mission-critical work, especially as more markets commoditize and product performance becomes table stakes. This is where a client like GE HealthCare evolves from being a vendor of impressive medical equipment to a strategic partner that can help a hospital system's entire workforce operate more efficiently, while also delivering better care. Not surprisingly, it’s also where the highest-impact conversations are happening with C-suite customers, partners, and investors.
The stories in this layer are typically still emerging—hence the missing middle—and our work, as the experience design team, is to find them.
Making the invisible visible
After observing this ‘missing middle’ pattern repeat itself across our client base, we’ve come to believe that the true value of enterprise Experience Centers lies in the fact that designing them forces organizations to answer hard questions, including:
• How do all these pieces actually connect?
• What’s a logical sequence?
• What does every guest need to understand, regardless of role?
• How do these core ideas scale across different personas and journeys?
To architect a cohesive guest journey through an enterprise Experience Center, our team must reckon with the missing middle—working from the top down and the bottom up at the same time.
That requires maintaining an altitude where we can see the bigger picture, and how everything connects, while also immersing ourselves deeply enough in the subject matter to navigate nuanced story feedback from product teams and business unit leadership. It means pulling threads of connection across heavily matrixed organizations and following where they lead, even when they unravel long-held ways of understanding the business. It means taking on intricate communications challenges that resist easy answers, and then building frameworks that translate what emerges into digestible, intuitive, emotionally resonant guest experiences.
Story as design methodology
The strategic vehicle we use to carry out this work is story. Not story as messaging (though we do that too), but story as the structure that makes an integrated value proposition visible to external audiences—whether a CEO, CIO, operations leader, or investor—and consistently repeatable by internal ones.
When successfully executed, the connected enterprise story will widen the opportunity aperture with your most strategic customers.
No matter how famous your brand is, most Experience Center guests will come in with a narrow view of what you do, even as they bring with them expectations of what they believe they know. Well-constructed Experience Center journeys transform relationships by broadening perspectives. They prompt serendipitous moments of discovery (“I didn’t know you did all of this!”) along a pathway of cumulative understanding, deepening trust, and expanding the possibilities for partnership.
And that’s when Experience Centers become what so many senior leaders wish them to be: not just impressive environments, but uniquely capable communication channels that help organizations clearly demonstrate enterprise value, at a time when clarity can be hard to come by.
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