Inspiration comes from many places and this week, it comes from @Angeline Ico, my former colleague at Deloitte and an experience and innovation designer.
We caught up the other day and as I am starting to work on the new people analytics conference, I asked her what advice she might have. She immediately reminded me that the conference needs to be an experience.
And to create an experience I need the 5E framework!
So, I figured it must apply not only to workshops and events, but also broader to our experience with people analytics.
Here is the problem my clients often face:
The people analytics team is brilliant, yet they often end up on a chopping block in the budget.
Despite all this brilliance, business leaders completely ignore them.
After a few cycles of producing heavy, complex reports that gathered dust on a SharePoint drive, the CFO asks a question: "Why are we funding this?"
And of course...
Most People Analytics teams think they have an influence problem. Or a data quality problem. Or, a data governance problem.
They don't. They have an experience problem.
The issue is not the math or code. The issue is how the math gets introduced, delivered, and followed up on.
If we want to stop getting deprioritized, we have to stop assuming that "good data speaks for itself." Tough luck: It doesn't. We have to treat People Analytics like a high-yield product, and we have to intentionally design the user experience.
Today, we are going to look at a framework called the 5 Es of Experience Design, and how applying it will fundamentally change how the business interacts with your data.
Good work does not speak for itself
The traditional People Analytics playbook is entirely focused on the output.
We aggregate millions of rows of data. We build a highly complex attrition model. We email the link to a VP of Anything. And then we sit back and wait for them to act.
This is a massive organizational failure.
Business leaders do not fund work they don't understand. And they certainly don't champion teams they never actually interact with.
When you just throw a dashboard over the fence, you are acting like a vendor. Not that vendors are bad, but usually, we don't want to see too much of them.
To fix this, we can borrow a framework originally developed by the Dublin Group: The 5 Es:
Entice
Enter
Engage
Exit
Extent
This framework maps the exact psychological arc of how a stakeholder goes from their first contact with your team to becoming an active champion for your capital investments.
Let's break down each phase.
1. Entice (The Hook)
Before any project starts, a business leader has to decide your team is actually worth their time.
For most analytics teams, this is where the relationship dies immediately. The team sits around waiting to be asked for a report. Or worse, they proactively go to the business and pitch their technical capabilities: "Hey, we just built a new neural network that can run sentiment analysis on Slack messages!"
The VP of Sales does not care about your neural network.
They care about what it can do for them.
Stop pitching your math.
Start pitching their ROI.
You must show up with genuine business curiosity. What exact decisions is this leader trying to make this quarter? What metric keeps them up at night? What data do they need to survive their next board review?
If you start the conversation anchored to their P&L, you give them a financial reason to care.
2. Enter (The Threshold)
Interest is not commitment.
Enter is the exact moment a leader goes from being passively open to People Analytics to being genuinely bought in. Getting an executive across that threshold requires one thing: momentum.
And...
Momentum builds momentum.
You have to give them a win they can feel immediately.
Analytics teams constantly fail here by pitching massive, 6-month organizational health diagnostics. By month three, the executive has lost interest.
Find the lowest-hanging fruit.
Find a project scoped narrowly enough to finish in two weeks. It must answer a question they actively care about, and produce a result they can physically take into their next leadership meeting.
Run a fast, 14-day headcount forecast tied to a business plan they are already executing. Give them something concrete, fast, and wildly useful. That changes the dynamic of the relationship permanently.
3. Engage (The Core Experience)
Once an executive is inside the experience, you have to deepen the involvement.
Engage is about turning a satisfied user into a highly vocal champion. This is where People Analytics teams massively underinvest. They deliver a good project, pat themselves on the back, and walk away.
But the stakeholder who just had a positive experience is the exact person you need advocating for your next, million-dollar workforce planning initiative.
Think of it: Do you trust restaurants with great reviews more?
Engage means pulling the stakeholder into the kitchen. Share your interim findings. Co-create the narrative. Give them the exact financial language they need to explain your work to their peers.
When a VP of Sales starts bragging about your People Analytics team in an executive offsite, you have achieved maximum leverage.
4. Exit (Closing the Gap)
Every project ends.
Exit is about ensuring it ends with extreme clarity.
Think about what happens when a leader clicks to the last page of your dashboard. If their immediate reaction is a question your dashboard doesn't answer, you just lost them. They are overwhelmed, not empowered.
As we talked about last week, the dashboard is not the deliverable.
The business decision is the deliverable.
A well-designed exit leaves zero loose threads. It explicitly answers the original business question, clearly states the variance and risks, and gives the executive a concrete, data-backed recommendation on what to do next.
Leave them feeling capable, empowered.
5. Extent (The Compounding Interest)
The value of the data does not end when the project is delivered.
Extent is about the follow-up. It is the system of check-ins and nudges that keeps the leader connected to the reality of the data.
You must build a continuous cadence. Set up a monthly review. Send an automated alert when their specific team's retention drops below the 80% cliff.
The goal is to make People Analytics a continuous presence in how this leader operates.
When you nail the Extent phase, you stop being a reporting factory. You become a trusted advisor on capital allocation.
The CHRO Playbook: Designing the Experience
The 5 Es are not a complicated data science framework. They are an operating model shift.
Rather than asking, "Did we deliver an accurate mathematical analysis?" you must start asking, "Did we create an experience that actually changes business behavior?"
Here is how you implement it today:
1. Audit the Failures
Look at the last three analytics projects your team delivered that the business ignored. Map them against the 5 Es. Did you fail to Entice them with a real business problem? Did you mess up the Exit by giving them a confusing dashboard with no recommendation? Find the break in the chain.
2. Mandate the "Quick Win"
For every new executive you partner with, ban your team from pitching multi-month projects. Force them to define a 14-day Enter deliverable that solves an immediate, painful problem for that specific leader.
3. Script the Exit
Never allow a dashboard or report to be sent to a business leader without a mandatory "Executive Summary" attached. It must state the finding, the financial risk, and the recommended action. Close the loop.
Stop hoping your good work speaks for itself. Design the experience.
K
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