Experts of Experience - The Real Reason Your Customer Experience Is Broken (And It's Not What You Think)

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

What if everything you thought you knew about customer experience was backwards? In this episode, JC Quintana—author, educator, and psychologist—reveals why most companies are approaching CX completely wrong. Instead of obsessing over touchpoints and metrics, JC argues we need to start with something much more fundamental: expectations. JC walks us through his Dialogue 7 framework, which identifies the seven critical conversations that must happen before you can even think about designing an experience. From defining value and understanding cultural influences to managing engagement levels and transparency expectations, these conversations form the foundation of every successful business relationship. We explore why employees are anxious about AI adoption (hint: it's not about the technology), why ChatGPT accidentally became the world's best communication teacher, and why saying your company is "like a family" might be doing more harm than good. If you're tired of CX strategies that look great on paper but fail in practice, this conversation will fundamentally shift how you think about customer relationships in 2026 and beyond. Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 01:52 What's Really Broken in Customer Experience 05:12 Redefining CX: It's All About Expectations 08:19 The Promise-Proof-Delivery Framework in Customer Journeys 12:26 Business Model First, Experience Second 16:56 Introducing the Dialogue 7 Framework 21:58 Why Culture and "Centricity" Matter More Than You Think 24:43 The Knowledge and Accountability Gap 28:02 Transparency vs Trust: The Critical Distinction 29:13 Why Experience Comes Last (Not First) 33:22 The Two Most Commonly Missed Expectations 36:46 How to Actually Use the 7 Conversations in Practice 42:49 Why Employees Are Anxious About AI 48:03 The Value-Cost Equation in Every Relationship 53:53 ChatGPT: The World's Best Communication Teacher 58:21 Lightning Round: Books, Trends, and Frameworks 1:06:11 Stop Saying Your Company Is "Like a Family" 1:11:59 Skills the Next Generation Will Need 1:14:36 Where to Find JC Quintana Experts of Experience is a Mission.org production. To discover more shows designed to educate, inspire, and entertain, go to mission.org.

So you think that our definition of experience has maybe kind of pulled away from the actual human experience at the heart of this? I hate pointing fingers, but I tend to blame vendors, especially technology vendors. If you remember back in the days where CRM came out, the idea was exactly that. Customer relationship management. What are the nuances of the relationship expectation for each customer segment? All the way to today, you can't say the word CRM without saying, technology blank. And I think that over time that has happened with the idea of experience. It started out with a very simple idea that whether I'm doing something, one-on-one with an

individual or with a company or with a brand, by experience, I mean the things that I do to get from point A to point B in a way that is functional, accessible, effective, and connected for me as an individual, right? But now, unfortunately, you say experience, People think methodologies, rating systems, technology for managing the customer experience or CX, and we've lost a lot of the human component and what it means to real people. One of my favorite quotes is that expectations are the thief of joy. But today's guest might argue something a little bit different. He might argue that expectations are also your gateway to joy.

Joining me on Mike is J.C. Quintana, a longtime customer experience leader, author, and speaker. who spent over two decades helping organizations rethink how they build relationships with their customers. He's advised teams all over the world, and today he shares what he's learned about human psychology that will dramatically transform how you think about experience building, expectation setting, and honestly just relationship building and human communication in general. I mean, there are literally things he shared in this episode that I'm simultaneously going to be applying to my business relationships, as well as my at-home relationships with my partner, with my kids, with my family.

So there are so many gems in this episode that you're absolutely going to love. For those of you who are new here, you're watching Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lacey Pease, and we release new episodes every single month. So if you don't want to miss those episodes, be sure to hit subscribe, and you'll get notified every time a new one drops. Thanks so much for tuning in today. And without further ado, here's J.C. Quintana. J.C., welcome to Experts of Experience.

Great to see you, Lacey. Great to have you on. it's the first interview of the year. So I'm so thrilled to be able to do this with you. It's fantastic. I'm looking forward to it and to the year as well. I think 2026 is going to be great. I honestly feel like this conversation we have to have is a great way for people to start the year. When they're thinking about business, like what assumptions have I been making about how my buyers think, how my employees think that I should maybe tear down before we even get into the year. That's true. It's going to be a great conversation for that. We don't like calling it that. We don't like calling it assumptions, but that's really what they are.

Yes, yes, for sure. So, J.C., you've worked at a lot of different companies over the year. Whenever people come to you and say, you know, our customer experience isn't working or maybe even our employee experience is having some gaps, what do you first think is broken? The idea of what experience is itself, our definition of experience, I think, is broken. And what I mean about that is that we've spent so much time. And you have to give Forster a lot of credit for going back to this very idea of, what experience means. And if you ask any company what experience means, they'll go through, talk about touchpoints and customer interactions and how to make them better.

But if you ask them, how are you doing that in a way that provides real functionality, reduces effort, increases accessibility, connects emotionally, a lot of people don't realize that that really is at the very core what an engineer experience is. So you think that just like our definition of experience has maybe kind of pulled away from the actual human experience at the heart of this? I agree. And, you know, I hate pointing

fingers, but I think that I tend to blame vendors, especially technology vendors for that. Because if you remember back in the days where CRM came out, the idea of CRM was exactly that. Customer relationship management. How do I manage the relationship? what are the nuances of the relationship expectation for each customer segment? And then slowly, all the way to today, you can't say the word CRM without saying technology blank. That manages our contacts and thus, right? I'm not going to advertise any given one of them, but you know the ones that I'm talking about. For sure, yeah.

And I think that over time that has happened with the idea of experience, it started out with a very simple idea that whether I'm doing something individually, one-on-one with an individual or with a company or with a brand, by experience, I mean the things that I do to get from point A to to point B in a way that is functional, accessible, effective, and connected for me as an individual, right? Or for my company, if it's a B-to-B situation. But now, unfortunately, you say experience, people think methodologies, people think rating systems, they think technology for managing, you know, the customer experience or CX.

And we've lost a lot of the human component and what it means to real people. It feels like a lot of the times when we try to define something, we latch on to the how, like how I'm going to do it, how I'm going to measure things, not the actual what is it. So, J.C., if you were to redefine customer experience, what would you say? I'm a little selfish share because, as you know, I dive more into the psychology of how people manage expectations, how they set those expectations, negotiate them, et cetera, including not just the psychology, but the social aspects of managing expectations and the cultural aspects of managing expectations. So when I defy experience, I have to kind of throw that in a little bit. And I keep the very first part of what we've learned from Forcer over time, which is experience is, what people expect from your company to get the value that they needed or want it from it or pay for it based on the expectations that you mutually set for that outcome to happen.

So, yes, experience is the very thing, the individuals, the collective assessment of how I felt, what I did, how I communicated. But it always has to be in context with what people expected from that experience because my experience as a economy class passenger is very different as the experience flying first class. Why? Because of my expectations. Yeah. And this expectation versus experience mismatch, right? So we see a lot of the times where the experience I'm getting doesn't match my expectation or it exceeds my expectation. How delightful and wonderful is that when that occurs, right? So this mismatch where if we get kind of like too latched on to the experience component and don't think about what's the expectation the consumer is coming in with initially, how does a company diagnose that there is this expectation experience, you know, mismatch going on? When a customer that you know that you've given them 100% of what the SOW or the contract says and they still leave, you know that there's somewhere a misalignment. and expectations.

It's something that a lot of companies don't understand because we train our employees on how to talk about our product really well, about aligning the expected experience between the user of the product or service and, you know, what they paid for. But we don't really talk about, really, ultimately, what was their expectation, not the alignment of what your product does, with what it did, but the alignment of the expectations of what your product does with what they expected it to do and the outcome they expected it to deliver. And that's a very, very different thing, very, very different thing. I relate this back to content. We make podcasts, obviously,

here at Mission. And there's this handy mantra that we think about, which is promise, proof, and then like delivery, right? Like, that I actually deliver on this thing that I promised, right? And the promise would be like if we think about a YouTube experience, right, I'm on YouTube. I see the title of the episode. I see the thumbnail. And that creates this promise of what I'm going to learn. I click in and I want proof within the first 30 seconds that I'm going to get whatever I thought. Right.

And then the actual rest of the episode or piece of content that you're consuming and hopefully delivers on that. And if any three of those things misalign, then now you've lost a customer or a consumer or a viewer for life, right? Because they're not going to trust that you're going to actually deliver on the thing that you promised. So how does the role of the actual whole customer journey sort of mirror that, right? If you think about marketing, like marketing sort of makes a promise or sales makes a promise. And then the actual delivery of that whatever experience it is, product, service, maybe it misaligns with that initial promise that that person had. Like, how do I think about this actual customer journey sort of mapping in that way?

I'm a big believer in going back to the basics, which, by the way, I think we align very much in this, listening to some of your podcast and the idea of bringing back to the simplest possible explanation and also how do you connect it to a proven methodology, right? So I try to break things down in that way. For a very brief period of time, I talked to you about teaching at first at Rugger's and then a program that is now part of, I'm blown away, 34 universities, right? And I remember my co-partner, co-teacher, Carol Burence, and I sat down talking about, hey, you know, there's so many associations that already have a customer experience program. What are we going to do different at this Rutgers executive customer experience program that's going to kind of differentiate us from the other programs? That kind of, you know, gets people to say, well, I already got my CXB certification, but what else is there that I can apply to? to my everyday experience as a customer experience practitioner. And the one thing that really stood out in alignment to, you know,

with what we're talking about today is that we kind of switch the learning from experience first and then gradually towards business to business first, the psychology of it, and then talk about the experience. Because the foundation of whether or not we even have the ability to deliver on expected expectations goes back to our business model, right? The, you know, the business model generation, all those, that amazing work that also Wiler has done and continues to do that says there's very specific blocks. One of those blocks is the relationship, but you cannot make decisions about the relationship and the kind of experiences you're going to deliver until you figure out if your value proposition aligns with the right customer segment. and whether or not you have the money, the people, the resources, the partnerships,

and the right activities that are going to allow you to deliver on the expected experience for that customer segment. And we kind of kind of like just fly right over that. We kind of skip right over that and we go to, oh my gosh, what should this experience feel like? What should this experience be like? You know, who's going to be in charge? Do we need a CXO to be in charge of that and experience?

doesn't belong to the CXO or to the CX team, experience belongs to all of us. So it's got to be first the foundation of understanding. And I hate saying it's so crude, right? But it's a reality. First, the reality of what can our business model really afford to do based on the expectations of the customer segments that we serve well, that best align with a value position. Then you can start the experience.

engineering process. But to your question, I think that the biggest mistake we make today and what we've lost our way is that we made experience not an additive, but we made the main ingredient. And that's not true. Business, our business model is the main ingredient. And based on our business model, we can make determinations of experience as an additive, and we can define what that experience means to each of the people that are that are value proposition is designed to serve. That makes total sense. And when I think about to the like especially bigger businesses when we really get into this idea of like siloing information, right? So like marketing's over here, sales over here, product is over here. And now experience is all the way over here.

You're like, okay, if we're not communicating across the board here on how these things work, there is really no point of having this whole experience team. They need to understand each of these steps. And truthfully, if these other departments are doing their jobs well, it does create already a great experience. And so then you're really just building off of something that's already going well, right? You're not trying to artificially create a good experience post, you know, sale or post-product creation. Yeah, very true. And I think that, you know, we all have a job in in the experience journey of our customers. And it is holistic by definition, but not by function.

And what I mean by that is that it's not the job of every member of the company to deliver on the whole experience, but to deliver well on a very specific piece that feeds to the experience, right? And that's what we have to empower our, you know, our support people to be able to say, okay, my part of the experience should include helping make it right where someone else did not do the right thing in the experience journey. If they fail in doing that or we were not accountable as we should have been to that experience, somebody else didn't do it. You know, who is it that is going to make it right? But yeah, we all have a piece that fits into the larger experience, but sometimes we take on a little too much

and then fail altogether on the things that we should have delivered within our role. Or to your point earlier, we're focusing on sort of the wrong things. Like I'm looking over at the metrics, I'm looking over all these strategies and these methodologies. But instead, what I should be doing is maybe aligning my team on literally the definition of experience and on expectations across the board, right? And I don't blame people, by the way. I don't blame people because I think that there are some fine lines between what is just a good human thing to do. and what is part functionally of our customers' customer experience program, right? For example, I should be nice to you because I'm a human being and kindness should be incorporated

into the way we do business with everybody. But if I'm going, you know, as far as giving you a product for free, thinking that I'm kind, then I'm stepping over the objective of the customer experience of my company, which is helping the individual use the product as intended, making it more easy for them to do what they're using the product to do, and then connecting them emotionally in some way, like making it easy and enjoyable. And I think we can talk about that, right? What's the psychology of doing things right?

What is the psychology of managing expectations that are human expectations versus our objective to deliver experience for the customer? When do we separate it? where are the lines that separate each of those things? Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, and you mentioned you, you know, your teaching. And one of the things that you've been teaching companies is something they call Dialogue 7. And I would just love to hear from you what that is because I really do think it's a great

framework for people to sort of start out their journey on this path of trying to understand expectations and how they actually impact business. Yeah. So, well, we talked a little bit about how people kind of put things backwards, right? we tend to say, let's provide the best possible experience, but we kind of forget to define the expectations that people have. And so the Dialogue 7 Framework tries to get people thinking about the right conversations necessary to start that relationship correctly and then work towards defining what that experience

should look like in that relationship. You know, if you and I have met for the very first time, we didn't know each other at all, We sat down at the table. If we knew nothing about each other or why we're sitting across from that table, the first question that we asked would not be, hey, what kind of experience would you like to have? The question you ask is, why are we here? Yeah. What is the nature of this relationship? What defines it?

What are its boundaries? What value do you expect from this relationship? And then I'm going to tell you what value I expect. And then we're in the middle. We're going to negotiate. what is the cost necessary to achieve that value. And so the Dialogue 7 framework starts there. It is inclusive of social exchange theory and the basic idea that we are all in a social exchange

to achieve our value expectations. And the only reason why I will consider you value expectations or value expectations is whether or not it's going to cost me less or more to get my value expectations, right? So if I say, you know, let's define the relationship, which is element number one, definition, and I say, let's define what this relationship's about and what each party in the relationship expects out of it. The first question I'm going to ask is, in exchange for what? If it's a transactional relationship, then I define the value by saying, you're selling me a hammer, that hammer costs $5.

That's a very inexpensive hammer. You know, hammers can go for a lot more than that. A hammer for $5, that's a good deal. Lacey, here's my $5. I get the hammer, right? But if in the process of you handing me the hammer and you handing you the money, you say, hey, hold on a minute, it's $5 for me to hand you the hammer.

It's $100 for me to come back and maintain the hand. and keep it the handle and the head together, right? Yeah. Now my valuation of $5 goes in a very different direction. So, you know, in context with our conversation of our experience, we do that to people all the time. We say, this product is going to be only this much money or this service is only going to cost you this much in financial or monetary terms, but we don't talk about the other cost,

emotional costs that are necessary to discuss for me to assess whether this relationship, this exchange is fair and whether the expectations are within the constraints of our relationship. So value always comes first. Culture always influences because, you know, if I say, here's a hammer and here's $5, my culture is going to say, hey, hold on just a minute. Let's just not do that. I said, Puerto Rican, Latin male, let's have a cup of coffee, let's sit down, tell me about your family. What kind of hammer is this? Where did it come from, right?

Now, all of a sudden, time and the expectations of time, the expectations of the inclusion of culture, maybe values, because that's really why I wanted to know you better, because those are my values. Now all of a sudden, you have to add that cost of being inclusive of my value system, my beliefs, my culture. So culture is number two. And we call it centricity because in Latin centrist, that's what really what it means is what makes up the center of what something or someone is. So we assess the value. I love that. I didn't know that. That's beautiful.

Yeah, it's a very cool word. It's a medical jargon that when you think about dissentress or something, you actually are talking. talking about the very nucleus of what something is. And unfortunately, we also use that term incorrectly. We say customer centricity, and we don't realize centricity is not about, you know, what a person does, but who a person is at the very, very poor of who they are. I love that. I love that term.

So if we can have a conversation about value, we can talk a conversation about the cost of centricity and being inclusive. if we can move to the third conversation and say, great, what is the expected level of engagement to accomplish the value, right? What's the level of engagement? I could sit at the table with you, Lacey, with zero engagement. We could have had an email that said the hammer is $5. I have $5. We could have sat across for each other with zero engagement other than look, and we could have just exchanged $5 for a hammer.

Sounds a lot like a little of my Facebook marketplace experiences. Exactly. Or you could go a marketplace and just sell it there and not even talk to a human person. But when you go back to, okay, how much engagement is going to be required for that? I'm going to call you every other day to ask you to give me support for the hammer? Am I going to have to, you know, maybe I'm a carpenter and I use the hammer as my primary hammer. and I want to call you every day to tell you about what amazing job I did after I finished a Camper tree project.

And so you may not have those expectations. And when I bring those expectations of engagement to the mix, what level of effort, what level of actual connection, what level of friction is going to be involved, then again, we're adding, we're adding cost to the value equation. So the third conversation must be engagement. And of course, the other conversations are really more about the maintaining of that relationship and the exchange. You have to know what knowledge expectation is required. Maybe I've never used to hammer before.

And it's going to cost you a lot of time just to teach me how to use the hammer. Maybe I have expectations that you know everything about hammers. So the burden of proof is on you to teach me about hammers. and for you to have the knowledge of what a hammer is, you also have to have the ability, right? It's not just about ability and knowledge is about accountability, which is a combination of those.

So those two conversations, conversations four and five, are about what are my expectations for knowledge and ability? Are you willing to do it? Are you able to do it? Do you know how to do it? And, you know, sadly, my experience working with companies, that probably is the number one thing that falls apart most of the time in conversations. From which perspective, the consumer not understanding or the business not explaining?

I think it's both, right? It's like, you know, back to the magic word that you use at the beginning, assumptions. Yeah. Assumptions. I am a salesperson and I sold you a million dollar contract for my technology products and services. and you knew the product inside and out, but you have never used it. So that knowledge was missing.

So, yeah, I had the ability to buy, and you had the ability to teach me about the product to a certain degree, but now that I'm ready to start using it and apply it to me, I'm not going to go back to the salesperson. They don't have their knowledge. I had to go back to a different person. So did I know that? Did people know?

and this is where I'm talking about from both sides, sometimes it is the customer's fault because they go in making assumptions that not alone knowledge is required for me to use this product for what I needed. And then when I realize that much more knowledge is necessary, I go over to the company and they say, we're not accountable for that.

We're not responsible. Then now is your problem. So those conversations, expectations of how much do each party need to know? know to get the value and how accountable they are to deliver on the value they promise, it's a marriage of two things that are extremely important. And then we'll wrap it up with the other two, which is things that you and I know about is, you know, we don't often talk about transparency. We talk about trust. We tend to say, oh, you can trust this product. And I say,

I don't want you to give me trust. I'm going to figure that out of myself. Product is an end result. So the conversation that you and I need to have is not about product, trust expectations. The conversation that we need to have is about expectations of transparency. How much access do I need? How much transparency are you willing to give me? And what is it going to cost me? We keep going back to that cost. How much is it going to cost me to actually get through what I need to know to trust you?

And when you say cost, you're not just speaking about actual financial costs. but like the cost of time, right? Or the cost of the emotional effort that I need to put in because I backed my whole budget on this new product that I just bought. And now I have to do XYZ thing. And my boss is looking at me like, hey, do you wanted that promotion? And now this isn't delivering. So like there's so many different levels of cost. It's not just that financial piece, right?

Absolutely. We tend to think financially first because, you know, we're business people, right? But we forget that time is a cost. effort is a cost, emotional real estate is a cost, the cost that we put on the emotional welfare of our employees is a cost. So yes, we have to have the conversations about what is going to cost us to be in a business relationship across many different factors that are going to take away from the value itself. The last conversation, by the way, is experience. So at the very end, Now we're talking about experience.

And so after all these six conversations that have occurred, what does that seventh conversation about experience actually look like then? I go back and forth in the terminology. In the book, I call it staging. And the reason why I call it staging is because when you go to a play, you don't just show up and how people go, now you're going to get whatever play we give you. You already came in with certain expectations

about what that experience was going to look like because yeah right i i got a certain concert because that's the kind of music i like and i've heard the record and i know what kind of concert i want to get we just my wife and i just went to see postmodern jewbox oh i love them they're amazing but have you ever heard them at an underground cave no in the mountains of georgia right it's like well wait a minute postmodern jukebox is amazing i understand what experience i will probably get from a concert with them But now they're in a cave. Wow, is that going to sound better?

It's going to sound worse. Yeah. So we define it. Was it? How was it? It was incredible, by the way. Oh, wow. I'm so jealous.

It was an amazing experience. And it was based on my base level experience of what I knew about them, right? But the point that I'm trying to make about experience and the final conversation in the Dialogue 7 framework is you cannot start with experience. You cannot start and say, this is what, this is how I'm going to treat you. I don't know about you. I don't know about your value expectations, your definition of value. I don't know about your culture. I don't know about the level of engagement you expect, knowledge and accountability issues.

I don't know about the level of transparency is going to take. How can I go and define experience without understanding your expectations for those other things? You did mention the thing that companies miss the most, which was knowledge. Was there anything else that, like, you see companies miss? When I initially wrote the book back in 2017, I was smack in the middle of all my doctoral work. And I had decided that anything that I was going to study had to do with business because I didn't want to go and do clinical work. I wanted to stay in organizational psychology, industrial organization psychology. So I kind of picked a research topic that had to do with, you know, what expectations companies bring.

when making decisions about technology purchases. And so we surveyed about a thousand different companies, which is where the seven things came from. Overall, the results included descriptions of expectation misses or misalignments or need for negotiation in certain expectation areas that used close to 1,100 different words to talk about the same things. They all rolled up to the seven things. Out of the seven things, engagement and understanding what engagement really meant and knowledge were the two things that really stood out.

Third to that was culture, really understanding or acknowledging the influence that culture, both local culture, national culture, have on how people manage expectations. But yeah, the first one was knowledge, but the second one was engagement. I use an analogy of gears all the time when I speak, and I tell people that, and you may have seen a video, I posted a video recently about it. It's a simple idea that a gear requires connection, right? If you have one gear here, one gear here, connection, without connection, there's no movement. But just because you've connected to something doesn't mean that you have the right amount of friction to make it move. And so I try to appeal to companies to understand that engagement is not just connection and it's not just communication.

It's connection that compels movement. And for some people, the expectation is that you increase the friction. And for some people, it requires that you decrease the friction. Right. And friction is not about word, right? friction may require that we just press with enough friction to kind of get to a point, to get better understanding, to get more clarity. For those of us who love conflict and have, you know, the job of managing conflict,

I love friction, right? Fliction emerges so many great discussions. Yeah. Some people are uncomfortable with it. Yeah. You know, I've had discussions several times with different folks around the word friction specifically. And like everyone's definition of that word, definitely.

It runs the gamut of what people think friction is and, oh, it's always bad or it actually can be a good thing because it creates like an investment from the customer in the process of them purchasing something, right? But I like the idea that it's definitely a neutral term, right? It can be good, can be bad. It just sort of depends on the situation and how we're leveraging friction. And also while you were saying that, J.C., I am trying to teach my three-year-old how to ride a bike, a pedal bike. And it's the same thing. Like he's trying to push on the pedal and he just can't get the pedal to go. And so like, I'm like, okay, he needs more friction.

Or maybe we need to like, I don't know, help pull him along a little bit. But the entire time you're talking, I was just thinking visually. I'm my three-year-old trying to ride this pedal bike. That's true. And, you know, even kind of following that analogy, right? It's like, what do people expect when they don't place the right amount of, you know, when there's not enough engagement between people, between functions, between organizations.

I include the community as a stakeholder in that as well, right? What do you expect when you don't have expectation conversations about what engagement means and what is the depth and level and amount of engagement necessary based on the expectations that people bring? I'm a highly engaging person, right? I like to engage with people at the deepest possible level because I know how you want to come to.

communicate based on what I know about you. Some people don't feel comfortable. Some people rather, especially the younger generation, they rather you text them, they rather you communicate with them via a mobile device on things to do with business, on things that have to do with personal things, which is what we tend to demonize millennials erroneously. It's not that millennials don't like engagements. They just don't like engagements that waste their time. And they have found better ways. to communicate certain things that traditionally we've used, you know, two-hour meetings for it. Yeah, yeah. Could that meeting have been an email?

Probably. That's right. Probably. Well, you know, you shared all these seven steps in the seven conversations, last one being actual experience. And when I hear you talk about these like seven different conversations that need to occur, what does that actually look like in action? Is this me actually like as a sales rep or? or as a consumer of a product, like trying to make sure I hit these seven topics?

Or how do I practically do this to make sure that we are aligned on expectations before we move forward? The most ambitious thing in my head when I wrote the book and as I teach workshops and teach people this, aspirationally, what I'm hoping people will do is be aware of them. Right. So that really is the first level. I think that being aware of the fact that you can't jump to experience and you can't just stay in value. You cannot start with number one and stay in number one, and you cannot start with number seven unless you address the other six. So the awareness is the most important aspect of my work and what I try to do.

And by that, I mean that if I sit down with you, I want to be aware that I understand expectations for our relationship. based on those seven things. Ideally, I would love to walk in the door saying, okay, I know the value this person expects and the cost is going to take from a perspective of communication, engagement, culture, accountability, knowledge, transparency, and then based on that,

I'm going to stage or designing an experience that allows them to get what they need without those other things costing them too much. So awareness is number one. But in my work, it has taken a lot of different shapes. Most of the time, and it's kind of funny because when I wrote the book, I thought, oh my gosh, this book is going to sell thousands of copies by HR people and, you know, like chief people officers, you're going to buy the books for everybody.

And it turns out that that's not really who started buying my book. the highest sale on my book at any given event or company was for professional services companies because they themselves did not know how to manage expectations with their peers, with their company, and with the client, right? Yeah. Like project managers would come in and say, well, my expectation is that we get this done on time and on budget. Well, what are the expectations of your peers to make that get, to time and budget.

What are the expectations of your clients? Yeah. And I think you bring up a good point here too. It's not like the way that you can roll out this strategy isn't just I'm trying to make a good experience for my customer. But literally like human conversation is the hardest thing we do day to day, we communicate with you, right? And that happens every relationship at work, whether it is with a client or it's with an

internal employee is all about mismatched or expectations or hopefully trying to set expectations that are aligned. So I think that is a really valid point here is that this framework isn't just for I'm trying to sell you something. I want to understand all these things. It can also be like I'm a boss and I'm trying to have a conversation with my employee on what expectations we have about the job role that they're doing or vice versa. The employee is trying to figure out like what is my what's my CEO needing and how can I support them? Yeah. I. A lot of professional services team, what they'll do is they know that they only have, you know, because time of materials, but you're building for your time. So they know they only have maybe five, 15 minutes with the customer.

You can't have every single person in the project go talk to the customer. And when you do have time to talk to the customer, you may only have 15 minutes. So I teach professional services team to have a checklist and say, okay, fine, go through the seven things, see what you can find out. the expectations of the client on your own, and then spend as much of that 15 minutes validating anything that you're unsure about, right? If you walk in and you're not sure as to who's accountable for what, like, conversation numbers more, then you better spend that time finding out what they're accountable for, what you're accountable for as well.

If you're unknown about the expected level of transparency, that's where you should be spending that 10 minutes on. But ideally, go in knowing as much as the other six as possible. And you mentioned salespeople. Salespeople do it as well. I think I teach salespeople that you should know as much of all those seven expectations before you ever have your first call with your client. And then spend the rest of the time listening and trying to have a conversation about what the other six or four, whatever those are.

Sometimes it's all seven because you just met them. spend as much time understanding expectations in those seven areas to kind of set the foundation. And man, you'd be surprised how easy it is to sell something, support something, or create an experience for something once you understand those other six expectations really well. I'm also of the philosophy, too, that if it's a mismatch, like, oh, your expectation is this. And what we offer is actually this. The sooner I can get to that realization of, no, we can't actually deliver on the expectation. you have, the better, because I'm going to spend less time with you trying to sell you on a product

or work with your team on this thing. At least then I don't have the negative customer experience later on whenever you're not happy with this thing. Like, how good is it that we get to the answer of no faster if it is a no, right? Yeah, lately, unfortunately, what I'm running into the most, and you've talked about this in your show as well is expectations for AI. Yeah. I thought, oh my goodness, I'm out of business. No one's ever going to buy. my book because we're all talking about AI and I'm realizing that more people are leaning on those seven things now more than ever because you got to understand all those seven things. You've got to understand what the value of AI is, how much is going to cost you, how is going to influence

the culture of companies and people, what level of engagement, what level of knowledge, accountability, and transparency is going to require and what the experience expectations will be when AI is in the mix. Those seven things are probably more important now than they've ever been. As companies kind of roll out new technologies, especially AI, why do you think employees are getting more anxious about this stuff than excited? Is it because of this expectation, or the unknowns, maybe like they don't know what the expectations are? My observation has been, and I try not to be too critical, because I know that companies that create AI, build AI, sell AI, integrate AI with different things. They got to make money. I understand that.

So, of course, you're going to create messaging and you're going to create a dialogue around AI and how it's going to fit your life, right? Yeah. With an immediate expectation, not if you use AI, when you use AI. Yeah. There are many companies today that have already started. actually, let me say that with a little bit more a pointed finger. I hesitated that. Okay, I'm all about it.

But I'm going to point the finger. They are companies that are expecting people to incorporate AI into everything they do, and some companies are doing a good job of training their employees, and some of them are not at all. They're expecting employees to figure it out on their own. Yeah. So this expectation that we create that, Yeah, AI is the answer.

It's in turn getting pushback from the people that are using it that are saying, I can get to point B without using AI. I dare you show me that AI is a better way. When I have to learn it, you could take away my job. It's going to reduce our team. When the expectations are so high. And it is a mantra I'm teaching myself because unfortunately it is a, where we're going. But when the expectation from companies is that, A, people know and use AI to make

their life at work more effective, two, that they create agents that they incorporate into processes that people use to, you know, accomplish. And three, that eventually we create agents, agent organizations, aging teams that humans manage, that's a really high bar. That is a very, very high bar. So when you ask the question about where's the hesitation from people, that's where the hesitation is. I don't think that we're addressing the human aspect of change management. Keneman did a lot of studies on this, and it kind of makes me laugh a little bit because Kenan, in his studies about acceptance and acceptance of technology, said that, even when something appears to be of amazing benefit to someone,

if the effort and the pain that they perceive it costing them to get to that point is higher, they will choose the safe zone every time rather than the suffering and the pain to get their greater value at a later time. It's just part of humans. And so, yeah, when we tell people, yeah, you have to use AI, it's going to be so amazing. Oh, my gosh, it's going to save you so much time. They go, all I see is pain. All I see is fear.

And we don't validate it or help them through it. What's the solution there? I've talked to a few companies that do actual training, right? So, like, one company we had talked to, they had said that everyone by mid-December would know how to build an AI agent, but not because they were just telling them, hey, by mid-December, you need to know to do that. but they were actively teaching and guiding and, you know, helping them understand this. So, like, I think part of it to erase the fear is upskilling. But what else do you think would help make this big shift actually feel better for employees?

This is going to surprise you, Lacey. But I think that they need to go through the seven things, right? I think that, you know, like, let's make AI the topic and walk people through all the seven things in the framework. If I sit down with you and I say, let's talk. about your expectations for value out of AI. So that's the topic. The expectation that we're talking about here is the value of AI. So let's align on that expectation. A manager, leader may say, my expectation is that you do three times the amount of work that it used to take you with AI because AI can proofread your emails, you can create conversation intelligence

reports, it can add data to the system that it couldn't do before, right? It can record calls and summarizing for you. So you used to take, what, three hours a week to do that? Well, I expect you to use AI to gain three hours back, right? Unfortunately, that's where we leave the conversation. We don't go back to the employee and say, what about you? What is the value you expect from AI in that value equation, help me understand what you perceive is going to cost you to get that value. So that reward minus cost equals outcome conversation. That's what we got to start, right? And then move through it, right?

Culturally, culturally, what's the expectation? If I go to Brazil, for example, and even better, Brazil, Chile, Puerto Rico, Mexico, people don't realize that AI is making great headways in those countries. There's being used by individuals very well, but it's not being implemented well at work. So culturally, how does an American company set expectations for the use of AI when we don't understand how culture is going to influence that, values are going to influence that? I remember years ago, and I'm going to date myself a little bit, I was working for a company very, very early in the voice recognition technology.

And we, I remember going to Chile and doing this amazing voice record demo showing how people could call in and it would recognize their voice and it would act naturally. And this is the statement that I made that it was the biggest mistake. I said, for the one person of. For the five people that you have in the cold center today, in the future, you're only going to need one. I was out of that office within 10 minutes of saying that. Because in Chile, at the time, I don't know if not, but in Chile at the time, there were government mandates that required an employer to employ a human, right, for as long as possible within limits. So the goal of the culture was to keep as many people employed and supporting their families as possible.

Wow, that's a totally different perspective than the U.S., right? Absolutely. So I broke the cultural expectations. And so with AI, I think it translates the same. And then, yeah, go through the same. Who's accountable for what with AI? Are you accountable for learning? Am I accountable to teach you?

Are you responsible for knowledge? Am I responsible for knowledge? What level of transparency is? are you going to lose or gain? And then, yeah, moving to what does it look like? What's the experience of using AI? Yeah, yeah. Well, as you talk about all these, you know, differences in expectations,

so much of it comes back to just, you know, poor communication between people, right? You know, if I take the example of a boss and an employee trying to learn AI, the boss's expectation of what an employee can do with AI, oftentimes without the boss even having maybe even used the tools themselves to know if it's even possible with the expectation they're setting. But yeah, it's like how can I have this conversation be trained to think like this? To your point, just be aware of these seven things. So that way I can make sure that we really are aligned.

Because what I found, and I'm sure that you've seen this too, is that people actually really suck at articulating what they want or what their expectations are. Right. Like I'll say one thing, but I mean something completely different. Like I just want to save money. It turns out, no, actually, you just want to save time. And like, if it costs the same amount of money, that doesn't really bother you. But there's just so many ideas in our head of, like, what we want and that we say, but it ends up not actually mapping to the truth. So we end up disappointed.

We don't really know why we're disappointed. But it's because our expectations were offered in the beginning or the words that we used to describe what we want were. So I do think this seven-step process is very, like, very much needed to help erase that problem that we have where we just don't. communicate well with each other or even on our own, like trying to figure out what we want. We're just so bad at it. Yeah. So you want to hear a probably the most recent, most ironic event realization in my life, right? And it was an event because I happened to be in the front of the computer and I was using AI.

And the most ironic thing that I learned is that the most effective. communication teacher that we've encountered in recent years is chat GPT. Explain more. So if I go into chat GPT and I say, can you get that to, can you get that for me? It goes, I know not of what thou speaketh, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And so I had to continue to give a context, right?

To create a good chat or create a good script, you have to give it an understanding of who you are, of what your purpose in doing something is, what the goal you expect, what role do you want it to have? Are you playing the role of a university professor? Are you playing the role of an elementary school teacher? You've got to be very clear in what you want from that chat GPT, right? And I sometimes sit down, right, and I do that. I take my time. I was at that point, during that event of realization, I was actually typing a script for CHIPT to go through a spreadsheet and look at all the different job titles in that spreadsheet. And based on those titles, make a determination of what their job function was.

And it took me probably an hour just to explain to Chai Chyipt's. just to explain to chat GPT that that's what I wanted. And the realization was this, Lacey, the realization was we do to people what we often do to chat GPT. We don't provide them background or context or what the objective is or what their role is in the interaction. We kind of just try to throw communication blanks at them. And you can't do that with chat, GPD.

You have to be as clear and concise. and be as good a communicator as possible to get the result from that little AI, just as you should be doing with people. Coming back to definitions, right? Like what even GPT thinks I mean by a word or a phrase is different than what I think that word or phrase means. And so it's so abundantly clear when we have these LLM conversations, right, where it's like, okay, GPT just doesn't know what I mean.

But then, yeah, I like putting on that hat of being like, oh, I wonder how often in my daily life that people around me just actually don't know what I mean because I'm just, our definitions, our words, our language is just different. One of my favorite quotes, and I cannot, the life of me remember who said it at this point. But for the listeners out there, I'll drop it in the show notes so that way I can properly give credit there. But one of my favorite quotes is, the limit of our words is the limit of our world. Right. And so the limit of what we can say articulate is going to be the limit of what we can actually create and experience in the world, or even from a relationship building's perspective, the limit of my relationship I can have with

you because we can't actually communicate with each other. So I think that's a really interesting way to think about that with GPT is like, oh, this is actually a great reflection, a great mirror of how awful we are at communication and setting expectations. Yeah, this is a psychological concept. It's called the theory of bounded reality, as in bound. as in confined. The theory of bounded reality is common sense, right? That the reality we create is limited by our facts, our knowledge, and experiences of the world. And we can't go into a conversation expecting that people know what our expectations are. But we do that all the time. So, J.C., you've got this perspective from a psychologist's lens on how to

about business, how to think about relationships, how to think about experience. What's one psychological principle that you wish every business leader understood earlier in their career? I brought it up already during our conversation, which is social exchange. Some psychologists call it independent theory, but it's really social exchange theory. And it's the idea that every social exchange requires an understanding of, you know, value and costs, almost like a scale. And the reason why I wish that we all knew it and that I knew it earlier in business and every business would understand it is because we tend to be very non-reciprocal,

non-equitable in our interactions with people, right? I don't want to use the word selfish, but a lot of times... That's what we are. That's what it is. We are very selfish. We think rewards, costs, me, me, I want me want reward. Yeah.

Center of the universe. No cost. Yep. Mm-hmm. And we don't, we don't say, by the way, Lacey, let's talk about you. What value do you expect? What does that look like? Yeah.

And let's kind of walk through those conversations that help me understand the level of effort, all the cost, the amount of money, the level, the level of effort, the amount of time that adds or subtracts from that value equation that's in your head, it's got to be mutual. It's got to be a dialogue, right? Not a monologue, not a diatron. It's got to be a dialogue about that exchange. But yeah, social exchange, I wish that we kind of taught it in leadership school and we taught it in business school and we taught our employees to kind of think that way during orientation they want. This is kind of a follow-up similar to that question around expectations. What's one expectation you wish leaders would stop setting?

Like, it sounds good when they write it down, but it's actually causing more problems later. I'll answer from the seventh perspective. So I wish the, from the experience perspective, I wish people would stop setting the expectation that we are there to give people a great experience without adding. within the context of who they are in our business relationship. That's one. I wish that people would just, because we do do that. We say we're going to give our customers the most amazing experience,

but we never take time to see if those customers were the right customers to begin with, because if we're giving the wrong customers a great experience, then we're not giving the right customers the best experience. Yep. And that's a huge problem. And then, and I'm going to get in trouble for this, Lacey, but I wish that companies would stop saying that our companies are like families. Yeah. It says the expectations that come with the, you know, with definition of the family and the context of the family.

I was thinking about this lately, actually. So I see a lot of ads for jobs for startups, right? So like I'm on LinkedIn all the time. I see like startup A promoting new new role. And so many times in these descriptions, they say that. Like we're like a family here. And then the job description itself is super encompassing. It's like you have to do all these things.

You're going to, you need to be flexible. You need to be able to work long hours. We're in wartime, you know, and you need to be willing to charge ahead. I used to speak like that, you know, 10 years ago whenever I was starting my career. I used to think like that. Like we have to be hustle. We have to do all this stuff. We have to have like a family culture.

I need to like all my coworkers that I work with. Like we need to have a great vibe. I don't feel that way at all anymore. I feel like that actually creates a really toxic environment for us to all work in. Yeah. So that I think it comes back to the idea that like actually if you look at most family dynamics, most of them are not great. Right?

Yeah. They're dramatic. They're seasons. So I have five kids, three grandkids. Two of those grandkids are 20 and 23, right? Yeah. And the whole dynamic of how we in Iraq has changed from the time they were babies to now, right? It's a very complicated expectation, transition from stages in life to the

the next stage in life. Those things are impossible to manage in the workplace. And I'll, I'll, I'll anchor that, that view. It is impossible to, to manage expectations like that while people are going through their own personal transitions in life, unless equity is mandatory, Meaning that if I am a single mom, I'm about to have, you know, a baby, and I need a certain amount of time because my mom lives miles and miles away and I've got to work at home. And my job requires that I must work from the workplace. Then as a workplace, if you're a family, you do what families do. You make sacrifices to make it equitable for people. But this is not a family.

This is a business relationship that requires that through that transition in life, that relationship doesn't exist anymore. So we're going to be very honest that that's how it works, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I've had a few more questions. I just want to shoot your way. We'll do it like lightning round styles.

I'll ask you the question and you just, you know, quick answer. Ready. Unless I derail you and we go down a rabbit hole again because it might happen. I'm ready for that. what's one book you'd recommend that would help leaders better understand how people actually behave? So the book of joy. There was a book written. It was an interview between the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu many, many years ago before Archbishop Tutu passed away. And they went off on a retreat and this very, very famous author interviewed the two of them. it is not a business book, but it makes you realize that you've got to bring joy to the workplace.

And you have to find your own piece before finding things like psychological safety in the workplace and harmony and collaboration. You've got to find your own piece. So I recommend that people read the book of joy and kind of figure out what are your personal mantras as an individual, which, by the way, for me, it's kind of hard to read them. but they're on my wall, right? They say positive, generous, grateful, kind. And so for me, if I cannot workplace, no matter where it is personal life and marriage, if I cannot act in a way that is positive, is generous, grateful, or kind, then I don't do it. If I don't have the ability to be those four things in any given situation, that I don't do it.

So the Book of Joy does a really good job of getting people thinking that way. I love that. I'm going to put it in my Amazon card as soon as we're done to this conversation. What's one contrarian trend you're betting on for 2026? Wow. So I kind of said it just now that I want to think in my own little world that things like unethical behavior, things like equity, things like balance can be part of a workplace by being a good, human being.

Unfortunately, I'm fighting very contrarian beliefs that say, no, you've got to be individualistic. You've got to be aggressive. You've got to be, you know, the boss. And sometimes the best strategy is to be kind, right? Not to make an assumption. This strategy is to say, in this situation, I don't know the facts. So I'm going to be generous with my investment. of time, effort, whatever it is. And yeah, it does feel a little contrarian, but you know what?

I don't care. I'm going to do it. That's great. I mean, in a world that's like so selfish, as we kind of talked about being kind is much needed. So I love it. What's one business framework, philosophy, or even a book that you used to believe, and maybe you championed, but now you no longer or buy into? I got to be careful because these are authors, author friends, and I don't want to step too much into things. But when I was in sales, I thought the solution selling book was like the Bible. And to some extent, I do believe in the core concept of the book, which is people are looking for solutions to problems. And so you should talk to people about your product in terms of what they deliver. Michael LeBoff is one of my mentors who wrote,

how do we win customers and kid them for life? He talks about the golden rule and he talks about how people love to buy, hate to be sold, all those things, right? I kind of fast forward to today. I wish that I had not read as many strategic selling book and solution selling books and instead wrote more about the art of war. I wish that I had read the art of war first and maybe some of the stoic books that are very popular today instead of reading things like solution selling and things like that. What's the reasoning for that? I'm just curious. Like why put the investment in time into those types of readings? So it's going to sound a little pious. I hope I'm right. I hope that in the end when we all kind of like figure out what the truth is

about life that they go, or J.C. was right. Yeah. But. Yeah, I'll let you know. As soon as I make it to heaven, I'll be like, got to find J.C. Where he at? That's right. Hey, J.C., listen. If I'm gone, if I'm gone, still come to my grave and say, hey, hey, buddy. My reasoning for that is that I think we overestimate the influence of character on business acumen. I think that we push strategies first. And so great books like those books, they're still great to use at a certain point in time.

But until you mature to a point that you understand and define your character as a human being, is very easy to know how you're even going to apply those things. What will happen is in the absence of character, the strategy will win. And to win by that strategy by any means could be really, wrong without character. So yeah, I think that I could, I would reverse it and really go back and read the, you know, the art of war, which is a strategy book that is based on conscientiousness and not pure strategy, but awareness, conscientiousness, ethic, honor, right? That's why the art of war is such a good book is because it's based on things like honor and awareness. And then you

out the strategy. That's my reasoning behind that. Okay. J.C., I have my last and final question for you, and it's a personal one. So I am a mom. I have a three-year-old son. I mentioned that. I'm pregnant with twins right now, 20 weeks, halfway there. And it's going to be three boys. So it's going to be wild. It's going to be chaos in this house. I am constantly trying to think about where we're headed for the future, right? Like, I've got these kids that I'm raising right now. What skills do you think this next generation are going to need to have? Yeah, this is going to be a, you know, the generation of your child and your upcoming twins, I think it's going to have the most difficult, you know, time in the world, right?

I was telling you about my five kids. I wish that I could come back and kind of anticipate it, not what world I was raising them in, but what world they were going to be adults in. And so the world that your children are going to live in is going to be a world where they're going to be valued for the intellectual value they bring, not for the tactical, strategic value that they bring, because AI is going to be doing a lot of that by that time. I think that the generation of your children is going to stand. out by being an innovative character first, innovative generation. So I think that, you know, if I was raising my kids today, that's what I would say. I would say, you know, I'm going to teach you human-centered design, right?

I'm going to teach you, that's going to be the first skill you're going to learn when you read your books and, you know, you know your ABC's. First skill I'm going to teach you is human-centered design because I want you to learn how to listen to people, understand their mindset, validate that the problem you're trying to solve is the actual problem you're trying to solve. And then, oh my gosh, you're going to have so many tools to go solve it. But if you don't learn the very skill of listening to human beings and validating what problems you're trying to solve, no technology in the world is going to help you be successful, right? But having said that, the benefits of that generation is that they're going to

have so many more tools to solve problems with and help the world. I really think that that's a generation that is going to end poverty, right? That's going to actually have, you know, it's going to find the cure to cancer. It's not going to be this. It's going to be that generation that we're bringing in right now. Yeah. Oh, I love that. Well, thank you, J.C. This has been a great conversation. I feel like there are probably a thousand different other rabbit holes we could have gone down. I would have loved it. Yeah, yeah, but I really appreciate you taking the time running us through the dialogue seven of the seven expectations. Yeah, it was great.

And for people who want to read your book, maybe dive deeper into that, because they're like, ah, I'm really intrigued by that. I would like to learn more. Where can they find you or where can they find that book? Well, surprisingly not, sevenexpectations.com. The number seven expectations. com. Great, great. So they can find you on there.

They can buy the book on there. Are you active anywhere on social media that people can follow along and kind of see what you're working on? Yeah. So, you know, J.C.Kintana.com and Severnifectations.com go to the same place. And Instagram at J.C. Kintana is active. And I'm trying to contribute more. That was my resolution for this year to kind of take stuff from both the children's books and the business books and start doing quick, you should know type clips. and contribute more during 2026. So yeah, you'll see me on Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn quite frequently. Awesome.

Well, for those listening, we're going to link all those things up below so you can click in the show notes and go follow and DM and bother J.C. All you want. Ask him more questions. But thank you. Yeah, thank you so much for joining us, J.C.