Over the last twelve months, I have had the privilege, and at times the challenge, of being co-author of the new ITIL Version 5 Experience module.

My first experience of authorship was deeply personal. Whatever Next? was self-published, rooted in lived experience, shaped by the questions I have carried for years about transformation, people, systems, friction, and what it really takes to make change stick. It was my voice, my stories, my perspective, brought together into something I hoped would feel honest, useful, and human.

Working on the ITIL Experience module has been something quite different.

Not better, not worse, but different in all the ways that matter.

This was not one voice trying to make sense of the world. This was a collaborative act of knowledge-building inside one of the best known service management movements in the world. It brought together the thinking and experience of Mark Smalley and me, the wider PeopleCert ecosystem, fellow authors reviewing the work, beta testers stress-testing the ideas, product owners shaping the direction, and ultimately Roman refining the final text so it could land as a coherent and credible piece of guidance.

That process has been eye-opening.

It has reminded me that authorship can be intimate, but it can also be collective. Sometimes writing is about expressing what you have seen. Sometimes it is about creating something that others can use, teach, test, challenge, and build on. Sometimes it is both.

That is perhaps one of the clearest differences between Whatever Next? and ITIL Experience.

Whatever Next? is built around The Five Human Lenses of Transformation™, and around stories, tensions, and lived moments. It asks people to look again at transformation and to notice what is really going on beneath the plans, frameworks, and official narratives. It is grounded in experience, but in a personal and reflective sense.

The ITIL Experience module, by contrast, is guidance. It is designed to help people look out from IT and pay closer attention to the experience of others. It offers models, frameworks, language, and a case study running through the material to help bring the ideas to life. It is less about personal reflection and more about shared practice. Less about telling my story and more about helping others interpret theirs.

And yet, beneath both books, there is a common thread.

Experience matters.

Not as a slogan. Not as a soft layer applied after the fact. Not as the decorative end of a process that was designed without people in mind. Experience matters because people experience the consequences of how services are designed, delivered, supported, and changed. They live with the friction. They carry the effort. They absorb the confusion. They feel the difference between a service that technically works and one that genuinely works for them.

That difference is the human gap: the distance between the plan and what people actually believe, experience and do.

That was at the heart of our thinking throughout the ITIL Experience book:

• How do we help IT pay better attention to the people around it?
• How do we move beyond service metrics alone and look more carefully at journeys, episodes, and states?
• How do we understand stakeholders not just as roles in a model, but as people whose wellbeing, representation, and engagement shape whether something works at all?
• How do we capture experience in ways that go beyond numbers, bringing together proxies, narratives, and ethnographic insight?
• How do we improve in ways that are experimental, transparent, and trust-building rather than closed, defensive, and overly certain?

The phrase that kept surfacing for us was this:

Make IT feel as good as it functions.

That line stayed because it says something simple that many organisations still struggle to act on. A service can meet its targets and still leave people frustrated. A platform can be technically stable and still feel hard to navigate. A team can deliver exactly what was asked for and still miss the experience of receiving it.

Function matters, of course. But function alone is not the point.

What I found especially powerful in this work was the way the models helped create a more rounded picture. The experience lens became bigger than satisfaction scores or moments of feedback. It drew in journeys, stakeholder relationships, evidence, interpretation, internal condition, expectation, perception, evaluation, and the challenge of understanding what people actually experience rather than what we assume they experience.

That feels important.

Because the more complex our systems become, the easier it is to mistake operational performance for human value. The more mature our methods become, the easier it is to become fluent in process while losing sight of feeling. And the more pressure teams are under to deliver, the more tempting it becomes to reduce experience to a number on a dashboard.

But experience does not live in dashboards.

It lives in people.

It lives in anticipation before something happens, perception while it is happening, and evaluation afterwards. It lives in trust, in effort, in clarity, in confidence, in whether people feel represented, whether they feel considered, whether they feel the service was designed with any real understanding of their world.

That is why this work has mattered to me.

It has given me another perspective on authorship, certainly. But more than that, it has reinforced something I have believed for a long time. Whether we are writing a personal book about transformation or contributing to a global body of knowledge, the most useful work often comes when we stop treating people as an afterthought.

The real test is not simply whether something functions.

It is whether, in functioning, it creates an experience people can believe in.

And that feels like work worth doing.

Whatever next?