How does a value fulfillment model explain a basic unit of experience?

Human beings experience the world, making sense of their experience in the form of stories and self-identity. Customers make sense of their buying and using experience in competitive markets, creating stories that give their experience meaning and guide their future actions.

Taken from cognitive science, we use a value fulfillment model to describe how each of us makes meaning.

Value Fulfillment Describes The Basic Unit of Human Experience


The figure above depicts the four functions and six dynamic relationships of a single human experience, providing the foundation for what we call a brand calculus.

Value fulfillment often starts with an ideal—a desire, aspiration, want, or goal—that invokes a learning process or lessons. These lessons consist of cycles upon cycles—dynamic gives and takes—with others, socializing information and experiences and creating what in this model we call knowledge.

We use this model to call attention to a remarkable insight and source of tremendous competitive advantage: the socialization of information and experience creates knowledge. Knowledge does not exist as a thing or objective (therefore, knowledge management constitutes a phantasm); rather, knowledge lives in social networks.

While certainly knowledge informs action, in the value fulfillment model we posit that most action arises from a precognitive, unthinking response to an external stimulus. This explains how the dynamic interaction of knowledge (socialized information and experience) and action often produces conflict.

Action also interacts with ideals in the form of resonance or sensory-based feedback. Generally speaking, feeling good indicates progress toward and fulfillment of ideals; feeling bad indicates missing the mark.

In any given moment, each of us experiences what we call a state—a gestalt consisting of a particular and interlinked thought, feeling, kinesthetic sensation, smell, taste, sound, and sight—modalities of subjective human experience.

In moment-to-moment states, we experience varying degrees of alignment with our ideals—integrity or a sense of being whole or complete. Sometimes, we have conflicting or muddied states; our self-knowledge or maturity leads us to a sense of nobility, the capacity to see a conflict or unwanted aspect of our state and rise above it. Various spiritual traditions call this grace, compassion, and blessings. Our state and our action interact, energizing action consistent with our ideals—courage.

The value fulfillment model offers new insights; however, as with all models, the value fulfillment model also generalizes, deletes, and distorts reality. A primary function of models is clarity of essentials.