Megan Burns Revisits the Six Disciplines of Outside In: Why "Leadership Support" Is the Wrong Ask

I owe a lot to six words on a page.

Strategy. Customer understanding. Design. Measurement. Governance. Culture. For more than a decade, the six disciplines in Outside In shaped how I thought about customer experience. I built a good chunk of my teaching on them. My MBA students at Loyola read the book this fall.

So I got curious. I sat down with Megan Burns, the researcher who created those disciplines at Forrester, and asked her to go back to first principles with me. Not defend the framework. Rethink it.

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Originally aired October 15, 2026 as Episode 168 of The Trusted Guide Podcast.

What we cover

• Why the model was built on behavior, not attitude

• The disciplines companies most often fake their way through: customer understanding, governance, and culture

• Why change and leadership were deliberately left out, and what Megan would consider adding today

• How to build an engagement strategy: finding the "power core" and building coalitions

• The one question to ask before any gap analysis

She measured what leaders do, not what they say

Megan made one design choice that still holds up: maturity would be judged by behavior, not attitude. Her reasoning was simple. "My experience was leadership doesn't actually support it unless they do the things or they enable people to do the things."

"You don't need support. You need action."

When I asked whether she'd make a different call today, Megan said she'd likely add a leadership discipline, built on concrete behaviors. "It's like, no, you don't need support. You need action." Funding. Resourcing. Someone willing to take a stand on a policy that isn't fair to customers.

This is a tension I think about a lot with the leaders I work with. Leadership support is genuinely hard to earn. And that difficulty can't become the excuse for not moving anyway. Megan's advice: start with something specific nobody can argue with, get a win, and build from there.

Start with what's already working

My last question: before you reach for any of the six disciplines, what should you ask first?

"What are we doing right already? One of the things, you know, I do a lot of research on trust now and people are afraid that you're going to try to embarrass them. And so, if you come in and you're focused on here are all the things you're not doing, it may be accurate. But they put up their defenses."

That line has stuck with me since we recorded. Walking in focused only on the gaps puts people on the defensive fast, even when you're not wrong.

Where this leaves change leaders

Megan's research has moved into trust, and she closed with this: "you can design a trust-building experience. But if you don't have trust inside the organization, you can't get the collaboration to build it."

The framework tells you what good looks like. Trust is what gets people to follow you there.

Related episodes

• Episode 41: How Do We Activate Employees to Deliver Consistently Good, Strategically Amazing Experiences? (Megan's first visit to the show)

About Megan Burns

Megan Burns developed the six disciplines customer experience maturity model while at Forrester. It is the backbone of Outside In by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine. Her research now focuses on trust.

If this conversation was useful, you'll find more like it in The Trusted Guide Newsletter: practical insights on trust, influence, and leading change.