EDGY: a common language to align identity, experience, and operations

I think this article will be of interest to many people because it deals with a subject that we all face on a regular basis to a greater or lesser extent: the need to get people from different professions and backgrounds to work together, which means above all getting them to understand each other and speak the same language.

In my case, I have always worked by mobilizing human, process, and tech levers together, which brought me face to face with this issue very early on. I think the high point was reached when, simultaneously managing the People and Operations functions and leading an employee experience initiative with a strong operational focus (Employee experience is useless (if it is not linked to the business) and People are everywhere in the workplace, but HR is nowhere when it comes to work) that mobilized all business lines and functions in a spirit of continuous cross-functional and collaborative improvement, I had to get people who don’t do the same thing, don’t speak the same language, all have a fragmented view of the issues, and may even have divergent or even opposing objectives, challenges, and interests to talk to each other.

The other day, I was having lunch with my friend Olivier Réaud from In Principo, whose job, strategic facilitation, means that this topic is at the heart of his business, which always leads to rich conversations when we meet in our favorite cafeteria. On this occasion, he told me about a new approach he was developing within his firm, based on a language and method I had never heard of before: EDGY ([FR]EDGY, the universal language of simplexity and [FR]AI and the power to act). Proof, if ever it were needed, that even if you have been interested in a subject and practicing it for more than 20 years, there are always new things to learn.

So I spent a significant amount of time exploring the subject and decided that the results of my investigations were worth an article.

To get back to basics, I think we can all agree that for more than twenty years, companies have been living in a kind of permanent fog where the quest for the ideal experience has become the watchword of all strategies. We promise seamless customer experiences, engaging employee experiences, and differentiating partner experiences. But by hammering home this word, we have ended up emptying it of its substance (Using the experience word for anything will ultimately break it). In many cases, experience is reduced to window dressing: a pleasant interface, a seemingly simplified journey, polished communication. And yet, as we well know, the experience only works because the operational architecture is able to support it. A promise of speed is a lie if logistics remain slow, a promise of simplicity is an illusion if internal processes are labyrinthine.

This disconnect is perpetuated by a fragmentation of languages. Each function of the company speaks its own language, defends its own agenda, and asserts its own interpretation. Marketers invoke the brand, designers focus on journeys and emotions, architects talk about capabilities, financiers talk about economic models, and operations talk about daily procedures. These languages are not mutually exclusive, but they do not converge either. They are juxtaposed like geological strata, with no bridges between them, and the company becomes a mosaic of partial representations, each accurate within its own scope but incapable of forming a complete picture.

This fragmentation makes any transformation complex, because transformation requires alignment, and only what is said in a common language can be aligned. This is where EDGY (Enterprise Design Graph Interplay) comes in. This visual language, created by Intersection and designed to overcome the usual silos, offers a unique framework where identity, experience, and operations connect and respond to each other. EDGY is intended to serve as an organizational lingua franca, a shared grammar that finally allows each discourse, each promise, and each capability to be placed within a common narrative.

In short:

• The complexity of organizations stems largely from a lack of common language between different business lines, which hinders alignment between identity, experience, and operations.
• EDGY is an open-source visual language designed to connect the identity, experiential, and architectural dimensions of an organization in a way that is logical and understandable to all.
• The EDGY approach reveals “white areas” (unfulfilled promises) and “friction points” (contradictions or critical dependencies) within companies.
• Comparing the EDGY maps created by management and operational teams highlights the gaps between strategic discourse and reality on the ground, promoting awareness.
• EDGY is not only a methodological tool but also a political one, as it structures representations while opening up dialogue and redistributing the capacity for action within the organization.

The origins of EDGY: responding to silos of thought

EDGY was born out of an observation we all made in the field: existing notation systems are not enough. On the one hand, standards such as ArchiMate, UML, and BPMN are powerful and rigorous, but so technical that they exclude the majority of people in a company, starting with senior management. On the other hand, there are more flexible design approaches that are more engaging in creative workshops, but unable to survive beyond the whiteboard or the post-it note session.

After working at SAP, where as a designer he saw how compartmentalized approaches remained between business lines, design, and architecture, Milan Guenther decided to create Intersection. The ambition was to bring together practitioners who, each in their own discipline, sought to represent and transform the company without ever managing to understand each other. It was in this context that EDGY was born, with the aim of offering a visual language that is open and accessible, that everyone can use, but structured enough to support the demands of organizational complexity.

It is a bold challenge: to create a language that is both accessible and effective, enabling a CEO and an IT architect to read the same map and understand the same thing, ultimately leading to a joint decision. Because what organizations really lack is not models, but communicability between models.

Another key feature is that EDGY is published as open source. This means that its language, definitions, and materials are accessible to everyone, free to use and adapt, with no proprietary restrictions. Whereas most notations or methods are supported by closed standards bodies or publishers who control their use, EDGY was designed as a common good, evolving, that anyone can adopt. This openness guarantees its dissemination, but also its legitimacy: it is not the method of a firm or a supplier, it is a collective language designed so that everyone can contribute to it.

The three facets of EDGY: identity, experience, architecture

EDGY is based on three pillars.

Identity is what defines an organization: its mission, values, culture, and promises. It is not limited to a marketing slogan, but is the source of it. It is identity that causes two companies facing the same challenge to take different approaches. For example, one may choose to respond to a problem by emphasizing speed, while another, faced with the same challenge, may choose reliability.

Experience is what customers, employees, and partners actually experience. It is the tangible translation of identity. A proclaimed value only exists if it is embodied in interactions.

Finally, architecture brings together capabilities, resources, systems, and processes. It is the often invisible but indispensable mechanism that transforms identity into experience.

EDGY requires these three facets to be articulated. A promise of identity must be matched by a lived experience. Each experience must be supported by operational capacity, because without it, the promise is not upheld, which is the cause of most strategic failures.

EDGY is not limited to a conceptual framework: it is visually represented by highly legible maps. Each element is represented by a colored block, placed in the facet that corresponds to it, and connected to the others by arrows or simple tree structures. Unlike complex notations where symbolism becomes an obstacle, EDGY favors minimal visual grammar: a few colors, basic shapes, three types of relationships (flow, link, tree). It is this simplicity that allows a manager, a designer, and an operational staff member to understand the same map without needing a dictionary.

One can imagine a company claiming to be responsive. It’s part of its identity. It therefore promises a smooth customer journey, without unnecessary waiting. But if, in its architecture, every commercial decision goes through three hierarchical levels and a rigid ERP system, the promise is never fulfilled. The experience is slow, and the brand loses credibility. EDGY highlights this discrepancy by contrasting a promise with a lack of capacity.

Blind spots and friction points: seeing what cannot be seen

Even without having practiced EDGY, it is not difficult to understand its potential because it highlights things that were implicit, unspoken, masked by reassuring rhetoric, or simply the gap between the vision that leaders have of their company and the reality on the ground. A very good way, then, to stop leaving elephants in the room.

In my opinion, EDGY can help identify two types of issues that I believe are essential in improving or even transforming an organization: white areas and friction points.

White areas are promises that are not being fulfilled. They appear visually when an identity or experience card remains isolated, with no arrow linking it to an operational capability. For example, a company proclaims simplicity, but no resources are mobilized to guarantee it. It boasts speed, but no process embodies it.

Friction points appear when a dependency is too strong or when a contradiction is obvious. A system connected to everything becomes a bottleneck, and a promise of 24/7 availability relies on a team reduced to the bare minimum: the risk is obvious.

Typically, in a bank, we can imagine that a promise of transparency enshrined in its identity translates into real-time monitoring of transactions, but that the architecture continues to rely on a central system with a 24-hour delay: the blind spot is obvious.

Similarly, in industry, we can imagine a manufacturer promising “zero defects”: the customer experience describes continuous quality monitoring, but the production workshops are content with random checks. Here again, the promise rings hollow.

I have also found real-life examples: for example, at the Intersection Conference, a distribution system operator (DSO) showed how EDGY enabled it to model a “composable” architecture linking customer journeys, capabilities, and technologies. The map made critical dependencies visible and helped prioritize the necessary investments (Modeling a Composable Architecture with EDGY).

The executive vs. operational mirror

Having used similar tools, I see a limitation to this type of approach, but one that can be turned into a huge opportunity if used correctly. Indeed, as I said above, it is not uncommon, and in fact almost the norm, for there to be a huge gap between what executives think about their company and what customers and employees experience. For example, I don’t think that the management of a company like Orange imagines that the case I reported a year ago could happen and is still unresolved (How years of progress have killed customer service). Either it can’t happen, or it’s been resolved and we can move on, but in reality, it’s an industrial accident in customer service. A small, gratuitous jab, but one that perfectly illustrates this point, and this story continues to give me ulcers.

One of the most enlightening uses of EDGY would therefore, in my opinion, be to have senior management and operational teams work separately. The former draw up their map, the latter draw up theirs.

The senior management map will often be ideal: it displays an ambitious identity, imagines a flawless experience, and describes a supposedly modern architecture. The operational team’s map will be more “rough“: it shows the actual experience, sometimes far removed from the proclaimed values, chaotic customer journeys, and processes circumvented by makeshift solutions (Work about work: when the reality of work consists of making things that don’t work work).

The confrontation between the two will therefore be an opportunity for awareness and will make denial impossible. I would like to take this opportunity to refer you to the concept of the Iceberg of Ignorance, formulated in 1989 by Sidney Yoshida, which shows that only 4% of an organization’s problems are known to executive leaders, while 100% are known to front-line employees.

And I dare not imagine what would happen if customers could be involved…

In a public administration, we can imagine that management has included “simplicity for the user” in its identity and described smooth digital journeys in the experience, while field teams complain about non-interoperable systems and paper forms. Cross-feedback would immediately highlight this discrepancy.

I refer you to the Cookbook EDGY (Section 7.1.6.2) to understand how different teams (design, IT, business) can each produce their own map and then merge them.

Identity, culture, and uniqueness of responses

However, in my opinion, it would be reductive to limit EDGY to highlighting shortcomings or friction. Its value also lies in showing that consistency cannot be universal.

Two companies facing the same problem, with the same objectives, will never respond in the same way because their identity guides them. A company with an engineering culture will respond with technology, while another, shaped by a service culture, will focus on people. It is not just a question of efficiency, it is a question of consistency.

In retail, for example, we can imagine two stores facing the same problem of queues at the checkout. One, with a technological culture, will invest heavily in automatic checkouts, while the other, shaped by a culture of proximity, will train more cashiers and open more checkout lanes, valuing human contact. The problem was the same, but identity shaped two radically different responses.

And here again, there are documented cases: in this article, practitioners explain that one of the advantages of EDGY is that it allows different choices to be represented in the face of similar constraints, because identity and culture shape architecture and therefore experience (An EDGY approach to designing Enterprises).

I have often addressed this subject from the perspective of the link between employer brand and employee experience (Employee Experience: The Missing Facet of Employee Value Propositon and Your employee experience is your employer brand) and, more broadly, I refer you to the quote that I consider to be seminal from Stephen Cannon, then CEO of Mercedes-Benz USA, who said that “customer experience is the brand” and that “customer experience follows employee experience” (Mercedes Benz CEO: Customer Experience is the New Marketing). There is no identity without execution, but identity also dictates execution.

A political as well as methodological tool

For me, EDGY is not just a method, but also a tool that is as political as it is methodological.

Political, because it gives a voice back to operational staff, highlights contradictions, and prevents management from remaining in denial. Methodological, because it structures representations, provides a reproducible framework, and allows us to move from a workshop to a roadmap.

It is this dual status that makes it interesting: a simple map can become a tool for dialogue.

Bottom line

You can’t transform a company with slogans. Nor can you transform it by accumulating partial models that never come together. Transformation requires convergence, an ability to connect what is promised, what is experienced, and what is executed.

EDGY aims to provide this common language. It reveals the blind spots where promises disappear, operational friction wears down, and gaps between management’s vision and reality on the ground. Above all, it enables the construction of a coherent approach shaped by the company’s identity, which gives meaning to its choices.

In this sense, EDGY can be a bridge between languages, partial visions, ambitions, and reality.

To answer your questions…

Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)