Phantom Dynamics of Service Networks
Beyond the Customer Journey
Phantom Dynamics of Service Networks challenges the core assumption behind customer journey thinking.
The book explains why the customer journey is not a real structure but a retrospective narrative, and why organizations make rational yet destructive decisions when they rely on maps in a world that actually operates through networks, system states, and state transitions.
This is not a new model or a new canvas.
It is an intervention: a shift from stories to reality
Coming May 2026
Available soon on:
Amazon
Apple Books
Google Play Books
Who is this book for:
- For executives and boards who recognize that customer journeys, roadmaps, and plans no longer explain failure
- For service design, CX, and strategy professionals who want to understand why current tools reassure but do not guide
- For IT and system architects for whom state spaces, delays, and non-linear responses are everyday reality, not metaphors
- For academic readers working with complex systems, networks, and systems theory
- For readers willing to abandon narrative comfort in order to understand how systems actually behave
Why the Customer Journey Does Not Reflect Reality
The customer journey is one of the most persistent beliefs of the modern organization. It offers a story that makes complexity appear manageable – and precisely for that reason, it blinds.
Phantom Dynamics of Service Networks shows why the customer journey is a retrospective fiction: an explanation constructed after events unfold, not a mechanism that governs system behavior. The book systematically dismantles the ontology of journey thinking and replaces it with the language of state transitions, network responses, and invisible tensions.
The work does not target individual methods or professionals, but the entire linguistic and institutional structure that has turned “paths” into substitutes for leadership. It demonstrates how rational decisions lead to irrational outcomes when reality is read using the wrong map.
The book does not offer a new model.
It removes the map.
The reader is deliberately left in an “empty space,” where uncertainty is not chaos but a prerequisite for restoring genuine observation. This creates a bridge to the next volume, where the question is no longer why current thinking fails, but how to live and lead in a world without a path.