A few months ago, I started getting uncomfortable about something that I observed, and it bothered me - the strange absence of a community of practice around customer decisioning. Not the absence of conversation, exactly. Vendors host plenty of those. Not the absence of writing, either; analyst firms produce reams of it every quarter. What was missing was the kind of structural thing that every other adjacent discipline takes for granted: a place where the practitioners actually doing the work could find each other, compare notes, argue about hard problems, and slowly accumulate a body of knowledge that belonged to the field rather than to a platform.
It struck a nerve I hadn’t fully anticipated. I called few practitioners across telco, banking, retail, and insurance - most of them senior, most of them experienced, all of them describing roughly the same loneliness. They had each spent years building real decisioning capability inside their organisations. They had each developed governance models, measurement frameworks, arbitration logic, organisational designs that genuinely worked. And almost none of it had ever travelled outside the four walls in which it was earned. When I asked them where they went to think about decisioning as a discipline - not as a Pega problem or a SAS problem or a Salesforce problem, but as the underlying craft itself - the answer was almost always a slightly embarrassed pause.
So, we built the place that should have already existed. Today, the Customer Decisioning Guild (www.customerdecisioningguild.com) is open to the public.
Join the Customer Decisioning Guild
The Guild has been running quietly in beta for a few months with a small group of founding practitioners - practitioner from organisations who have been doing decisioning seriously for long enough to have hit the edges and learned how to navigate back. The beta was deliberately small because the most fragile moment in any community of practice is the early one: the moment when the norms get set, when the language stabilises, when the difference between “a place where practitioners think out loud” and “another LinkedIn group nobody opens” gets quietly decided. We wanted the founding conversations to be dense before they were broad.
What we have learned from those early conversations is that the demand is not for content. There is plenty of content. The demand is for companionship in the thinking -for somewhere a senior practitioner can describe a genuinely hard architectural choice and have three other people who have made the same choice, in different contexts, push back on it with real specificity. That kind of exchange does not happen at vendor summits. It does not happen in analyst briefings. It happens, when it happens at all, in the corridor outside the conference room, between people who recognise each other as members of the same small tribe.
The Guild is built around three founding commitments that I want to be explicit about, because they are the things that will determine whether the Guild becomes useful or becomes noise.
The first is that it is practitioner-led. The Guild is not a vendor initiative. It is not an analyst product. It is not a marketing channel for a consultancy, including mine. The agenda is set by the people doing the work, not by anyone with something to sell to them. This sounds like the kind of thing every community claims, but it is structurally easy to compromise the moment someone with a budget asks for a webinar slot - and the test of practitioner-led is not who shows up, but who gets to decide what the Guild thinks. The editorial line, the working group agendas, and the Guild's positions on hard questions belong to the members. That part will always be led by practitioners. Vendors and consultants are welcome as members and contributors, and many of the best practitioners in this space sit on that side of the table; they participate as practitioners, not as vendors.
The second is that it is vendor/platform neutral. Every member is welcome to talk about the platforms they work with, because that is how real practitioner conversation actually happens. But the discipline-level frameworks, vocabulary, and reference architectures that the Guild produces will sit deliberately above the platform layer. A bank moving from one decisioning vendor to another should find that the Guild’s body of knowledge survives the migration. A practitioner moving between organisations should find that what they learned in the Guild is portable in a way that a vendor certification can never be. This is the same compact that distributed systems have with AWS, that capital markets have with any individual bank, that data science has with any individual cloud - and it is the compact that decisioning has not yet had with anyone.
The third is that it is slow on purpose. The temptation with any new community is to optimise for activity - daily threads, weekly newsletters, monthly events, the whole content-marketing engine running at full tilt. We are deliberately not doing that. The Guild’s rhythm is built around fewer, denser exchanges: working groups on specific hard problems (arbitration, governance, measurement, organisational design), occasional papers that try to actually move the discipline forward, and conversations that happen because someone has something genuinely worth saying rather than because the calendar said it was time. If the Guild ends up being the most thoughtful place in your professional life rather than the most frequent, that is the outcome we are aiming for.
What you will find when you join, today, is a small but serious group of practitioners; a structured set of working groups beginning to form around the hardest discipline-level problems; and a quiet commitment that the Guild will get more useful the more practitioners bring their hard-won knowledge into it. What you will not find is a finished thing. Communities of practice are not products. They become useful through accumulation, and the accumulation has only just begun.
If you are a practitioner who has built or is building decisioning capability inside an organisation - whether your title says CDP strategist, personalisation lead, AI decisioning architect, customer engagement director, or one of the dozen other things the discipline currently calls itself - the Guild is for you. If you are a consultant or vendor who has spent enough time in the trenches to think above your own platform, the Guild is for you. If you are earlier in your career and trying to understand what decisioning even is, the Guild is for you, and one of the things we most want it to become is a place where the next generation of practitioners can find a professional home that the previous generation never had.
Joining is straightforward. Go to www.customerdecisioningguild.com, sign up, and tell us a bit about the work you do. There is no fee, no sponsor wall, no qualifying exam. The only thing we ask is that members come willing to think out loud, push back generously, and share what they have learned with people they will probably never meet in person.
The discipline has been waiting a long time for somewhere to come home to. The door is open now. Come help us figure out what the inside should look like.
One last thing. The Guild is launching, not arriving. A lot of the thinking is already underway, but most of it isn't yet, and what eventually gets written down will reflect the practitioners who chose to write it. The decisioning ecosystem will be exactly as strong as the people doing the work decide to make it together. The doors are open now. The rest is a collective project.
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