The Geometry of Choice

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Bob Adams

Take a look at almost any decision-making reference in a book or magazine and what do you see? Most likely a matrix with one desirable feature across the top and another down the side. Conventional wisdom says you read the matrix in straight lines – you have to choose which feature you’re going to favor.

What if you chose both?

I first came across this idea in Jim Collins’ classic book “Good to Great.” Since then, many writers have used the phrase “both/and” to refer to decision-making that references both issues in a choice. Alan Webber, writing in “Rules of Thumb” states it this way:

We’ve moved from an either/or past to a both/and future.

One of the skills that defines an entrepreneur and an innovator is the capacity to generate new lines of sight. That mean looking at problems along a new dimension. It means rejecting old either/or choices and finding new both/and combinations.

It’s like the game of chess. Most of the plays involve moving pieces forward or backward or sideways. But the bishop? It’s a game changer because it moves on the diagonal. Now you have the ability to move across and up on the board at the same time. You have changed the geometry of choice with one move.

How are you going to put into practice the skill of making “both/and” decisions in your organization today?

The Guiding Principles of Guest Experience, Part 3: Design

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Bob Adams

How do you build great Guest Experiences?

Great [Guest] Experiences are consistent, captivating, and memorable by design. To achieve this, organizations must seize and retain their Guests’ complete attention by deliberately planning a defined Guest Experience that stimulates Guest senses and deeply engages them emotionally. – Colin Shaw, Revolutionize Your Customer Experience (modified)

It is relatively easy for a church to provide a great Guest Experience occasionally. But in order to create a WOW! Guest Experience, it is vital that you do this every time.

The only way to achieve a consistently great Guest Experience is if the experiences are designed.

To design something means that it is deliberate, not an accident or luck. Deliberate is a strong, proactive word. Stop and ask yourself these questions:

Is my Guest Experience process deliberate?
Did I deliberately set out to create and deliver a WOW! Guest Experience?
Is the outcome of the Guest Experience one that I have proactively designed?

From my observation and research in churches of all sizes across the country, in most cases the Guest Experience is not deliberate – it is something that just happens.

If you will reread Colin Shaw’s definition above, you should be able to answer the following questions about your church’s Guest Experiences.

What is the Guest Experience I am trying to deliver? Do you know? Does your team know? If I came onto your campus and asked your team “What is the Guest Experience you are trying to deliver every weekend?” would they be able to tell me? Would I get a consistent answer? Since emotions account for over half of a Guest Experience, a necessary follow-up questions is:

What are the emotions you are trying to evoke? Without considering what emotions you are trying to evoke, your Guest Experience can’t be deliberate. According to a study done by an Australian consumer psychologist, emotions range from the top end (people are appreciated, happy, contented, delighted, and valued) to a middle range (people are indifferent or emotionless) to the bottom (people are disappointed, frustrated, neglected, annoyed, or insulted). If you are going to evoke top-level emotions, then a third question comes next:

What senses are you going to use to evoke these emotions and how are your going to do this? Human beings take in information through their 5 senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. In our daily lives we use our senses to gather data about he world around us. If a Guest Experience is about the senses that are being stimulated, creating a Great Guest Experience means we define how and when to engage these senses and create a deliberate sensory impact and memory.

**Creating a Guest Experience that is defined, deliberate, and designed is a key to delivering a WOW! Guest Experience every time.**

This post is part of a journey translating Customer Experience learnings in the corporate world to Guest Experience in ChurchWorld. Material in today’s post was inspired by and adapted from Revolutionize Your Customer Experience by Colin Shaw, founder of Beyond Philosophy.

The Guiding Principles of Guest Experiences, Part 2: Purpose

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Bob Adams

What is the purpose of Guest Experiences?

While researching Customer Experience best practices a few months ago, I came across Beyond Philosophy, a company that helps organizations create deliberate, emotionally engaging customer experiences that drive value, reduce costs, and build competitive advantage. Based in London with an office in Atlanta, Beyond Philosophy specializes in strategic consultancy services, custom research, training and education.

Steven Walden, Senior Head of Research and Consulting, was kind enough to engage me in a conversation via email and phone when I contacted the firm about my work in translating corporate Customer Experiences to ChurchWorld Guest Services.

According to Beyond Philosophy, there are 3 guiding principles of Customer Experience. I looked at the first one yesterday; today it’s time to look at the purpose of Customer Experience:

Create an interaction between an organization and an individual.
Conduct a transaction between an organization and an individual.
Create a desire for future interactions and transactions.
Create value.
Create advocates.

Translation for ChurchWorld

As referenced in yesterday’s post and the Guest Experience definition, the first purpose of Guest Experience is to create an interaction. This means there is communication between the organization and the individual. Ideally, this interaction moves on to conducting a transaction. In the case of ChurchWorld, this is not a transaction involving money, but one of time and potential life change. At the same time, the organization should be looking to create a desire within Guests for future interactions and transactions. Guests will only come back if they perceive value in the interaction. Also, the organization has to see value in this interaction for it to continue to offer it. Finally, the Guest Experience should be such that the individual wants to tell others how great it was. This can happen over a few hours, days, or possibly weeks.

Putting this all together, ideally, this is what you want Guests to say when they are talking with their friends:

It was awesome! The church was easy to find following the directions on their website. Everyone made me feel welcome without being in my face, my children loved their time in their group, and the worship experience was amazing. There’s something special happening there, and I’ve got to go back again! Would you want to come with me?

In a nutshell, this is the purpose of a Guest Experience as translated from the ideas and concepts of Beyond Philosophy’s work in the arena of Customer Experience.

The first Guiding Principle deconstructed Guest Experiences by looking at a definition in detail. The second principle examined the purposes of Guest Experiences. Tomorrow, it’s time to reconstruct your Guest Experience.

The Guiding Principles of Guest Experiences, Part 1: Definition

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Bob Adams

What is a Guest Experience?

A Guest Experience is an interaction between an organization and a Guest. It is a blend of an organization’s physical performance, the senses stimulated, and emotions evoked, each intuitively measured against Guest expectations across all memorable moments of contact. – Beyond Philosophy (modified)

Let’s break this definition down:

Interaction – when an interaction takes place, you are communicating. The interaction can be a split second, as when a Guest is looking at your website or print materials. It can also span a period of weeks, as the Guest continues to explore your organization at increasingly deeper levels. In an interaction, you are trying to attract attention and convey a message, hoping to receive a message in return and process it. The longer you hold your Guest’s attention, the more likely your message will get across.

Guest – an individual who is experiencing your organization for the first time, or at least is still very uncertain about moving any deeper with you. Taken to the next level, a Guest can also be an existing individual who is in your circle of influence, but not committed to become a part of the organization.

Blend – a Guest Experience is not just the physical, or just the emotional, or just the senses; it is all of these blended together.

Physical Performance – factors such as location, facilities, phone calls, digital experiences, quality of services provided, etc. While a business might consider this the end of their experience, for the church this is just the beginning; emotions and senses play a huge part in delivering Guest Experiences

Senses – human beings take in information by or senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. In our day-to-day existence we use our senses to gather data about the world around us. Therefore, a Guest Experience is about the senses that are being stimulated. Organizations, to a large extent, can control what senses to stimulate, and this is the goal: to define how and when to deploy senses in your Guest Experience.

Emotions – the combination of physical aspects, the data received by your senses, and your expectations all contribute to evoke emotions. Forward-thinking organizations understand more than half the Guest Experience is about evoking emotions, and then plan how to evoke specific emotions.

Expectations – when you wrap all the preceding together, your Guest develops expectations. Their perception is reality, framed by the past and hoped for the future. Everything feeds our expectations, which are constantly being updated or confirmed.

Intuitively – these expectations are measured intuitively; they are within your Guest. One person’s shyness is another person’s exuberance. My definition of “loud” is probably different from yours. We all have personal measurement yardsticks within us.

Across all moments of contact – your guest can (and will ) touch your organization in many ways before they physically present themselves at your place. Through the web, direct mail or other print information, talking to a neighbor, etc. All of these are moments of contact that are Guest Experiences in their own right while together making up a complete Guest Experience.

As you see, there is a great deal behind the simple question, “What is a Guest Experience?”

Understanding more about what a Guest Experience is begs the next question:

Why bother?

I thought you’d never ask…

Tomorrow: Purpose

What is the Foundation of Design Thinking?

Posted on November 8, 2013 by Bob Adams

It’s the willing and even enthusiastic acceptance of competing constraints.

The first stage of the design process is often about discovering which constraints are important and establishing a framework for evaluating them. Constraints can best be visualized in terms of three overlapping criteria for successful ideas:

Feasibility – what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future
Viability – what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model
Desirability – what makes sense to people and for people

A competent designer will resolve each of these three constraints, but a design thinker will bring them into a harmonious balance.

This pursuit of peaceful coexistence does not imply that all constraints are created equal; a given project may be disproportionately by technology, budget, or a mix of human factors. Different types of organizations may push one or another of them to the forefront. Nor is it a simple linear process. Design teams will cycle back through all three considerations throughout the life of a project, but the emphasis is on fundamental human needs – as distinct from fleeting or artificially manipulated desires.

That’s what drives design thinking to depart from the status quo.

Questions for ChurchWorld leaders:

What are the constraints facing you today?
Can you classify them into the 3 categories listed above?
How will you balance them?

inspired by and adapted from Change by Design, by Tim Brown

Reading Requires Deliberate Practice

Posted on November 7, 2013 by Bob Adams

Researchers are clear about this point: It doesn’t matter whether it’s in sports, music, medicine, computer programming, mathematics, or other fields. Talent is not the key that unlocks excellence.

You need a particular kind of practice – deliberate practice – to develop expertise.

In honor of SUMS Remix, the best-of-class book summaries for leaders, I want to paraphrase authors James Kouzes and Barry Posner’s discussions in their book The Truth About Leadership on deliberate practice and apply them to reading.

Five Elements in the Deliberate Practice of Reading

Design a reading discipline to specifically improve your performance – if you want to become an expert, you must have a methodology, a clear goal, a way to measure success, and a specific process for accomplishing the goal.
Reading has to be repeated a lot – sloppy execution is not acceptable to top performers. Read far and wide in your chosen field with sustained effort.
Feedback on your results must be continuously available – every learner needs feedback. As you are reading, make it a practice to share your insights, comments, and questions with a group of peers, a mentor, or some other third-party to help you analyze how you are doing.
Reading is highly demanding mentally – developing expertise requires intense concentration and focus. Reading sessions need to be free of those daily interruptions that are commonplace in everyone’s day-to-day routines.
Sometimes reading isn’t all that fun – while you should love what you do, deliberate reading practice is not designed to be fun. The knowledge that you are improving and getting closer to your dream of superior performance should outweigh the sacrifices you make.

The best leaders are the best learners.

The best learners are the best readers.

Want to join me on the “practice” field of reading?

inspired by and adapted from The Truth About Leadership by James M. Kouzes and Barry Posner

>> Discover SUMS Remix, best-of-class book summary service for leaders here

Design Like Apple

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Bob Adams

John Edson is president of Lunar, a leading global design firm that has worked with Apple on many products. Edson’s book Design Like Apple uncovers the lessons from Apple’s singular approach to product creation, manufacturing, delivery, and customer experience.

From his earliest days at Apple, Steve Jobs set the standard that all products should be “insanely great.” Continuing that standard today, Apple sees design as a tool for creating beautiful experiences that surprise and delight, but also convey a point of view down to the smallest detail – from the tactile feedback of a keyboard to the out-of-the-box experience of an iPhone package. The entire Apple organization is designed to give top priority to design considerations.

Design Like Apple is subtitled “Seven Principles for Creating Insanely Great Products, Services, and Experiences.” Here are the seven principles with a short description:

Design makes all the difference – beauty, ingenuity, and charisma create a unique competitive advantage
Design the organization – nurture taste, talent, and a design culture
The product is the marketing – great products sell themselves
Design is systems thinking – product and context are one
Design out loud – prototype to perfection
Design is for people – connect with your customer
Design with conviction – commit to a unique voice

The content of Design Like Apple is a fascinating read, but the design of the book itself is amazing – this is a book that you won’t want to get on Kindle or other e-reader, but instead hold in your hands as you see how the author practices the book’s message in its own design.

You may wonder why I’m recommending this book for further study by leaders in ChurchWorld. That’s simple:

Leaders are designers.

The sooner you accept and apply that statement, the better off you will be as a leader.

inspired by and adapted from Design Like Apple by John Edson

I plan to dive into the individual principles at a later date, but if you are curious about design and leadership, take a look at these posts:

Will the DEO Become Your Organization’s New Hero?

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Bob Adams

More than rigor, management discipline, integrity, or even vision – successfully navigating an increasingly complex world will require creativity. – IBM Global CEO Study, 2010

There is no shortage of advice and counsel on how to become “creative” – as a matter of fact, the books and online resources available to today’s eager-to-learn leader are staggering to a fault. So much so that many leaders are tempted to throw in the towel and hope that their inherent traits or some measure of luck will suffice.

Authors Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland want leaders to take another approach – one that organizations have used many times in the past. In their recent book Rise of the DEO, Giudice and Ireland advocate that leaders identify the strategy and function best suited to these tumultuous times and use it to guide your actions.

In a time where organizations need agility and imagination in addition to analytics, they believe it’s time to turn to Design as a model of leadership.

When we think design, our first association is change: change that responds to need, embodies desire, pursues a stated direction and reflects a shared vision. Those who are designers – either through training or by nature – actively encourage and support collective change.

Enter a new model for future leaders – the Design Executive Officer, or DEO.

Design leaders usually possess characteristics, behaviors, and mindsets that enable them to excel in unpredictable, fast-moving, and value-charged conditions.

Which pretty much describes the world leaders in organizations of all sizes find themselves today.

Giudice and Ireland have developed six defining characteristics of a DEO; do any of these look familiar to you?

Change Agent

DEOs aren’t troubled by change; in fact, they openly promote and encourage it. They understand traditional approaches, but are not dominated by them. As a result, they are comfortable disrupting the status quo if it stands in the way of their dream. They try to think and act differently than others. They recognize this ability as a competitive advantage.

Risk Taker

DEOs embrace risk as an inherent part of life and a key ingredient of creativity. Rather than avoiding or mitigating it, they seek greater ease and command of it as one of the levers they can control. They recast it as experimentation and invite collaborators. A failed risk still produces learning.

Systems Thinkers

Despite their desire to disrupt and take risks, DEOs are systems thinkers who understand the interconnectedness of their world. They know that each part of their organization overlaps and influences another. They know unseen connections surround what’s visible. This helps to give their disruptions intended, rather than chaotic, impact and makes their risk taking more conscious.

Intuitive

DEOs are highly intuitive, either by nature or through experience. They have the ability to feel what’s right, by using their intense perceptual and observational skills or through deep expertise. This doesn’t mean they have a fear of numbers. They know they that intuitively enhanced decision-making doesn’t preclude rational or logical analysis. They use both – and consider each valid and powerful.

Socially Intelligent

DEOs have high social intelligence. They instinctively connect with others and integrate them into well-defined and heavily accessed networks. They prefer spending time with employees, customers, and strangers rather than equipment, plants, or spreadsheets. “Everyday people” are a source of strength, renewal, and new ideas.

GSD

DEOs can be defined by a new set of initials: GSD – euphamistically short for “gets stuff done.” They feel an urgency to get personally involved, to understand details through their own interaction, and to lead by example. DEOs make things happen.

Is it time for someone in your organization to move toward becoming a DEO, looking at every organizational challenge as a design problem solvable with the right mixture of imagination and metrics?

inspired by and adapted from Rise of the DEO, by Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland

When Moses Isn’t Around, You Have to Create Your Own Miracle

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Bob Adams

According to the authors of Solving Problems with Design Thinking, most managers they meet harbor a deep, dark secret: They believe in their hearts that they are not creative.

In today’s seemingly rampant innovation mania, managers and leaders cannot appear unimaginative, let alone fail to come up with brilliant solutions to vexing problems on a whim.

For most of us there will be no Moses-like parting of the waters of the status quo that we might safely cross the Red Sea of innovation. Drowning is more likely our fate. – from Solving Design Problems

There is hope.

Instead of trying to part the waters, leaders need to build a bridge to take us from the current reality to a new future.

In other words, we must manufacture our own miracles.

According to Liedtka et al, the technology for better bridge building already exists, right under our noses. What to call it is a matter of dispute, but they call it design thinking.

This approach to problem solving is distinguished by the following attributes:

It emphasizes the importance of discovery in advance of solution generation using market research approaches that are empathetic and user driven
It expands the boundaries of both our problem definition and our solutions
It is enthusiastic about engaging partners in co-creation
It is committed to conducting real-world experiments rather than just running analyses using historical data

And it works.

Design thinking is capable of reliably producing new and better ways of creatively solving a host of organizational problems.

inspired by and adapted from Solving Problems with Design Thinking by Jeanne Liedtka, Andrew King, and Kevin Bennett

For further reading:

Why Design Thinking?

What If Leaders Thought Like Designers?

Leaders Need to Work Our of Both Sides of Their Brains

Thank You, Martin Luther

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Bob Adams

On October 31, 1517, Luther posted 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany – and launched the Protestant Reformation.

For a brief backstory, go here.

The 95 theses contained Luther’s opinions of what was going wrong in the Catholic church. Excommunicated from the church and condemned to die, Luther was given protection by Prince Frederick of Germany. For the next 10 years,he worked on another task we should thank him for – the translation of the Bible from Latin (which only a few learned men could read) to German – the language of the people.

Others soon took up the cause, and the “protest” spread to other nations outside of Germany. Soon a new church was spreading across Europe – and the world, changing not only the religious landscape but all civilization as well.

Now almost 500 years later, look how far we have come.

energized by the steady, deliberate journey in generational learning

Author Archives: Bob Adams