If we assume that customer experience brings value to both the business and its customers, then what must be true about where and how the customer influences the organization (1)? — Customer experience helps define and shape how we work, what data we use and how we make sense of it, how we incentivize our talents and teams, how we measure our progress, hold ourselves accountable, improve, and celebrate successes (2).

Complexity can’t be simplified it should be managed. — In Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework (1) there are four quadrants: clear (used to be “simple” until recently), complicated, complex and chaos. The purpose of Cynefin is to help decision makers make sense of their surroundings in order to operate and make decisions in a more optimal way. e.g. don’t make…

Innovation is not the process of coming up with widgets or technologies. It’s about believing in and capitalising on the talent, imagination and brilliance that resides in your culture, your colleagues and your teams. — Innovation is about the willingness to be surprised, the openness and ability to listen and the curiosity to explore even the smallest things. …

With advanced analytics the organization can discover new information, develop new mental models and explore new types of sense-making. It can understand the world differently and make new hypotheses about what leads to progress. — The promise of the algorithm is to help the organization make sense of the world in ways it never could before. But the algorithm won’t do this on its own. Making a company data driven doesn’t make it anything. Getting the improvements we seek is up to us: the questions…

The goal of any measurement is better decisions. How can our measurement invite and support better questions and decisions across the organization? — The attached deck and highlights is from a presentation I was invited to share at the 13th Annual Customer Experience Management Summit in October this year (2022). In this article I am sharing the slide show via Google Slides and a few slides with comments below.

If you are in need of a good read these are 12 books which helped me better understand and connect the humans behind our customers with the power and limitations of our data. — 1. You look like a thing and I love you, Janelle Shane Shane explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) works by building and breaking solutions using AI and Machine Learning. The book is a very good gateway to how these dark boxes work. It’s funny and eye opening. https://www.janelleshane.com/book-you-look-like-a-thing

Jobs-to-be-done has become standard practice for discovering and describing what the customer values that is relevant to the business. It clarifies what progress the customer desires that motivates her needs. The business can benefit from the same clarity and customer centricity when setting its own strategy. — Download Jobs-to-be-done for business canvas here. Jobs-to-be-done for the customer: Using Jobs-to-be-done the team discovers and articulates what progress the customer is trying to achieve or what struggle they are trying to overcome within which context in order to achieve what desired outcome. …

Every method and practice has a problem-fit. Design Thinking is optimal for a certain type of opportunities, do you know which? — Design Thinking has unlocked the customer and introduced a creative approach to problem solving for countless of organizations. As with every solution it needs the right problem to solve. So when is the answer Design Thinking and when is it not? #Introduction — two perspectives

Do we blame the solution or the problem when something doesn’t work? — Remko Vermeulen (1) is credited with saying “75% of startups fail because they are solving problems that don’t exist.” Could this be true for every business, not just startups? If maybe not 75%, then 35% or 24%? Are we spending too much time on made-up problems that will never succeed…