Customers are made simple by design
Our methods and tools have created the narrative that the organization is more important than its customers. This has allowed companies to confidently concentrate on themselves.
E.g.: When designing the Business Model Canvas (1) a group of 400 experts were able to distill the organization down to nine fundamental elements. But when filling out the [customer] Value Proposition Canvas business people are relieved from thinking about more than three (pains, gains and jobs).
We tell ourselves through our tools and methods that the customer is something simple we can understand, control and predict (2)(3).
The current design of the customer is intentional. An organization is a predictability machine designed for efficiency and standardization (4). Control is made to look like good strategy, helped by making the world outside the company simple .. very simple.
The organization’s command-and-control framework is so fragile it needs to make what it can’t control extrinsic — effectively putting itself outside the system it depends upon to work(4).
To fit with the capabilities of the 20th century organizational design customers have been kept at an arms length from the organization (4). We have designed tools and methods to prove to ourselves that this is ‘how markets work’. And so we slowly end up convincing ourselves that the tools are not there to keep customers out — the customers are truly as simple as our tools allow them to be… We shape our tools only to have them shape us (5):
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us” — Father John Culkin, SJ, a Professor of Communication at Fordham University in New York (5)
If our tools and methods don’t help us see the customers’ world, but our own world. If they hold up a mirror and not a window we won’t even know of the untapped opportunities because we won’t even see them. We might unintentionally, but successfully have designed the perception of the customer to fit the company, not the other way around.
E.g.: a customer journey might portray the customer as living in a singular world with a simple problem to be solved on a linear path through a nonexistent problem. But from a customer’s perspective nobody is a cable TV customer buying, onboarding, and churning. They are Janelle after a long day at work and kids wanting to sit down, relax, be mindlessly entertained and maybe rewarded with a laugh, chocolate bar, or glass of Pepsi (3).
Sources:
(1). The Business Model Canvas by Osterwalder and Pigneur, https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas/business-model-canvas
(2). Robert S.McNamara is credited with saying “you can buy customers” (1960). I found this in a deck on customer delight by Steve Denning, but have been unable to relocate it.
(3). For a more detailed critique of the AIDA model and the customer journey see midway through this article, https://betterprogramming.pub/are-you-solving-problems-that-dont-exist-c36685ad8c8b
(4). Shoshana Zuboff, Design flaws within organizations, https://youtu.be/GCPvnXUVteA
(5). The origin of the quote “we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us”, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/06/26/shape/
