Image by MidJourney, Prompt by Andromath.

The system is the customer

Every model has a bias. And every time you choose a model like e.g. a business model canvas or a customer journey the model is choosing for you which information is important and which information is not.

e.g. if you use a Customer Journey to map a commuter’s trip from their home to work using public transport you are focusing on what is within the immediate vicinity of the customer: e.g. payment app, waiting time or available seating. But you would not include how many buss drivers there are employed by the bus company nor the scarcity of buses, cost of fuel or the city’s traffic or noise pollution.

A traditional customer journey is very shallow and usually only includes elements which directly influences the customer. Icons from Nounproject, illustration by the author

Understanding customer’s needs and motivations, imagining their situation and empathizing with how they make decisions is vital to any organization partnering with their customers. But the customer is only one part of the situation that needs to be fully understood, considered and solved for.

The customer is usually only present in one part / the final leg of a system of influence leading to their experience. Icons from Nounproject, illustration by the author.

We need to distinguish between being customer centric and myopic. Understanding the system the customer is one part of is equally important to understanding the customer herself.

Only seeing through the lens of the customer means taking a one-dimensional and linear approach to problem solving. Potentially missing the side effects of our actions (although there are no side effects in systems thinking, only effects(1)), and running the risk of creating more problems. To quote Kevin Slavin:

“Every time you solve a problem you create one” — Kevin Slavin

e.g. while mapping the whole system the city council or buss company might see that the commuter experience is the outcome of a system that is inherently complicated with several degrees of effect and a multitude of relationships.

The schematic illustrates direct and degress of indirect effects leading towards or away from the desired outcome. The most powerful influence on the outcome might be found at any degree of separation. Illustration by the author.

And that if they want to increase customer satisfaction they can’t just change e.g. the time schedules because there might be knock-on effects like limited bus-driver training available, increased local pollution or scarcity of busses in other places which can deteriorate the service everywhere else and impact the city as a whole more negatively.

And maybe they will discover that a root problem to better customer service is not time schedules — as they cannot magically be fixed — but shortage of drivers due to low pay (US), dismal public housing (Bristol) or road designs (Brazil).

Knowing and focusing on the customer is vital to a healthy business, but so is understanding that the way to create better outcomes might as well be an indirect effect as a direct one, or a deep structural change (e.g. housing) as well as a shallow one (e.g. time-schedules).

Choosing the right model(s) means being better able to see how any good or bad decision can cascade through a system creating which alternative desired or undesirable effect.

In the article The Journey, the experience and the system I present a few examples of models and how they are fit to solve different types of problems. Illustration by the author.

Sometimes by understanding the whole system with all its forces of influence we can see that even something small and inexpensive far away can have an outsized effect on the outcome.

Like making people opt-in or -out of organ donation instead of skipping the question entirely when they undertake their drivers license application (link) might have an outsized effect on the ability to treat people with organ failures in every hospital across the country.

Or how Malcolm McLean (link) sat in his truck hoping to get home for Thanksgiving back in 1937, imagining the efficiency gain if it would be possible to offload his entire truck in one go compared to handling tens of individual boxes as was the norm back then. McLean invented the container, changed the shipping industry, how we designed our harbors and eventually the cost and scale of global trade.

The promise of systems thinking is that it is a better approach to help the company understand the whole market and operate as a coordinated whole company.

And in complex continuously moving environments we need better multi-dimensional models that allow us to understand as much as we can about the complex relationships and effects of our decisions, indecisions and actions.

In other words: the better way to serve the customer is to serve the whole system.

For your further pleasure: An excellent introduction to System Thinking by MIT’s John Sterman (starts at 2m43sec)