narrative « John Caddell's blog

Posts Tagged ‘narrative’

Scott Berkun reminds us of the value of learning from mistakes

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

You may remember my project The Mistake Bank. It’s on hiatus now (isn’t that what broken-up bands say?), and someday soon I’ll be putting up a post on what I learned from that project. (Thanking Cynthia Kurtz for that idea.)

In the meantime, people are still screwing up and, thankfully, learning from those experiences. Most recently there was this post from Scott Berkun: “My Biggest Mistakes.”

Scott, in addition to being a great speaker and blogger, is a first-class mistake learner. His post “How to Learn From Your Mistakes” was an early entry in the Mistake Bank. It’s gratifying to see that he still appreciates the value of reflecting on his past actions, and retains the sense of humor that allows him to do so.

Tags: complexity, learning, mistake bank, mistakes, narrative
Posted in learning | Comments

The tyranny of the dashboard

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

I frankly am beginning to feel that I’m shouting into a void here. Companies are spending more time and money equipping the CEO and team with information, while starving the thousands of ground-level employees who, frankly, can have more impact on the company’s success simply through their day-to-day actions.

One ray of hope: an article in the December Harvard Business Review (co-authored by Fred Reichheld, the creator of the Net Promoter Score – a simple metric that somehow captures the complexity of customer perception) entitled, “Closing The Customer Feedback Loop.”

As opposed to the conventional wisdom of gathering masses of data and trying to detect high-level patterns in them, Reichheld and his coauthors talk about getting more granular – gathering information at the customer transaction level, creating small rollups of the data, and sharing them where they can do the most good – with the front-line employees and first-level management who directly impact the customer experience.

I agree with their prescriptions, but it still leaves the problem of what to tell upper management. Is there anything wrong with high-level management dashboards? Well, yes. Something of the danger in this is described in today’s WSJ article on Simpson’s Paradox (”When Combined Data Reveal the Flaw of Averages“). The first example cited: while today’s overall unemployment rate is lower than the 1982 level, unemployment at each educational level is higher. (The overall rate is lower because there are more people at higher educational levels, which have lower unemployment, than there were in 1982.) The article states: “Compared with a similarly educated worker in 1983, ‘the worker today has higher unemployment at every educational level.’”

There’s always something lost in summarization. In the case of Simpson’s Paradox, the result of the loss is a flawed conclusion, or at minimum missing a greater point of the story. Overall unemployment today is lower than 1982, but people today have been hit harder than their 1982 counterparts.

Dashboards distort reality as well. Executives rely on machines crunching millions or billions of numbers to present them an easily readable story of what is happening in their businesses. Yet the farther the statistics are distanced from the on-the-ground reality, the more likely they are to lie.

What can be done? Let’s get back to “Closing the Customer Feedback Loop.” On-the-ground data gathering and interpretation by those close to it makes all the sense in the world. But in communicating with upper management, there needs to be less sharing of numbers, and more sharing of individual stories. You can’t get any more granular than that. You can read a vibrant story in a minute or two. And stories fall into patterns–something more subtle and nuanced than statistics–that help senior management understand what’s going on. And human experiences are more understandable than the simplest dashboard.

There are tools to do help you gather and use stories. Rakontu, an open-source story-sharing platform, is one. Enterprise 2.0 tools such as blogs would also work for this purpose. So what’s stopping us? Or am I still shouting into the void?

(Photo by awegedebe via stock.xchng)

Tags: blogging, customer relationships, customer service, knowledge, knowledge management, learning, narrative, social media
Posted in management | Comments

Marketing messages are simply another bee in the hive

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Cynthia Kurtz starts off a recent blog post with a provocative statement: “Telling a story is not always the best way to tell a story.”

She continues:

There are no green fields in the land of stories; every available spot is occupied and contested. There are no story-free environments. When a new story is launched into the world, the stories it meets do not simply watch as the newcomer descends; they rise to meet it and swarm around it in complex, unpredictable and sometimes baffling ways. If an idealistic metaphor for telling a purposeful story is pulling a lever or pushing a button on a compliant machine, a more realistic metaphor is sending a bee into a hive.

I want to talk about what this means for marketing communications, especially in today’s world of proliferating social technologies.

Marcomm people have always been tasked with creating messages that can inform the public utterances of the company – be they press releases, speeches, interviews, advertisements, etc. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call these things “stories.” Here are some examples of very brief stories that companies have told over the years:

Budweiser is the King of Beers
Chevy is the Heartbeat of America
GE brings good things to life
Wal-Mart: always the low price

Those are the most public messages, but there are others, not explicitly stated, perhaps, but nurtured and supported by the marcomm folks:

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
A Mercedes tells people, “I’ve arrived.”
Cool people shop at Target.

The official messages have always encountered other bees in the hive. Protesters, in some cases unions, and the press have offered counterstories to the company story – although one could argue that the press has often swallowed the company message and regurgitated it whole. (Quick aside – for the longest time I was amazed by how news stories profiling a musical artist would appear just a couple of days before a new album hit stores.) Here are some counterstories you may be familiar with:

GE’s industrial pollutants have damaged the environment at certain places where they had plants.
Wal-Mart achieves cheap prices by purchasing goods from overseas factories that exploit their workers.
GM cars have poor fit and finish and aren’t fun to drive.

By and large, though, the hive was pretty empty. Corporate messages were transmitted, and seeped into our consciousness pretty much unaltered. This was because mass public communication was expensive and exclusive.

Now we live in a different world. The hive is buzzing with voices. Communication is cheap and easy. Blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking, Yelping, Amazon-reviewing, etc., etc. The counterstories fly fast and furious (read this one contesting an oft-reported statistic that Wal-Mart prices save American families $3,100 per year).

More than once, the other hive members have swarmed all over a corporate story and killed it. Remember the Motrin Moms fiasco, or the short-lived new Tropicana packaging?

Marketers, it’s time to stop trying to control your message. It’s time to stop believing that if you spend a lot of money buying advertisements, sponsoring sporting events or creating publicity stunts, that people will automatically believe what you say.

Instead, you’re going to have to earn your positive messages. Sell great products, service them well, provide outstanding value, thrill your customers. Listen hard to what they’re saying. The deep values they espouse in the stories they tell are your messages. Feel free to retell those stories in your forums. Look in the negative ones for clues to things you can improve, or markets you simply don’t serve well.

But, most of all, stop thinking you’re in control.

(Photo from direct dish via Flickr Creative Commons)

Tags: marketing, marketing communications, messaging, narrative, social media, stories
Posted in marketing | Comments

Farmers’ market secret ingredient – community

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Broad Street Market 2 I did a project last year with the Broad Street Market, a farmers’ market here in Harrisburg. (Disclosure: I am on the Market’s board of directors.) We were trying to establish some parameters for a strategic plan for the Market. My project was to interview Market customers to understand why and how they valued the Market, and what common issues might be that the strategic plan should address.

I did 60 open-ended interviews, and heard some great stories – for example, a woman in her seventies discussed coming to the Market as a young girl, shopping at a place that used to sell wonderful pears, taking the trolley that ran down 3rd Street. But some of the best stories weren’t explicitly told – they occurred during the interviews.

Perhaps half a dozen times an interview was interrupted while the person I was speaking to greeted a friend who walked by: “Hi, how you doing?” and an embrace. “Let’s get together,” or “See you Saturday.”

And when the board reviewed the stories, a theme emerged: community as an important value. We had expected customers to discuss safety and cleanliness (and they did), the types of vendors (a bit), fresh and local products (yes) or the hours of operation (a lot). But the theme of community, something we hadn’t been looking for, kept coming up. For those customers, the Market was more than just a place to shop. It was a place to meet friends, to stay connected, even to return to after they’d moved out of town.

This is an interesting observation for all brick-and-mortar retailers, restaurants, etc. Even in this technology society, people yearn to get together, to be with friends and acquaintances. (Note how tech-based getting-together solutions like Meetups, Tweetups and Foursquare have emerged.) How aware are you of the community you serve? How can you engage it, and nourish it? How can you honor the value that your customers place in it?

How B2B customers talk

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Some years ago, our company supplied billing services for a mid-sized telecom provider. It was old technology, and we were very interested in migrating them over to a new platform we’d just begun to offer. They were referenceable and complimentary of our work with them. The IT group, our liaison, was happy to set up a meeting with the various groups that would be involved in a decision to change platforms.

At that meeting we learned the other groups didn’t hold us in such high esteem. Not only were they not ready to migrate, they had a list of issues with our current system they wanted fixed. And while we were there, they let us in on a lot of other ideas they had about what we could do better, ideas they had clearly been storing up for years.

We (me included – I headed the group that managed customer satisfaction) had made a big error – we had mistaken good feedback from our direct customer, the IT group, for good feedback from the whole user base.

When B2B customers talk, it’s a lot different from how consumers talk. It’s not uncommon to have a B2B product used by hundreds or thousands of employees in a single company, spread across multiple departments and geographies. “How are we doing?” in this case is a much harder question to answer. Weekly status meetings and yearly customer surveys sent to a handful of people will not let you know whether the company as a whole likes and values what you do for it – or whether there are pockets of dissatisfaction that could derail your strategic initiatives with this customer.

Don’t get seduced by the viewpoints of the people you deal with every day. It’s the people in the field, who use the product, who aren’t saying anything aloud – they are the customer you need to listen to.

Tags: B2B, customer satisfaction, narrative, referenceability, surveys
Posted in Customers Are Talking | Comments

The unbalanced relationship between buyer and seller – a cautionary tale

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

My colleague had set up a meeting with a prospect. I traveled to the office and we spent time preparing – chatting about the customer, next steps, do we set up a projector? etc. Then, at the time the meeting was supposed to start, the email arrived. “I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to make the meeting,” wrote the prospect.

“Did you confirm the meeting?” I asked.

My colleague shrugged. “Sure, we agreed on this time two weeks ago.”

It’s natural to blame the prospect here. He had agreed to the meeting–didn’t he know how to manage his calendar?

But this example demonstrates something important. We needed that meeting more than the prospect did. Delay won’t affect him much – his work will go on. Delay affects our timing of revenue (assuming we win), or even the likelihood that the prospect will do anything at all (remember “Time Kills Deals”?).

As much as we talk about “value exchange” and “partnering” with our customers, the truth of the matter is that during the selling cycle they are more important to us than we are to them.

And that means, even when a prospect commits to a meeting, we need to follow up – a week ahead (”here’s an agenda for our meeting”), then a couple of days before (”really looking forward to meeting; is there anything else you want to cover?”). Because if they forget, we pay the price.

Related post:
Shop Talk Podcast #1: Gordon Adams on “Time Kills Deals” (worth the listen to experience a truly primitive podcast – they have gotten a lot better sounding, don’t you think?)

Tags: follow-up, narrative, sales, scheduling
Posted in sales | Comments

A wide-ranging (and free) e-book on narrative

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Kathy Hansen of the A Storied Career blog has been conducting interviews of storytelling figures large and small for nearly two years now, and has collected these into an e-book, available via this link.

I’ve been following the interview series with interest and, as mentioned in the title of this post, it’s a very wide-ranging look at storytelling and its uses. As such, there’s some of it that doesn’t speak to me very much. On the other hand, there are parts that I find extremely valuable. Like this…

Cynthia Kurtz on “approaches that don’t respect the integrity of the raw story and end up … injecting the biased interpretations of people outside the community:” There are two positions embedded in that statement — raw stories and self-interpretation — and I can tell a story from my own experience describing how I came to my current understanding of each position. The first position is that raw stories of personal experience are far superior to crafted stories for the things I care about when working with stories. For the purposes of advertising products and services, delivering specific purposeful messages, and entertaining people, crafted stories are often (but not always) best. But for the purposes of helping people learn, think, make decisions, get new ideas, grow, and get along, I’ve found that there is nothing better than a raw story. (NB: The entire interview with Cynthia is so valuable I have printed it out and refer to it regularly.)

and this:

Whitney Quesenbery on storytelling in user experience design: Although user experience [UX] stories are built on insights from research, their purpose is to help create something new. Often, they explore how a new or updated product can change an unsatisfactory experience into a good one. They describe a possible future condition, and in doing so help it become a reality.

This is not all user experience stories, of course. Sometimes, we use stories to present a current or past situation. But the reason we spend time thinking about current experience is to be able to create new experiences — and move us into the future. … Every UX project involves managing a lot of information. Even a small site involves balancing the business goals, user needs, and technical possibilities. When you are working on a large project it’s hard to stay focused on the goal of creating an excellent user experience, because you are managing so many details and (sometimes) conflicting needs. The other difficulty is keeping the “user” in sight. Perhaps that sounds strange for work on the user experience, but typically the users are not part of the design and development team, so it’s easy to ignore them.

With their ability to communicate so effectively, and on such a deep level, stories are one way to manage both challenges. They are a natural way to describe events, brainstorm ideas, engage the imagination, and build community around the new design.

oh, and this (self-promotion alert):

John Caddell: There has been an immense amount of investment in the last 20 years in business-process re-engineering and process standardization and in IT systems and to support those initiatives. We’ve taken process improvement about as far as it can go. In fact, we’ve taken it a bit too far. With companies applying Six Sigma to things like sales processes (???), and not surprisingly achieving poor results, it is time to seek new tools. And narrative is a perfect tool to help shed light on complex questions (Is our reorganization helping the company to perform better? Is this a good or lousy place to work? Why aren’t people buying our new product?).

Here are some of the other contributors whose work I know and respect:
Stephane Dangel
Thaler Pekar
Shawn Callahan
Ardath Albee

So, I’d recommend you take a look; you’ll likely find things that you can use.

Tags: narrative, reading list, storytelling
Posted in narrative | Comments

How radical innovation and careful customer listening go together

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

It may be difficult to square my current obsession with Roberto Verganti’s new book “Design-Driven Innovation” – a textbook study of how companies create way-out, game-changing innovations that users could never have dreamed up – and this blog’s focus on customer listening as a tool for improving innovation, customer satisfaction, etc.

But the truth is that these fit together quite nicely. While companies wishing to create the next iPod-like phenomenon may not want to poll their users for ideas, customer listening is a crucial part of making these innovations successful. Here’s an important passage from Verganti’s book:

Executives who have invested in radical innovations of meaning acknowledge that rather than start with user needs, the process goes in the opposite direction: the company proposes a breakthrough vision. Stunningly, Alberto Alessi uses almost the same words as Ernesto Gismondi to illustrate this concept: “Working within the meta-project transcends the creation of an object purely to satisfy function and necessity. Each object represents… a proposal.”

Design-driven firms don’t crowdsource–they make proposals. And here’s where customer listening comes in. Proposals invite responses. And once products – even design-driven products – are released, they continue to evolve based on how and why people end up using them–which can result in them occupying a different market space than originally envisioned.

With Design-Driven Innovation, proposals shouldn’t get universal acclaim–if they are radical enough, the company should expect and welcome some level of rejection and antipathy (see Lenny Bruce reference in this post. But in the feedback they generate, there are seeds of insight. Is the proposal being understood? Are there unexpected uses?

So the techniques we’ve discussed previously in this blog – customer story gathering, finding patterns, devising adjustments to the product/services – are just as suitable for products created through design-driven innovation. In fact, the more radical the vision, the more necessary they may be.

Tags: innovation, listening, narrative, product development, sensemaking
Posted in Customers Are Talking | Comments

Tally the votes, but if you want insight, read the comments

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

I was reading the new Harvard Business Review today at lunch, specifically the piece by Guido Jouret of Cisco on the company’s recent external innovation tournament (interestingly, that’s the name of a new book I’m reading right now). There’s lots of good stuff in the HBR article about sourcing innovations externally, but one sentence in particular stopped me in my tracks–in a good way. Jouret wrote:

On balance, voting was less useful than comments in helping us choose the 40 semifinalists…. Some commenters showed deep subject-matter expertise and insight.

This throwaway line reminded me of a prior post, where I recounted a story a friend had told me about an HR VP making a decision based on survey comments. Here’s the story:

Last year we had a pilot of a new performance management system for our employees. The trial group was 4000 people. We had spent a lot of time on the pilot and gathered a lot of data. At the end of the trial, the VP of Human Resources printed out all the comments that had been received on the survey forms. He took them home one night and read every single one. Then he came in the next day and said, “We can’t roll this system out.” And that was it. The trial was very expensive. We’d gathered lots of data, lots of numbers, but the final determinant was what he read in those comments.

Freeform data such as comments, anecdotes, rants, etc., aren’t easy to manage. But they contain tons of insight. Sometimes all you need to do is read them.

Tags: comments, innovation, insight, narrative, sensemaking, tournaments
Posted in narrative | Comments

John Caddell's blog

Posts Tagged ‘narrative’

Scott Berkun reminds us of the value of learning from mistakes

Farmers’ market secret ingredient – community

How B2B customers talk

The unbalanced relationship between buyer and seller – a cautionary tale

A wide-ranging (and free) e-book on narrative

How radical innovation and careful customer listening go together

Tally the votes, but if you want insight, read the comments

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