Posts Tagged ‘sensemaking’

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Lessons Learned from the Mistake Bank

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Mistake bank logoI haven’t written much about The Mistake Bank in a little while, and I’ve put the project on hiatus. But Cynthia Kurtz convinced me that it would be good before stepping away from the project to recount some of what I’ve learned in the three years since I started working on it.

1. Mistake stories are inherently memorable – both for those who are involved and people hearing the stories. This story came so quickly to the teller that I almost didn’t finish the question before he started talking:


Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank

2. Mistakes can lead people into successful situations they wouldn’t have encountered if they hadn’t made the mistake. My favorite story in this light is my father-in-law’s story about buying an apartment building without, in his mind, doing enough due diligence… and then spending the next several months dealing with the fallout. Of course, he ended up profiting from that apartment building for many years. And without that decision, he may never have taken the plunge. There are several stories like that on the site. All the protagonists are successful entrepreneurs.


Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank

3. Stories are often viewed by others as not being mistakes at all. See above.

4. As time passes from the event itself, it’s easier to recount your mistakes. It’s not uncommon to encounter stories that are 20, 30, 40 years old. Like this one (blame the cameraman – me – for the poor video quality):


Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank

5. People who share mistake stories are courageous people. This story from Sue Pera, who owns a coffeehouse near my home, struck me as particularly candid, and in a way illuminated why she is a such a successful businessperson:


Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank

Finally I would say a word about what a narrative collection represents. Once the site got to thirty, forty, fifty stories, it began to exhibit, for me at least, something of the richness of a Cubist painting. By collecting a number of different styles of storytelling across many subjects yet all relating to mistakes, the site became a place where you could immerse yourself and gain a perspective on human imperfection and, in a way, grace.

What’s next for the Mistake Bank? Perhaps a company will take the plunge and set one of these up for themselves, as a way to capture lessons learned, the company’s history and culture.

Maybe there’s a book in it. There was for Royal Little.

[If you'd like an invitation to the Mistake Bank, email me at john (at) caddellinsightgroup (dot) com.]

Related posts:
On Royal Little’s “How to Lose $100,000,000 and Other Valuable Advice”
A collection of posts on the Mistake Bank

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Farmers’ market secret ingredient – community

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Broad Street Market 2I 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?

Related posts:
The Values Proposition

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Rakontu, open-source story-sharing software, is here

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

If you’ve read this blog regularly, you may have encountered me discussing how nice it would be to gather stories from front-line personnel and share them with the rest of the company, or to have a repository where staff members could share information that’s pertinent to the company, its customers, competitors and markets.

One barrier to these ideas was the unavailability (or unaffordability) of software that was adept at storing, annotating, tagging, and presenting this messy kind of narrative data. Well, that barrier is down, effective immediately.

Cynthia Kurtz, one of the pioneers in the story-listening world and author of “Working With Stories,” has developed an open-source package called Rakontu, which is the best thing I’ve seen at collecting and presenting narrative data, involving a community in adding to it, and making it generally useful to a group of people–the contributors included.

It’s a beautiful, elegantly-designed application, far more polished than users of new software have a right to expect. There are a couple of webcasts available on the Rakontu website which you should watch if you are interested.

(Disclosure: I’ve done a bit of collaboration with Cynthia and was an alpha tester of the software. No money changed hands ;)

By the way, Cynthia has started a blog, “Story-Colored Glasses,” which you should put into your RSS reader immediately.

Related posts:
Gathering customer intelligence from your front-line staff
Bringing the outside in

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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.

Related posts:
Lenny Bruce was happy with the support of 1/3 his audience
On “Design-Driven Innovation”
Podcast with Roberto Verganti
Innovation moving from initiatives to experiments

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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.

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The invaluable stories inside customer-service calls

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

Much of the story work I’m familiar with involves asking people to tell stories about their experiences on a particular topic. I do some of this myself. But I’ve also done work with a completely different class of story. This story is created out of the spontaneous meeting of two people – a customer and a customer-service rep – over the telephone.

A customer-service call is less an anecdote than it is like a play unfurling in real time. There’s nothing but dialogue, yet there’s conflict, emotion, suspense (will she get the credit she’s demanding for the series of dropped calls? Or will she have to escalate to the supervisor?). Listening to these recordings gives you an intimate view into the relationship customers have with their products and with their service providers.

And within these calls there are almost always sub-stories–the sequence of events that led to the person calling in the first place. There are also moments of human connection… and of estrangement.

Compared to elicited stories, contact-center calls have advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:

  • Spontaneity
  • Authenticity
  • Freely given
  • Lack of self-consciousness or self-censoring
  • Highly inclusive (everyone has a telephone and most people call customer service eventually)
  • Easy to access


Disadvantages:

  • Noisy–lots of pro forma dialogue which is not story-related
  • Undirected–if you’re interested in one scenario, you’ll have to spend time narrowing down the calls
  • Voluminous and redundant (which is not always a problem)

Listening to series of customer-service calls reminded me of reading the work of William Gaddis. His books (especially “JR” and “A Frolic of His Own“), continuous dialogues with few bits of exposition, are not easy to read. But they are full of meaning and insight. This insight isn’t presented in headlines, but accrues, organically, as you’re immersed in the conversations. Similarly, searching through call recordings and finding patterns reveals true customer insight that’s hard to gather any other way.

If you think you lack customer intelligence, and you have a call center, you couldn’t be more wrong. You have terabytes of it sitting in your call-recording databases. Start using it.

Related post:
Turning points in telephone sales calls

(Photo by benthecube via Flickr Creative Commons)

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“Customer Insight From The Ground Up” webinar now archived

Friday, July 10th, 2009

If you regret missing the webinar I did last week, “Customer Insight From The Ground Up” (and I know you do), you’ll be happy to know it’s been archived. The webinar covers the customer story-gathering and sensemaking approaches discussed frequently on this blog. You can listen to the webinar, as well as download slides & notes, from Listrak’s site here.

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Customers are talking: “Why Customers Really Buy”

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

“Why Customers Really Buy: Uncovering the Emotional Triggers That Drive Sales” by Linda Goodman & Michelle Helin is a worthy addition to the literature on customer research. It describes a method of learning about customers by conducting in-depth interviews aimed at identifying “emotional triggers” that influence how and why customers buy products and select certain suppliers over others.

These emotional triggers bear a resemblance to the “deep metaphors” described in Zaltman & Zaltman’s “Marketing Metaphoria” but the means of getting to them is much more akin to the story-gathering and sensemaking methods we’ve discussed in this blog than in the collage-making at the center of the Zaltmans’ approach.

The authors’ description of the complexity and emotion of the sales process, and how customers can reveal their true feelings within open-ended interviews, are excellent. I’ve done projects like this and my approach has a lot in common with Goodman and Helin’s. They neatly summarize the difficulty with the most-prevalent customer research method–the survey:

Frequently, surveys include a list of choices that are ranked in order of priority or in order of preference. For example, customers may be asked to rank the importance of a number of considerations impacting the shopping experience. The list might include cleanliness, helpful sales staff, good lighting, neatly displayed merchandise, competitive prices, good selection and so forth.

Although the ranking would accurately report how customers rated the choices they were given, there’s still one little problem. Their actual “hot button” might never have been on the list.

There are also many case studies that add richness and depth to the ideas. The volume and variety of case studies is the best part of the book.

I wished Goodman and Helin talked more about the sensemaking process – the method of distilling insight from the interviews. In my experience this is the “secret sauce” of the entire approach and not a straightforward process. It would have been valuable for the authors to describe how they got from the customer interviews to the “emotional triggers” that were central to each of their projects.

Finally, I would have loved for the book to cite external sources that inspired their thinking. It’s possible that they came up with this approach completely alone, but it’s more likely that their ideas stand “on the shoulders of giants“–it would be a significant benefit to their readers if Goodman and Helin could, in a future edition or on their website, include notes and a bibliography.

(Thanks to Tom Gibson for pointing out the book to me.)

Related posts:
The weird, alchemical process of distilling insight from stories
“Marketing Metaphoria”: the deep insights behind the products we buy

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Free Webinar: “Customer Insight From the Ground Up,” Wed, 1 July, 1pm US Eastern time

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

My friends at Listrak have allowed me to take over their webinar series on July 1 to discuss “Customer Insight From The Ground Up” – a 45-minute discussion about the “customers are talking” insight-gathering processes I’ve been using with clients for the past year.

I’ll talk about why we need to gather and look through customer stories; finding customer stories in places like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.; how to make sense of what they tell us; and, perhaps most importantly, how to use that information to drive meaningful business improvement.

Click here for more information and to register. I look forward to meeting you at the webinar!

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Central Penn Business Journal writes about narrative work

Monday, June 1st, 2009

CPBJ is my local business newspaper. A few weeks ago, I sat down with their technology reporter Jim Ryan and talked about my customer narrative work. Jim also interviewed Cynthia Kurtz and a client, Ross Kramer of Listrak.

The article turned out really well. For all those for whom I’ve been unable to explain what I do, this article does a good job of discussing using narrative analysis to understand what customers want and how companies can apply it. Check it out here.

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