Author Archives: Howard Tiersky

About Howard Tiersky

Howard Tiersky is an inspiring and passionate speaker, the Founder and CEO of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency, innovation consultant, serial entrepreneur, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance. IDG named him one of the “10 Digital Transformation Influencers to Follow Today”, and Enterprise Management 360 named Howard “One of the Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers That Will Change Your World.”

Projects Don’t Go All Right or All Wrong

Leave a reply

Projects Don't Go All Right or All Wrong

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

What The Heck Went Right?!

Have you found yourself working on a project that’s having problems, missing deadlines, over budget and/or full of defects?

Or have you launched new products only to discover that they didn’t get the uptake you had hoped in the market?

On most such projects, at some point, someone will say “when this is all over we need to do a post-mortem” to determine what went wrong and how we avoid these kinds of problems in the future. This is certainly an important and worthwhile activity. In Agile practices, we refer to this as a “retrospective” instead of using the term “post-mortem.” We do this partly to avoid the ever so slightly negative death-related connotations of the term “post-mortem;” also because anything named in Latin tends to sound intimidating. But most importantly because we take the mindset that a retrospective should not be triggered because “there was a problem” (or death!) but rather should be part of the completion of every project (or even a phase of a project).

In fact, I recommend you don’t view the retrospective being exclusively, or even primarily about identifying “what went wrong” on a project. The first and primary focus of every retrospective is what went right. The recommended guideline is that over 75% of the time in every retrospective should be spent on what went right. Why is that?

What went right is more useful than what went wrong.

Sure, its good to understand what went wrong, but even once you’ve done that you have a lot more work to do. Just knowing what went wrong doesn’t make the next project more successful, you then need also to figure out what you will do differently to make that “wrong” thing not happen again. And then even once you have “figured that out,” the reality is you may or may not have gotten it correct. Your “fix” is not yet proven.

So, there is yet a third step to try that “fix” on another project and see if it has the desired effect. Hopefully, it does and if so, great. In fact, I heartily recommend you do take this three-step approach when looking at “what went wrong.” But, let’s contrast that with how many steps it takes to benefit from what went right. Step 1- determine what went right. Step 2- determine why that thing went right (which is usually a lot easier than finding the root cause of problems).

And once you have figured out what went right and why you just need to keep doing that thing. So it’s simpler to get future benefit from what’s right vs. what’s wrong.

Now I can hear your wheels spinning, and you may be thinking “yeah, but come on if we are already doing something right, why would we stop doing it anyway? We are already doing that thing; we aren’t going to get any “incremental value” by praising what we already know how to do! We should focus on improvements! I’d like to say, “good point,” but I can’t.

It’s a terrible point, and here is why.

This line of thinking is based on a fallacy. The fallacy is that good and beneficial practices sort of automatically perpetuate themselves. Having worked with scores of large enterprises, I have not found this to be the case. In fact, when project teams retrospect on “what went wrong,” very often the root cause of the problem was a failure to engage in practices which they have done in the past that led them to success.

There are many reasons for this – efforts to seek efficiency, change in project leadership, a desire for variation, or just old-fashioned “forgetting to do it.” That’s why it’s incredibly valuable to reinforce what went right, so we don’t forget to keep doing it, and we acknowledge the value of the practices that led to the successful outcome.

But here’s another reason to focus most of your time on “what went right.”

Talking about “what went right” makes people feel good.

Perhaps you are thinking, “Come on, this is a place of business! We don’t come here to feel good; we come here to get things done! You can feel good at home!” In reality, many studies have shown morale is a hugely important component of productivity. In one study, the Gallup organization estimated that low morale in the form of worker “disengagement” costs the US economy as much as $350 billion a year. Giving people the opportunity not just to say “good job” but really “get into” what was done right, by who and why is a huge morale booster for everybody.

And here’s one final benefit to focusing on “what’s right,” when it comes time to get to that last 25% of your retrospective where you do want to talk about “what can we do better next time,” the team is going to be a lot less defensive and a lot more open to acknowledging problems and responsibility if it’s preceded by discussion of the positive aspects of the project. Furthermore, when team members become accustomed to retrospectives being positive experiences, they are less likely to procrastinate scheduling them, less likely to find an excuse to miss them, and less likely to show up in a defensive posture. All good things.

And I’ll anticipate one final question; you may be thinking, “But what if nothing went right on the project, it was a total disaster?” Believe this; something always went right; you just aren’t seeing it. Just like something can always be improved. On super successful projects its still very valuable to consider whether there are “things that went wrong” (once you’ve thoroughly covered what went right) and even on the most messed up projects, it’s worth digging to find what went right, it might be more than you think and its working from those past aspects of success, however small, that you will build towards an even more successful future.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Unsplash

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Errors You May Be Making in Your Customer Experience

Leave a reply

Errors You May Be Making in Your Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Maintaining a website or mobile experience with a high degree of usability is essential to maximize business outcomes, and people who are frustrated often take for granted how easy it is in the digital world to simply click over to a competitor. Even worse are cases where determined customers simply cannot figure out how to proceed to complete a transaction, or otherwise achieve their goals.

At FROM, we regularly conduct both in person and online usability tests for our clients to observe “real” users engaging with their digital experience. This gives us enormous insight into where users are encountering frustration, confusion, or other difficulties, and while we are huge believers in robust usability testing as a tool to identify and prioritize which aspects of a digital touch point should be optimized (and really, it’s not terribly time-consuming or expensive), there is a little-known trick that can start to identify many problems. While not as comprehensive as user testing, it’s generally much faster, and therefore, a great place to start!

What is that place? The server’s error logs.

While it may not sound super sexy, your error logs contain a treasure trove of data.

First, the server will typically log if a page doesn’t load properly, errors occur, or if transactions fail to complete. Naturally, usability is hampered if your customers are receiving errors because the system not functioning properly, and yet it’s amazing how often server logs don’t get looked at. And since error logs can generally be viewed by browser and device, it’s not uncommon to find that a new version of Chrome or Edge is causing errors that previously didn’t exist, so this is something that need regular attention. In addition, many systems rely on external cloud services, increasing the points of failure. By monitoring server errors, you can make sure you are aware if your site is “breaking,” a simple but often overlooked part of managing an effective digital experience.

Second, we have errors of user validation, i.e., a user enters an invalid email or phone number, tries to complete a transaction without checking the “terms and conditions” acceptance box, etc. Now, on the one hand, you might say “That’s not my fault, my site worked. It was the user made a mistake!” Bzzzzt. Wrong answer. Especially if there are a lot of these types of errors, or if the number suddenly spikes.

It’s our job to design a solution that makes it unlikely that users will make errors. If they’re frequently overlooking something, or misunderstanding what they are meant to do, it’s a sign we need to look at that screen or field and consider how to redesign it to reduce confusion. It might be as simple as rewriting the instructions or moving a button.

One nuance we like to look for is circular errors. What’s a circular error? It’s when, during a single session, a user sends the same input multiple times and receives the same error. For example, a user submits a page, and the email is determined to be invalid (a logged error.) Then the user submits again, with the same email (and maybe then a third time, again with the same email.) These types of circular errors usually mean the error messaging system in your application is flawed. Perhaps the error text appears at the top of the screen, and the field itself is below the fold, so the user may not even be seeing the error text.

The third type of error is failed search or out of stock messages. The user wants to rent a car with a pickup at 2 am but that location is closed, or the user wants the pants in a 42 waist, but you don’t have any in stock. Or, the user is searching your site for information on bed wetting, but no articles match that term. These types of errors indicate a missed opportunity to meet a customer need, and you should scour these types of messages to consider what steps can be taken to meet commonly requested unmet needs.

All of this is based on the assumption that your site’s back-end code is logging errors properly. This is a standard coding practice, but just because it’s standard doesn’t mean it can’t get omitted, or that certain errors might not have code that logs them. It’s important to check with your technical team; if your site is not logging most errors, or not logging them with sufficient detail, this code can generally be added.

Additionally, you may include logging at different levels of your system, and therefore have multiple log files. For example, the web server may have one log file, the commerce layer may have a separate log file, and your security/authentication layer may have its own log files, and that’s fine. There are great tools that can combine them together and make them easy to analyze, filter, sort, etc.

The logging I’ve been referring to is generally done on the server. However, with each new generation of digital experiences, we push more and more code (including more and more error checking) to the client. Whether it’s javascript (in the case of web pages), or Java code (in the case of mobile apps.) These types of error events can be logged as well, it just requires a separate effort or technology (but it’s well worth it!) You can use analytics packages like Google Analytics to record “events” when certain things (like error messages) happen in the interface.

A one or two-day analysis of error logs can help you focus in on specific, frequently occurring error states that were previously off your radar. Sometimes, it’s still necessary to do user testing to figure out what the deeper reason for the confusion is, but even still, it’s helpful to know where the errors are occurring, so you can focus your testing there. In other cases, it’s easy to guess what’s tripping your users up, once the errors are there to act as signposts.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Pixabay

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

What Your Website Reveals About Your Brand

Leave a reply

What Your Website Reveals About Your Brand

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

For the past few weeks, I’ve been sitting in a lot of usability testing sessions for web and mobile sites. In particular, for two sites that we are beginning the process of re-doing for clients. I’ve noticed a consumer pattern jumping out across multiple subjects in tests for both clients. It’s something that I think its relevant to pretty much everybody working on a digital touchpoint.

Brands spend a lot of energy (and in some cases, money,) on the copy and content they put on their sites to tell you about their brand and products. But listening to all these research subjects, I hear so much cynicism about what brands say about themselves. Maybe its the impact of election season, but consumers seem to be at the point where they just assume that most of what brands say about themselves are somewhere between an exaggeration and an outright lie.

As a result, what I am hearing from these customers of our clients is that they feel they need to ‘read between the lines’ to predict what they can actually expect if they decide to move forward and do business with a brand, whether its a bank or a breakfast cereal. And how do they do that? By evaluating the quality and experience of the brand’s digital presence.

For the consumers we have studied, the experience of a brand’s site (or mobile site or app) is what you have “told” the customer the experience of your product will be. Period.

You can write copy that states your product is friendly, easy to use, and fun, but if your website is confusing and disorganized, or has errors or broken image links, THAT is the message people take away. If your signup process is cumbersome, they assume so will be your product. If your error messages are unfriendly, they assume that’s the same characteristic they can expect from your customer service.

It’s perhaps an obvious insight that the quality of your web experience reflects on your brand, but what I’m saying goes a step beyond that. Whatever the experience of your website is, that is your brand and the quality expectation you’re setting, especially for prospective customers, who don’t yet have other experiences of your products or services.

Sadly, in the case of several different tests, I sat in over this past weekend, the experience was flawed — no doubt in part why we’d been hired to re-do them. Large investments had been made in features and content. Both sites had some great attributes and were visually appealing. But when you started using them, they had small inconsistencies confusing terms, occasional bugs, and other small “broken window” type defects that, when aggregated together in a total experience, left the research subjects saying things like, “I’m not sure I’d trust my taxes to a company who makes these kinds of mistakes. I don’t want mistakes like that on my tax return,” and “Their product is pretty expensive, and my sense from this site experience is that…it’s probably not better than cheaper products out there.”

It may seem discouraging that consumers “jump to conclusions” as a result of small defects or flaws in your digital experience. But here’s two pieces of good news: First, so often these problems are not that difficult to fix! A thorough heuristic and usability analysis can often be achieved in a few weeks. So often this yields dozens of small issues that can be improved with minimal effort. Of course, deeper problems can also be uncovered, and these may be more time consuming to address, however understanding the magnitude of the issue and the business impact that its having is the first step towards solving it. And second, this connection is not all bad. Prospective customers may be cynical about what you say, but their belief in the veracity of their experience means that by delivering a first-class digital journey you can persuade them that your brand is worthy of their trust and create positive expectations of your products and services.

So how do you figure out the right answer, get everyone on the same page, and focus on a common innovation goal? At FROM, we use a specific model to approach the process of identifying the most relevant opportunity areas for innovation, and to build group consensus around the best approach. You’ll have to adapt it to your situation, but the model should provide a good starting framework.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Pixabay

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Finding Innovation in the Humble Garbage Can

1 Reply

Finding Innovation in the Humble Garbage Can

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Uber has taught us that even the most commonplace products and services are ripe with innovation. They’ve re-invented the taxi experience, and many people would agree that, given a choice, they’d never go back to the old way.
Today, I want to give a shout out to another company, one that’s doing amazing things with garbage cans: simplehuman.

Simplehuman, founded in 2000 by Frank Yang, is a great case study in terms of product innovation, as well as business model. It had one simple mission: make a better trash can. For the last year, I’ve had a simplyhuman garbage can in my kitchen, so I can attest. It is a better trash can.

Before we switched to simplehuman, this is the kind of trash can we had in the kitchen:

And this is the simplehuman can that’s in my kitchen today:

Two features of this product make it a real game-changer. The lesser of these was the rim around the top that completely hides the edges of the plastic bag that peek over the edge most cans. I didn’t realize how ugly this was until it was gone. (insert sigh of relief here)

But the real hero is the built-in garbage bag dispenser. As you can see from the image below (pulled directly from simplehuman’s website), a dispenser for new garbage bags is built right into the body of the can, saving me from having to walk across the room to get a new bag from the box under the kitchen sink when I need a replacement. Yes, this is a seemingly small inconvenience, but once it’s removed, it seems a silly waste of effort that you ever had to walk across the room in the first place.

While they may not be solving world hunger, these two improvements are enough for me to never want to go back.

Simplehuman: Our new stainless steel rectangular step can features an innovative ‘liner pocket’ that stores and dispenses liners from inside the can for a faster liner change.

But from a business perspective, here’s where it gets interesting. In order to have garbage bags that fit both the dispenser and perfectly around the rim (so that no “spillover” bag is showing,) I need to use their custom-fitted bags. These bags are sized specifically for this can and come in little boxes perfectly sized to fit the built-in dispenser.

So where does one get these magical bags? Well, when you buy the can, there’s an insert that directs you to download simplehuman’s app. In the app, you can “manage your supplies,” by ordering garbage bags or, even better, setting up a subscription, which is what I did.

What do these garbage bags cost? A 100-count box of simplehuman garbage bags is about $25. That doesn’t break the bank, but as it turns out, it’s about twice what Hefty and Glad bags cost. Besides that, the garbage can itself is about $100, compared with less than half of that for one of their less innovative competitor’s stainless steel kitchen garbage cans. Again, not outrageous, but still a substantial premium. So what’s innovation worth to simplehuman? About double. And it’s worth it to me to pay it to solve problems, even if I never realized there were problems until simplehuman’s solution brought them to my attention.

Coming up with these types of innovations for your business starts with finding painpoints. What is your customer’s equivalent of having to walk across the room to get a garbage bag from under the sink? It doesn’t have to be pain that drives them crazy. Solving just a small irritation can turn out to be a highly appreciated innovation. And what about aesthetic gaps in your products that nobody focuses on, but would be obvious once gone (the way Steve Jobs showed us how ugly PCs were by creating the iMac)?

Finding these types of unmet points of pain can be achieved through ethnography and other research techniques that create customer empathy. Techniques like these can generate profound insights with relatively minimal effort, and at FROM, we utilize them on nearly every project. The majority of the time, the most winning features of the new digital products we create come from solving problems generated by these insights. The ideas may not come from the customers (in fact, they probably won’t) but the pain insights do. Once you have those, it can open up new doors, and allow your team to come up with many new solutions.

Additionally, innovation is often not just about the product, but also the business model. Achieving simplehuman’s innovation required custom-fit garbage bags. I’d imagine that, at one point before launching this product, simplehuman realized it would be difficult to get every grocery store in America to carry these bags, especially before their product achieved critical mass. That logistical problem could have killed the whole concept. But instead of working within the existing ecosystem, where can-sellers have to align to a few non-tailored garbage bag sizes, they shifted their business model to app-based subscription. This allowed them not only to deliver the innovation, but also to double the price of their bags (probably without customers even noticing, since their bags aren’t sold side-by-side with mainstream brands), and to realize 100% of the revenue via direct sales, rather than splitting with a retailer and distributor.

So I say Bravo!, simplehuman. Great innovation, great business, and thanks for making my life a little bit better — I’m happy to pay you more for it. Now imagine what I’d be willing to pay if you could figure out how to get the can to take the full garbage bag outside!

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Pixabay

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Creating Effective Digital Teams

1 Reply

Creating Effective Digital Teams

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Creating digital products is a multi-disciplinary process, blending creativity, engineering, strategy, customer support, legal regulations and more. How to structure their teams is a major challenge faced by large enterprises and global brands undergoing a digital transformation. Specifically, they need to answer the following three questions:

What’s the optimal way to organize the necessary roles and responsibilities?
Which part of the organization should own each capability?
How do we get everyone working together?

The optimal structure for digital teams varies across different organizations. At FROM, we use a base framework that identifies fifteen key roles or competencies that are part of creating and operating most digital properties. Those roles are divided into three conceptual teams: the Digital Business Team, the Digital Technology Team, and the Extended Business Team.

The Digital Business Team

Digital Business Vision Owner: The Business Vision Owner defines the key business measures and objectives for the digital property, including target market segments and their objectives. This “visioneer” makes final decisions on product direction.
Product Management: Product Management owns the product on a day-to-day basis, and liaises with other areas to make sure the digital value proposition is realized. They’re responsible for commissioning and reviewing customer research to develop and maintain the product roadmap in terms of the business vision and can prioritize the backlog of changes and improvements.
Program Management: Distinct from the Product Manager, the Program Manager is responsible for owning the long-term plan to achieve the product roadmap, including budgets and resource allocations, and for maintaining the release schedule.
User Interface/User Experience: UI/UX is responsible for the overall look and feel of the digital product. They develop and maintain UI standards to be used as the product is developed, are involved in user testing, and QA new releases.
Content Development: Content Development creates non-campaign and non-marketing or editorial content for the site, including articles, instructions, and FAQ or helps content. Their job is to create content that’s easy to understand and consistent with the brand or voice of the product or site.

The Digital Technology Team

Front End Development: Front End Development selects frameworks and defines front-end coding standards for any technologies that will be used. They’re also responsible for writing code that will execute in the browser, such as HTML, HTML5, JavaScript, and mobile code (e.g., Objective-C.) Front End Development drives requirements for back-end development teams, to ensure the full user experience can be implemented.
Back End Development: Back End Development manages core enterprise systems, including inventory, financial, and CRM. They’re responsible for exposing, as web services, the capabilities that are needed for front-end development. They’re responsible for developing and enforcing standards to protect the integrity of those enterprise systems, as well as reviewing requests for and implementing new capabilities.
Data: Data develops and maintains enterprise and digital specific data models, managing data, and creating and maintaining plans for data management and warehousing. They monitor the health of databases, expose services for data access, and manage data architecture.
Infrastructure: Infrastructure maintains the physical hardware used for applications and data. They maintain disaster and business continuity programs and monitor the scalability and reliability of the physical infrastructure. They also monitor and proactively manage the security of the infrastructure environment.
Quality Assurance: Quality Assurance creates and maintains QA standards for code in production, develops automated and manual test scripts, and executes any integration, browser, or performance testing scenarios. They also monitor site metrics to identify problems proactively. (It should be noted that, though you want dedicated QA professionals on your team, QA is everyone’s responsibility!)

The Extended Business Team

Marketing: Marketing is responsible for some key digital operations. They develop offers and campaigns to drive traffic. They manage email lists and execution and manage and maintain the CRM system.
Product and Pricing: Product and Pricing responsibility can vary, depending on industry and type of digital property. When appropriate, they develop, license or merchandise anything sold on the site. They set pricing and drive requirements for aligning digital features with any new products based on those product’s parameters.
Operations: Operations is responsible for fulfillment of the value proposition. For commerce sites, for example, this includes picking, packing and shipping orders. For something like a digital video aggregation site, responsibilities include finding, vetting and uploading new video content.
Business Development: Business Development is focused on creating partnerships that increase traffic and sales, or find new streams of revenue.
Customer Support: Customer support is responsible for maintaining knowledge of digital platforms, policies, and known issues and solutions. They assist customers with problems and questions and track customer interactions to report on trends and satisfaction levels.

How these teams and the roles within them fit together varies from company to company. However, it’s good practice to review this model to see, first, if you have these key roles represented in your organization. Then, make sure to create well-defined responsibilities and processes, and finally, look at how they function together, to see if they’re organized in the most effective manner. If your Digital Business, Digital Technology, and Extended Business teams are in sync, all your projects will benefit.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Pixabay

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Creating a Seamless and Unique Customer Experience

Leave a reply

Creating a Seamless and Unique Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Most companies recognize that creating a seamless and unique customer experience is key to success in the digital world, but that’s not always easy to do. How can you deliver the optimal digital experience to your users?

If you’ve ever been to the arctic circle, there are icebergs that are not only acres wide, but that rise hundreds of feet above sea level — truly massive objects. Yet what is perhaps even more amazing is that scientists tell us that almost 90% of a typical iceberg’s mass is underwater, and not visible to from the surface. If you are in the “iceberg business” — studying them for science or cutting through them for ships to pass — it’s quite important to understand not just the visible component, but the full scale and depth of the iceberg.

Similarly, most companies now recognize that creating a seamless, elegant and differentiated customer experience is key to success in this increasingly digital world. Defining that optimal experience is not necessarily an easy task. In fact, it can seem like a huge undertaking, and at FROM, it’s something that we spend a large portion of our time working with clients to optimize.

But we also see many companies struggling to execute on delivering their customer experience vision. There are many reasons for this, but a starting point of success is realizing that excellent customer experience is more than meets the eye. While concrete manifestation of the experience is found in the brand’s digital properties, content, and features, this is just the part of the iceberg that sticks up above the water. Beneath the waterline is three additional supporting elements that must also be effectively managed in order to achieve an excellent customer experience and the associated business outcomes.

User Experience FROM Iceberg

1. Technical Architecture

Outstanding customer experiences are supported by modern technology stacks that permit two essential capabilities:

Access From Any Touchpoint

Great customer experiences have the flexibility of touchpoint, and permit you to not only interact via web, phone, mobile, kiosk or other devices but have all actions instantly updated and available in a consistent manner. An example of what not to do: I placed an order on HomeDepot.com and immediately realized I made a mistake. I wanted to cancel it, but due to technical constraints, you can’t cancel orders on the website, only from the call center. So I called the call center, and they told me they wouldn’t be able to “see” my order (and therefore weren’t able to cancel it) for about an hour when the systems synchronize, and I should call back then. Not a great or accessible customer experience.

Flexible Frameworks

Flexible frameworks have the ability to be modified rapidly along with the changes that are being frequently deployed. The number one secret to how great customer experiences got to be great? It’s not by having a genius team that gets it right the first time; it’s through an iterative process of testing and learning. To do that, you have to be able to efficiently code, test, and iterate or kill new ideas quickly. Furthermore, the frameworks for presentation, business logic, and transaction processing need to be flexible. If user testing shows that changing the sequence of information collected from users during a checkout process might improve conversion, you need to be able to make a change like that reasonably simply. We often see companies with aging mainframe-based “back office” systems that are holding them back from being able to re-engineer their customer experience because “that’s not how the legacy system works.” No matter how much pain, companies in this situation need roadmaps to upgrade, redesign or replace these inflexible systems to permit the creative evolution of their customer experience.

2. Business Operations

Serving the digital customer effectively is not just about creating digital touchpoints, but about evolving the total experience with digital at the center. That means you will need to change the way you do business in a variety of spheres. Customers who use online chat to ask questions expect answers far faster than those who email, let alone those who send in snail mail. Digital customers opening an account at your bank don’t want to have to wait to receive a thick packet of forms in the mail that they have to sign in 17 different places. You may want to offer digital customers alternatives in “out of stock” situations (such as a direct ship) or permit them to customize their purchases in ways that weren’t previously possible. Truly optimizing for digital will probably change how you merchandise, your return policies, your customer support, customer communications, and, well, everything. It may require new roles, new processes or a re-organization of the company.

3. Business Model

One of the benefits customers see from digital is a huge improvement in the value equation. Skype has taken our long distance bill from hundreds of dollars to pennies. Spotify has given us access to practically any song ever recorded for a few dollars a month, and Netflix has done the same for movies. In many markets, Uber has halved the cost of a taxi. This is awesome for consumers, but threatening to incumbents whose business models are dependent on the pricing levels of legacy business models. Jeff Zucker, the former CEO of NBC, echoed this concern a decade ago when he bemoaned having to trade “analog dollars for digital pennies.”

Why are some companies able to offer consumers a “better deal?” Because digital can take substantial cost out of the equation, allowing more digitally centric companies to be more cost-competitive or shift to totally different business models (subscription access to huge content libraries instead of one by one DVD rental in the case of Netflix; offering the largest ground transportation fleet in the world without ever buying a single vehicle in the case of Uber; likewise eBay and Alibaba, two of the largest online stores, both of which stock no inventory.) You can have a great website and app, but if the fundamental value equation of your business is no longer competitive, you are going to struggle.

Don’t Bolt On Digital

Digital started out as a means of communication. We then had the era of eCommerce, where we “bolted on” digital alternatives to access the same inventory and offers available in our non-digital channels. But today, the winners are “digitally-transformed” companies that are offering a digital value proposition and have a technology stack that empowers them to create a great customer experience, and the business processes necessary to support and deliver on it.

It may seem like a lot. And it is. The world is changing fast, and the companies that succeed in the future will be those that make the transition. The ones that don’t will wind up on the list with companies like Kodak, Polaroid, BlockBuster, Sports Authority, Borders, Linens and Things and Circuit City. You can use this as a high-level roadmap for what you need to do to keep up with the digital transformation era. If your formula is not working yet, ask yourself which of these three areas you might not be paying enough attention to, or adapting quickly enough.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Pexels

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Think Outside Which Box?

1 Reply

Think Outside Which Box?

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

We’ve all said it. We need to think “outside the box.”

But what is this box-like barrier that would otherwise constrain our thinking, and how do we move beyond it?

At FROM, we use our custom-built workshop space, Innovation Loft, to help teams from some of the largest brands in the world move beyond that metaphorical box to create new products, processes or entire businesses. We’ve spent a lot of time studying the barriers that limit individual or team thinking, and testing methods to break free of those barriers.

Through our work, we’ve discovered there isn’t just a single box. Instead, there are four nested barriers that can limit thinking.

HABIT
BELIEF
IDENTITY
IMAGINATION

You can use a variety of different techniques that you can apply to help get past each box, but they differ, depending on which box you’re focused on.

BOX ONE: HABIT

People constrained by habit are best described by the phrase, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” This box exists because it’s our comfort zone – where we know what works. But the uncharted territory is where much of the treasure lies!

Overcoming the Limits of Habit

How do you move teams beyond habit? One way is to explore ‘stretch-goals,’ or goals well beyond what’s possible with your current method of doing business. For example, if your manufacturing process takes 90 minutes to produce a carton of ice cream, conduct an exercise to brainstorm how you could produce that same carton in only 5 minutes. This type of exercise requires completely different thinking about the entire manufacturing process. It might not actually be practical or cost-effective to make the cartons in 5 minutes, but the process of thinking about how it could be done is one way to explore what lies beyond the box of habit.

BOX TWO: BELIEF

Even when we’re ready to move past habit and try something new, there’s another box that constrains what we believe will work or are capable of accomplishing. In corporate environments, the box of belief is epitomized by statements like, “We tried that before and it didn’t work,” or “We can’t compete in that space.”
Whether these beliefs are true or not, they’re often over-generalized or stated in absolute terms. Take, “We can’t compete in that space.” It may not be wise to compete in that space, but is it really impossible? By staying in the box of belief, you could be dismissing possible opportunities.

Overcoming the Limits of Belief

To tackle the barrier of belief, use an exercise that sorts beliefs from facts. Underlying facts are helpful, but the beliefs associated with them can be limiting. If you chose to pursue a certain goal, how would you move past the facts? If it’s not that you can’t compete, but that there are barriers to doing so, what are they and how might you get past them? Ultimately, you want ideas for clearing each obstacle, so you can evaluate if it makes sense to proceed.

BOX THREE: IDENTITY

Even when we’re willing to change and believe certain things are possible, we can remain stuck inside of a box of our own identity. This box is best characterized by statements like, ‘We don’t do that at this company,” or “That wouldn’t be consistent with our brand.”

Overcoming the Limits of Identity

First things first: It’s valuable to have an identity, and to have a brand that customers know stands for something. However, getting past a belief barrier doesn’t necessarily mean acting outside the box, but just to think outside the box. Identities need to grow and change over time, and can’t do that if you never consider possibilities beyond your current identity. (e.g., Apple used to be called ‘Apple Computer,’ but now they make more money from phones and are known as simply ‘Apple.’)

To temporarily think outside your current identity, play the ‘What Would Company X Do?” game. Give separate teams one company or entity, and have them look at the problem at hand in the way that organization might. Apple, the Marines, Starbucks, and Disney are good companies to use as models, as they’re all successful entities with very different identities and ways of solving problems. Viewing your company’s problems or opportunities through the lens of another company can yield interesting, new ideas. If some of the ideas aren’t a good fit, that’s ok! In ideation, we’re mining for gold, so a large quantity of sand and pebbles in the pan is not an indicator of failure – it’s the number of gold nuggets that indicate success.

BOX FOUR: IMAGINATION

Ideas beyond the box of imagination aren’t even a blip on the radar, or even in the realm of our thinking. We don’t consider them outside our beliefs, or inconsistent with our identity because we don’t consider them at all.

Overcoming the Limits of Imagination

What we can imagine comes from a combination of our experiences, plus an ability to take those experiences and combine them in novel ways. To stimulate imagination, it’s important to define a clear goal for your team, and encourage them to share and explore past experiences that may be relevant to that goal. If you want to increase customer loyalty, have your team review experiences that have affected their loyalty to other products and services. Then, expose them to new ideas and knowledge – things like competitive case studies, trends or technologies that might be part of a solution to the problem. When teams have a greater range of experiences to draw from, they can start to imagine possibilities that they didn’t previously have the “raw materials” to form.

It’s fantastic to have an identity, beliefs, and habits. All these aspects of our personality serve us in various situations. But it’s also valuable to be able to temporarily turn these psychological limits off in the context of exploratory ideation. You never know what’s out there, and you can enrich your value proposition, your brand and even yourself by embracing the freedom to explore what lies beyond. Then, you can decide for yourself whether or not to expand the box!

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Pexels

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Why Organizations Struggle with Innovation

Leave a reply

Why Organizations Struggle with Innovation

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

We all know the world is changing rapidly. It’s clear that in order for organizations to remain relevant to the next generation of customers, and even in the next generation of technology, we must adapt, evolve and transform. The field is littered with once-great companies who failed to do this: Blackberry, Nokia, Kodak, Borders, Western Union, Blockbuster, Polaroid.

But accepting major change, or even in some cases small changes, isn’t easy for large companies. At Innovation Loft we’ve worked with scores of major brands on their efforts to conceive, create and launch new products, enter new markets, redefine their value propositions and distribution strategies, and address various types of transformations. We’ve seen some spectacular successes and some tragic near misses. In watching these innovation stories unfold, we’ve concluded that there are three key reasons why innovations fail.

Three Key Reasons Innovations Fail:

The Wrong Idea
Failure to Execute
Sabotage!

It’s important to keep these three domains of risk in mind when approaching any innovation project, and a lot of our work at Innovation Loft is focused on how to manage and mitigate risks in each of these three categories. Let’s look at these one at a time:

1. The Wrong Idea

Change is not always good. New is not always popular. How can you tell the right ideas from the wrong ones? Here are a few practices that can make a big difference.

Focus on Customer Needs

It may seem like Apple has made its success on delivering customers new capabilities they “didn’t know they needed.” And that may be true in the sense that if you had asked customers, they might not have articulated a desire for an iPod or an iPad. However, if you focused on observing consumers in their day-to-day interactions back then, the challenge of dealing with dozens or more CDs, and the decision about which ones to bring clearly created a “pain point.” Fast forward a few years. People trying to curl up with their laptop in bed to watch a movie was clearly awkward, and watching a movie on a small iPhone was also sub-optimal. Apple identified gaps they could fill. Many unsuccessful ideas lack a clear customer value proposition and are based on the assumptions of a benefit consumers will eventually realize.

Test and Iterate

Think of product development as a spiral. Test the simplest, lowest-cost version of your product (even if it’s a paper mockup) to get early feedback from users. Continue that process each step of the way, through launch and beyond, to really understand how consumers are using your product and where it may need improvement.

Pivot

Ultimately, don’t fall in love with your idea. Focus on the value you can create for your customers. Even with the first two points in this list, you can still find yourself launching the wrong idea. That’s the risk of innovation. In a large corporate environment, it’s important to set the expectation up front that there will be flexibility on redefining the product, even substantially, as the project goes on. While this approach may not be consistent with typical enterprise “capital budgeting” processes, it’s critical to the success of innovative projects.

2. Failure to Execute

Even if you have the right idea, you can fail to execute. Effective execution is measured by quality, speed, and communication.

Quality: Does the product fulfill the vision? An initial version of a product may not be as feature-rich as future releases (the original iPhone did not allow copy and paste, let alone the downloading of apps!) The key test is not comprehensive features but doing a few things very well.

Speed: In a world of innovation, we are always in competition. At the initial launch of Android, it was clearly behind the curve compared to iOS. Over time, Android was able to catch up and eventually exceed iOS sales. The two remain locked in an arms race for higher standards and better capabilities, and the timing of improvements clearly has a substantial impact. Nevertheless, Android’s story demonstrates that even with a late start, one can catch up. Kyocera and Nokia were in the market with smartphones several years before Apple.

Communication: Peter Drucker said, “Business has just two functions: innovation and marketing.” The two must go hand-in-hand. Apple’s genius has been the marriage of a great product with great communication.

3. Sabotage

Companies are designed to resist change. Classic business books define how organizations must specify roles and clear processes for how to operate. But this resistance to change is misplaced when it comes to innovation. We’ve seen many great projects killed in infancy, or even after launch and initial success, due to areas of an organization whose interests would be threatened by the success of that transformation.

If a new product or project is truly going to be transformational for your company, expect it to have enemies. These enemies’ very survival (or their perception of it) may be at stake. Many innovative products that were on the path to “saving the company” are killed through internal sabotage. As soon as there is any misstep in an innovation initiative — as there always is — forces are ready to pounce and convince the powers-that-be that it’s time to “put it out of its misery.” Can you imagine Apple killing the iPhone over Antennaegate or the Apple Maps debacle?

How can you avoid sabotage? One tactic is trying to gain as much organizational alignment as possible during each step of the innovation process. Don’t assume that because a solution seems “obvious” to your team that others will automatically support it. Involving key executives, in addition to as many parts of the organization as possible, will garner more support. Give team members the chance to participate and feel ownership of the initiative. In the words of Harry Truman:

“It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Unsplash

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Innovation Friction Risks and Pitfalls

1 Reply

Innovation Friction Risks and Pitfalls

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

There’s a lot to be learned about innovation by looking at good ideas that just didn’t make it. We’d all like to believe that if we have an idea that genuinely improves upon something, and if we execute that idea correctly, the idea will be successful. But there is another factor to consider:

Here’s today’s example:

Back in the early 2000’s, I was running part of the eCommerce practice for Ernst & Young. Around 2003 we moved into a shiny new building at 5 Times Square in New York City, right next to where the ball drops on New Year’s Eve. The building was the first place I had ever seen with a keypad-controlled elevator. Instead of pushing an up or down button, the elevator is called by a numerical pad. You type in the number of the floor you are going to and receive a response from the keypad with a letter (such as D.) That letter corresponds to the elevator that you have been assigned to. You go to “your” elevator and, when it arrives, it automatically takes you to your floor.

This innovation delivers several benefits that improve the elevator experience:

1. It makes the elevators more efficient.

People going to lower floors are clustered together, as are people going to higher floors, and people going to the same floors are put on the same elevator. This allows more elevators to run express. Fewer stops. Less waiting for an elevator and a faster trip in the elevator.

2. It reduces “clicks.”

In a traditional system, an elevator user has to “call” the elevator and indicate their desire to go up or down. Once in the elevator, the user has to pick a floor. The old system was not a massive amount of effort, but the new system reduces two interactions to one. Presumably an improvement.

(Plus there’s no worrying about the kid in the elevator who decides to push all the buttons — there aren’t any!)

Is there a downside to this innovation?

Well, if you’re already in the elevator, there’s no opportunity to change your mind without getting off on the wrong floor and repeating the whole process. The biggest downside of this innovation is simply that it requires users to learn something new. In fact, when I moved into 5 Times Square, I found that when people came to meet with me for the first time, the first 10 minutes of our meeting was inevitably focused on their need to vent their reactions to our crazy elevators and how they couldn’t figure out how to use them!

Truthfully, the elevators were easy to use. Clear instructions were printed above the keypad, and the system worked very well. The problem was that it required users to relearn a skill they had fully and completely mastered (i.e., using an elevator) and start over at a beginner level — even if it only took 30 seconds to learn how to use the new elevator system.

I’ve watched with interest over the years to see if these types of elevators would take off. It turns out they didn’t. Very recently, I was visiting a client in Houston. The building had actually spent money to remove the keypad system and replace it with the traditional 2-step process. Wow. You know your innovation is not doing well when your customers are willing to invest tens of thousands of dollars to get rid of it and go back to the old way.

After much thought, I believe it’s all because of the friction of asking people to re-learn how to push an elevator button. Some innovations don’t require this. The new Boeing 787s have substantial innovation, but from a passenger standpoint, they work in basically the same way as the last round of airplanes. The innovations improve comfort, fuel efficiency, and other factors, but you recline the seat and return your tray table to an upright position in pretty much the same old way. Other innovations require learning: ATMs, DVRs, electric cars. All of these innovations have been successful, despite their learning requirements. However, the need for users to learn new behavior did slow their adoption. Innovation friction slows down adoption of innovations that require substantial behavior change, and even more so if it requires learning. This is especially true if the innovation requires un-learning an old way of doing something. If the friction is greater than the momentum of the benefit of overcoming it, the innovation stops dead in its tracks.

An example of this friction is the metric system, which has made only a very small amount of progress in adoption over the last 50 years, despite being clearly superior to the “English system.” It’s just too darn much trouble to change.

One last story about innovation friction from early in my career.

At that time, I was working with a lot of insurance companies creating web-based interfaces to replace traditional “green screen” systems used by insurance agents to quote and initiate new policies for auto and home insurance. It typically took a new hire 4-5 months to learn the system well enough to complete a policy quote — and well over a year to become truly proficient with it! We proudly designed replacement systems that anyone with basic computer skills could learn in a day or two at most, but found that some users were quite hostile to our efforts. They already knew how to use the green screen systems, and they were pretty darn fast with them. One Customer Support Agent even quoted Charlton Heston to me, saying I would only be able to take away her green screen if I pried it from her “cold dead hands.” Creepy? Yes. But also telling. Those old systems are gone now, because of the huge benefit of being able to train people on the new system so quickly. This benefit put the companies that used the new system in a position to more or less force that innovation onto other users.

Many successful innovations have required change and learning — automobiles, indoor toilets, smartphones. With all of these examples, we’ve seen many people willing to learn, for whom the “pain” of change was outweighed by the perceived benefit. But we also see a substantial number of users who resisted for years, saying, “No thanks, I like my outhouse (or horse and buggy or bank teller) just fine.” When conceiving or launching an innovation that requires learning, it’s important to consider the role innovation friction will play in adoption, where you can reduce it, and where you can increase the user’s willingness to accept it as the cost of the greater benefit.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Unsplash, Howard Tiersky

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Ignite Innovation with These 3 Key Ingredients

1 Reply

Ignite Innovation with These 3 Key Ingredients

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

The team at FROM has worked with dozens and dozens of companies to create innovative new products, processes, and channels to connect with customers. It’s very rewarding work for many reasons, one of which is the incredible people we get to work with at our clients. In fact, we find over and over that our clients have teams with tremendous knowledge, vision, and passion to serve their customers. And yet, it can sometimes take an outside force (like us) to unleash their full creative potential or to catalyze the action need to move an idea forward along the pathway of value. Why is that?

Having observed many companies go through transformations that yielded massively innovative thinking and action from teams that were previously struggling, the difference usually boils down to something that had been missing in the company’s culture, processes, or environment. But what?

Consider this analogy. To create fire you must have three key ingredients:

Some type of fuel
Oxygen
A spark or source of heat to start the reaction.

These ingredients are all necessary for the reaction to occur. If any is missing, nothing happens. The dormant potential is not realized.

It’s a similar pattern with sparking innovation. There are three key ingredients. When these are present, amazing things can happen. And when any is missing, there’s no reward structure or corporate mandate that can create the magic.

The human mind is an incredible problem-solving machine, and it works best when given a very clear and precise goal.

1. Focused Objective

The first ingredient is a Focused Objective. This is the SPARK of innovation. The human mind is an incredible problem-solving machine, and it works best when given a very clear and precise goal. Defining the right objective that you want your innovation team to churn on is the first step in empowering them. If you want your team to create a more innovative doorknob, that’s somewhat specific. However figuring out how to create a doorknob that looks like brass, lasts for at least 10 years with normal residential use, and can retail for no more than $19.99 is a much more specific objective. The brain is more resourceful when it really understands the target it is shooting for.

Where does such specificity come from? We use a concept in our innovation framework that we call Cascading Innovation.

It might have been a prior team’s innovation output to figure out that a $19.99 “faux brass” doorknob is what the market wants. Their specific objective might have been to determine what gaps exist in the doorknob market where the company could generate at least $50M in incremental sales by 2014 through existing retail channels.
That input might have come to them from yet another team whose focus was to figure out which market in residential hardware has the greatest potential for growth over the next 5 years, perhaps they concluded it was doorknobs.

Constraints

When articulating a focused objective, it is very important to clearly define the correct constraints.

On one hand, we want to drive innovation, and so we want to be careful not to state the objective or the problem too much in the terms of the current “legacy” solution to the problem. Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked people what they want, they’d have said a faster horse.” So avoid defining the problem as “a faster horse” versus “a faster way to travel.”

At the same time, all creativity exists within some kind of framework, whether it’s the structure of a haiku poem or a painting created within a defined frame.

What’s fabulous about clear constraints is that once all the constraints are clear, then we can tell the teams with confidence that any solution which solves the problem within the constraints is fair game, even if it looks nothing like what anybody expects. That is very liberating.

Henry Ford said “If I’d asked people what they want they’d have said a faster horse.”

2. Information

The second ingredient to ignite innovation is Information. Relevant information is the FUEL of innovation. Our doorknob team is hopefully populated with some individuals who have some of their own stored information in the form of personal experience in the doorknob biz. But collecting the right additional information and making it easy for the team to organize and internalize it is key. Information might include: competitive examples of other low cost doorknobs which have or have not been successful; market research about consumer needs; materials prices for a variety of different low cost metals along with information about their durability. Figuring out the right information with which to FUEL your team will allow them to burn hotter and longer on the problem.

There are three ways to get the information to feed your team:

The people you choose for the team bring different backgrounds and experience to the table. On the projects on which we consult, significant thought goes into the right composition of the client’s innovation team to bring different backgrounds, knowledge, personalities and perspective to bear.

Once assembled, each team member’s individual knowledge will be an information resource to him/herself, as a member of the team. The team’s collective knowledge will be a resource to the entire team if you structure the collaboration to foster knowledge sharing.
Secondary research such as market studies, government statistics, materials analysis, etc can provide critical reference. Gathering the full gamut of available information and structuring it so that it is easily digested and referenced can be a sizable undertaking, but is critical to giving the team both information that may yield flashes of valuable insight as well as the tools they need to evaluate and prioritize ideas as they are generated.
Primary research that your team participates in, such as talking to customers and building and testing physical prototypes, is another way to get the information to fuel your team. There is no substitute for personal experience.

You can also think of two key “buckets” of information that together form the ideal fuel.

1. Knowledge of the problem space

Who are the users for whom we are innovating? What do we understand about their needs?
Has this problem been solved before or have prior attempts been made? What was the approach and what were the results?
How can a potential solution’s effectiveness be measured? How will we know when the problem is solved?
Has anyone solved or attempted to solve a similar problem which may be instructive?

2. Knowledge of the resources that are available to create the solution

Details on the rules regarding any constraints that must be met for a successful approach (e.g. regulatory restrictions or distribution restrictions)
Specific characteristics of different materials or processes, that either enable or hamper their use in particular ways
Information on new technologies that can be leveraged in the solution

There is a wonderful scene in Apollo 13 where the team has to figure out how to keep the astronauts alive until re-entry even though the Co2 “scrubbers” in the command module have failed, causing the air to become slowly poisoned. The leader of the Mission Control team tasked with solving this problem dumps onto the table all the “stuff” they have in the command module and tells the team “we have to figure out how to make this (the large square filters they have) fit into the hole for this (the smaller round filters that have failed) using nothing but this (the pile of miscellaneous stuff on the table which mirrors the available material in the command module). Watch this one minute clip it’s a great example of a clear focused objective with clear information about the resources available to solve the problem:

3. Freedom

And so what is the OXYGEN we need to finish the recipe? Freedom is the OXYGEN of innovation. What do we mean by freedom? In daily “business as usual” there are a variety of things that hold us back — which suppress the natural release of our latent creativity just as lack of oxygen snuffs out a campfire. Here are a few of the barriers to freedom and how we overcome them.

Fear. Fear of looking foolish and fear of political repercussions are the two greatest risks to innovation. These fears hold back new ideas and honest discourse regarding ideas that do come forth. These are best overcome with culture. In our innovation workshops we stress rules such as “leave rank at the door,” and highlight the value of bad ideas.
Patterns. We all have certain patterns we follow. Those patterns are the grooves in the road that make it hard to find a new path and they are the shackles that keep us from thinking freely. There are many ways to break patterns. Some techniques we use in our innovation frameworks and workshops include: working in a different type of workspace, music, toys, time compression, physical activity/games and mixing teams in unexpected ways.
Assumptions. People have assumptions about what can or can’t be done, what the company will or won’t allow, what the market will or won’t accept. However most successful innovations break existing assumptions. One of the reasons its important to state the problem and its constraints with great care is that in doing so we let the innovation team know those are all the assumptions they should respect, anything else should be challenged. We also conduct exercises specifically designed to remove assumptions. One great example is the “Google exercise.” It works like this. People perceive Google as innovative. So we tell people: “Google just bought your company, and they put their most innovative team on the problem. How would they solve it?” (and it can work with Apple or Facebook as well). This context puts people outside their normal assumptions about what is possible in their environment and even, strangely enough, frees them from their own limiting beliefs about their own imaginations. The team may come back and say, “Well the guys at Google would do this wild innovative thing, but that’s the sort of thing we’d never come up with here at Acme corporation.” Uh oh, tricked you! You just did.
Faith. The last component of freedom is faith. A lack of faith can stifle innovation. Teams must believe that solutions to the challenge exist and that they are more than capable of arriving at them.

So those are the three ingredients to ignite innovation: a clear set of objectives to spark the FIRE, a rich set of information to FUEL it, and an atmosphere of freedom acting as OXYGEN so the flame can breathe.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Unsplash

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.