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A frustrated customer

Some weeks ago I bought an economics book that also had an useful web resource. Enclosed was a key to access the resource. It tried to use it and login, but did not succeed. I contacted the support and it took several emails back and forth to understand that the key could not be used. Since their web shop had no button to add this web resource item to my basket, I asked them how I could buy such a key. They redirected me to sales. Yet another email, this time to sales. Sales department could not find the ISBN number in their Canadian system and therefore could not give me a price. Period. That was all. How hard can it be? Here I was, a customer fighting to buy an item! I gave up.

Standardized services

This led me to think about services and their design. The above has happened many times in different situations. In the name of effectiveness and optimization I am forced to fill in standardized forms or talk to people that can handle only one type of questions. Sometimes I have to talk to an dumb automated teller without pardon. Why can’t I be guided to the right answer by a real person?

Services are designed with the assumption that 1) problems can be a categorized and 2) the customer can understand this categorization. In real life there is variety and the problem told, might be hiding the real one. What is the real result of this categorized service? People call again and ask questions. Are the customers slow to understand? Is the problem on the customer side? Should we optimize the categorization? No!

Failure demand

Service design seems to be guided by factory thinking. Usually the intelligence is put in an information system. This way, standardization can be applied by specialized service people. But this factory thinking, this system (encompassing much more than the IT system), hinders variety and create unhappy customers. It creates a demand of help or more information because of failures.

Absorbing variety

We should accept that variety is part of life and design the services accordingly. You may react: we cannot afford that! But what if the unnecessary questions, the “failure demand”, actually generate a lot of unnecessary work? This waste of time could have been avoided if the customer got all the help he wanted at first contact. Real people are the best absorbers of variety. When designing services, the workers that meet the customer should handle as much as possible and be a guide to the solution. This generates happy and returning customers.

Peter Senge, a well-known professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and founder of the Society for Organizational learning (SoL) was interviewed in Jakarta Post recently.

We got two curves that are creating big problems. One is the growing interdependence of the world…and a diminishing capacity to understand interdependence.The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

So if you deal with tribal cultures, prior to the agricultural revolution, many of them don’t even have a sense of themselves as separate from nature. They usually don’t have even a word for nature. You don’t have a word from something that’s not separate from you.

Agrarian societies developed a slightly different attitude, believing it was humans who initiate the “natural” systems, which were often highly religious, and that humans are separate and superior.

During the industrial revolution and the subsequent urbanization process, human beings began to ignore nature. “There’s a lot of American kids think their food comes from the grocery store and the concept of seasonality has no meaning to them whatsoever.”

The further people are from nature, the more they lost the ability to understand interdependence. “Nature is our teacher to understanding interdependence

Other posts about this subject you might want to read:
The partnership paradigm
Ishmael
The necessity of diversity
Connecting to nature

In an interesting article in Culture Change called “Living now, naturally and sustainably via relocalizing“, Dave Ewoldt traces the root of our global crisis back to a fundamental disconnection from the natural world.

He describes the dominator paradigm that our industrial civilization has been built upon.

The systemic root of our disconnection from nature can be directly traced to the dominator paradigm which started conquering and subverting egalitarian cultures 6-8,000 years ago, and was firmly ensconced by 2,000 BC. As detailed by author Riane Eisler, this paradigm consists of force-based ranking hierarchies of control (humans over nature, men over women, one race over another) that are built on and maintained by fear.

In this paradigm individualism reigns and “the others” are thought of as inferior and thus morally acceptable to exploit for personal profit. We in our civilization, even assume that we must use this control for the sake of human progress and prosperity.

The root has to be removed. A fundamental change of paradigm is needed.  The antidote is to reconnect with nature in a systemic way.

Healthy ecosystems can be looked to for providing the models and metaphors humans require for becoming sustainable and creating mutually supportive relationships.

Sustainability is a key. The author defines it as

integrating our social and economic lives into the environment in ways that tend to enhance or maintain ecosystems rather than degrade or destroy them; a moral imperative to pass on our natural inheritance, not necessarily unchanged, but undiminished in its ability to meet the needs of future generations; finding, and staying within, the balance point amongst population, consumption, and waste assimilation where bioregions, watersheds and ecosystems maintain their ability to recharge and regenerate.

The other antidote is to relocalize

In the human built environment and in the social institutions we create, the process to become sustainable — to holistically integrate our activities with the natural world — is provided by a systemic concept known as relocalization. This is the antithesis as well as the antidote to corporate globalization. Relocalization includes the concepts that we must rebuild our local economies to be self-reliant; recapture our sense of place and belonging; reclaim our sovereignty; and restore our communities of mutual support.

The author describes the need to return to local autonomy, to bio-regional networks of interdependence where production and distribution of food, goods, services and energy is as close to the point as consumption as possible. Living organisms have a strong tendency to self-organize into mutually supportive relationships. Nature is resilient and we need to build our society that way.

Using the four core Natural Systems Principles — mutual support and reciprocity, no waste, no greed, and increasing diversity — to inform the process of relocalization, we can replace the dominator paradigm with a paradigm of partnership, and we can overcome and heal our disconnection and separation from the web of life.

Reconnecting to nature and relocalizing are effective strategies for the future, according to the author. The dominator paradigm should be changed to a partnership paradigm.

Here are some more articles published by Dave Ewoldt.

I believe the main reason we have to start thinking in this direction is that we live embedded in a larger system. Our civilization is part of something bigger, whether we like it or not. We can perhaps create our own rules to a certain extent and for a period of time, but sooner or later the laws of the surrounding system will enforce themselves.

We like to look at things in small and understandable pieces and we trace simple paths from cause to effect. We see the causes of our problems as something “out there”, instead of something “in here”. In reality our band-aid solutions only creates further problems, because our perspective is too narrow. Our only real option is to see ourselves in a bigger context and find out, cooperate with and learn from the surrounding system..

How could relocalizing be expressed concretely for a country or a city? What steps could we take to realize it?

Other posts about this subject you might want to read:
Ishmael
The necessity of diversity
Connecting to nature

A good mix of different personalities, roles and experiences increases the creativity and quality of teamwork. In groups and any kind of collaboration, we need diverse angles of approach. We ought to choose members in a team on purpose with diversification in mind, but if you are like me, the first thought is to choose people like yourself. You know, some people you just immediately get along with and relationship feels natural. Other people are more troublesome and hard to understand. What if we too soon exclude people? Perhaps they are hard to understand, because you are different. What would happen if we took a step towards them and tried to build something together? I am playing with the thought that some possible connections pass by unnoticed because of preconceived ideas.

Differences first

We are usually quite fast to categorize people when we meet; most of the time we see differences first. The first thought is accompanied with a feeling. We compare ourselves with the other person in some areas. Either it turns out favourable for us or we feel inferior. We might feel envy, insecurity or contempt and distance. As a result we put a label on the other person. We see what’s separating us and hang on to that. If we look at our behaviour a bit more closely, it has actually an egoistic smell on our part. Why do we choose the differences first?

Similarities first

What would happen if the first thing we do, we look for things that connect us with the other person, things we have in common? We can first try to build a bridge, even if it is a tiny one. At least we are two human beings; that’s something at least. Connecting to and cooperating with someone that is unlike you is powerful. It could be worth the extra energy we have to put into it. Diversification is a key to survival in nature.

I was thinking along these lines while standing in a queue at a grocery store a few days ago. I looked at each person in the queue while noticing my own reactions. There were different ages and different social statuses represented. Some looked cool and self-confident, other confused, insecure or overbearing. I  noticed my initial thoughts about them. But we were all humans; we all stood in the same queue buying groceries, probably facing the same kind of troubles in life.

More on this subject:
Living inside walls
Your thoughts are not you

We have been taught that nature is a place of competition and that different species must struggle for existence. Darwin wrote “All nature is at war, one organism with each other or with external nature.” Man is supposed to be the one which has climbed the highest and now dominates nature. Obviously we have exerted dominion. But Darwin’s ideas were influenced by the prevalent classical, mechanical view of nature. He considered each species in isolation. Darwin’s theory was an insufficient explanation of what was going on in nature, a limited model.

Many scientists are reevaluating Darwin’s model today. It is evident that there is a lot of cooperation going on. The fact is that nature is a web of life where the species cooperate and need each other. There is no waste. Everything is reused. All organisms are dependent on the others for the completion of their life cycles. Each one has found its own niche.

During the last three decades a revolution has occurred in the life sciences that has enlarged the framework for understanding the dynamics of evolution. In this view, the relationship between parts or individual organisms is often characterized by continual cooperation, strong interaction and mutual dependence.

For example, the fossil records indicate that the temperature and composition of the Earth’s atmosphere have been continuously regulated by the whole of life during the last million years, even though the intensity of the Sun has changed quite much. The least discrepancy would have resulted in catastrophe and a sterile planet. We have millions of species interacting by complex feedback loops. Here diversity is a necessity and key to survival of life on planet earth.

We are surrounded and composed by microorganisms, bacteria, germs and they are indispensable to every known living structure on Earth today. These tiny fellows are not way down on the evolutionary ladder. They are the building blocks of life at this instant.

The more diverse a system is, the more resilient it is and the more able it is to withstand stress. This is the way the world operates. Obviously we should join its way of operating. Yet man has fought diversity through colonialism and industrialization. In the spirit of old Darwinism we spread out and conquered the world, ignorant of our true dependency of own environment.

If the Darwinian model is the ultimate model; we are at war, and our hope to stop this craziness is in vain. But the more I realize that the nature is cooperation and that diversity is actually a strength, the more hope rises in me. Life is all around us. Man ought to realize his place in the web of life and begin to cooperate.

As you can understand from my blog I am thinking and reading a lot along these lines. There is always a personal application also. As I was out walking with my dog today, I meditated over being part of the web of life. Fascinating. A responsibility.

The internet has changed our world and we have taken advantage of the new possibilities. The change is profound, like a paradigm shift and we need to adapt our mental models to fully utilize it. We have never before been able to reach so many and still communicate on an individual basis. I read an interesting article by Chris Anderson in Wired about the new economic model for the media and entertainment industries.

He talks about the long tail business. The tail is the titles that never became a hit. In the traditional economy many titles never make it to the stores or cinemas, because they have to reach a certain level of popularity to carry its own cost. Retailers will sell only content that can generate sufficient demand to earn its keep.

This means that people have less chance to find out about non-hits. It also means that many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually the results of poor supply-and-demand matching. Businesses think that if something isn’t a hit, it won’t make money and so it won’t return the cost of its production and distribution. We assume, in other words, that only hits deserve to exist. It is tempting for the producers to stay with a popular concept or repackage hits over and over again.

The traditional entertainment economy has been much of a push-model with its limits: not enough shelf space for all the CDs and DVDs produced, not enough screens to show all the available movies, not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out.

In the internet economy on the other hand, you have the possibility to offer much more. You can reach the masses and distribute the goods much easier, especially if it can be completely digitalized and downloadable as music and pdf-documents. You might think that people would keep buying only the hit-music if they were offered a greater variety. But no, they don’t. More than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Amazon earns money from the tail. This is a pull-model. The consumer has the initiative and the consumer likes it.

Internet has made possible a market for books, music and films at low volume per title. Variety is possible. Amazon is not only selling form the tail, the head is also represented. They have both the hits and the misses. The hits are an entry point for many.

The consumer needs some help. You can feel quite helpless standing before millions of titles. Amazon and similar e-businesses guide the customer by following the contours of theirs and other buyers likes and dislikes, easing their exploration of the unknown. They process real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. They use recommendations to drive demand down the long tail. It is a win-win situation. I buy a lot of books and music albums and this is precisely what I appreciate. I want to explore and I want to be help to do that.

Amazon recommendations based on other customers, helps us to develop our tastes and can fan interest in a book long after it was published. Cultural diversity is increased. Customers helping customers is also a prerequisite for scalability.

What I find interesting with this is that if you offer people a variety of titles, they begin to choose from among the variety. There is obviously a market for cultural diversity. People like to explore and leave the main stream. Not all, but many. Another interesting thing is that also low volumes can find a market. The trend has been towards larger volumes and units and this way can only lead to decreased diversity. I believe cultural diversity is important for our society and the internet can help variety from being swallowed by mainstream.