When action takes place without evidence, based on bias and assumption, or merely indifference; seeing incontrovertible facts presented in a compelling format can kickstart a change in behaviour.
That’s what Florence Nightingale achieved when she sent a copy of “Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army” to Queen Victoria.
There were undoubtedly many more facts Nightingale could have observed. The height of patients, their propensity to swear, their educational attainment, their places of birth.
But those facts weren’t what mattered to her. What mattered was how many were dying unnecessarily.
Data is increasingly easy to collect. Resist the temptation to use it all. Decide which facts matter to your business and measure those.
That way you’ll have a better chance of changing the right behaviours.
30 minutes later I call the cab office: “It’s been half an hour and I’m still waiting.”
“They’re in XXX gardens, and will be with you in 5 minutes.”
“Well if they aren’t I’m walking instead.”
“I can assure you they’ll be there in 5 minutes.”
9 minutes later the driver calls: “I’m 2 minutes away.”
“Sorry, you’re too late, I’ve started walking”.
I’d have been happier if the cab firm had said it was going to be forty minutes at the start. Then I could have made my decision to walk instead immediately. What irked me was the breaking of a promise made. The feeling of being lied to. As a result the driver missed out on a fare and wasted a journey.
“Should’ve got an Uber“, you say.
Maybe.
The way Uber solves this problem for the customer is to have a surplus of cabs available in the area. That means drivers are systematically under-employed. Which might mean it’s harder to earn a decent living. I’m not sure I want promises kept to me at the expense of the people doing the work.
Which is why in the end, I prefer travelling under my own steam.
My Great Western Railway train to Penzance was delayed by half an hour. Someone had been taken ill on a train in front of us. The tannoy kept us informed, and let us know that we would be able to claim compensation via the train operator’s website.
So far, so standard.
But here’s the difference a real-life, flesh and blood human made:
Knowing that some of the passengers would have missed their connection to Newquay, the train manager asked them to identify themselves as he walked through the train, so he could arrange alternative transport. Having worked out what their actual needs were, a bus was arranged to pick most of them up from St Austell, while for one person, a taxi was booked to get them to Newquay airport in time to make their plane. All at no extra cost.
Because the train manager saw their job as getting people to their desired destination as near on time as possible, not merely to carry them from A to B.
How very different from ‘rebel’ brand Virgin, who will happily chuck passengers off a train well short of their destination, to avoid the costs of further delays down the line, leaving them to scramble onwards as best they can.
I’ve supported the rail strikes since the beginning. I support them even more enthusistically now. Even though my Penzance trip was a day later than booked because of them.
These people aren’t just fighting for their jobs, they’re fighting for the kind of service I for one want to receive. A human one.
If you’re a micro business looking to serve more people well, consider this before you add the next person to your team:
Are you trying to make your music louder or more complex?
Getting louder is simple. Just let each new person follow the score you play from, alongside you. On a different instrument maybe, to give richness to the sound. Or give them a copy of your score so they can play elsewhere or in a different timezone. It’ll still be your music, still a personal experience for customers, only nearer to them.
Once you’ve mastered louder, making your music more complex gets easier too. Write a new score for the new thing you want to offer, teach new or existing people to play it, and put them wherever you want, to harmonise or contrast with your existing musicians. Better still, make sure every player is able to play every variation, in case they need to. So you can make your complex music louder.
It’s hard to do both at once without confusing your musicians and your audience.
Cinderella’s sisters would do anything to get their feet into the glass slipper. They cut off their toes, and when that didn’t work, they tried trimming off a bit of their heels. All they did was create a bloody mess. The slipper wasn’t designed for them.
In business, it’s sometimes desirable to present your ideas in a format people are more comfortable with. That’s always something worth exploring. If you want to change minds, it’s helpful to start with the familiar as a way to introduce something new.
Be careful though.
If you find yourself mangling the idea to make it fit, this shoe is not for you.
What is it exactly that the people you serve are trying to achieve? What’s the job they are trying to get done? (Hint: it’s not ‘buy your product or service’).
How do they go about getting that job done? What’s the process they follow to achieve it? What difficulties do they encounter in that process? How can you remove those difficulties for them? How can you make the process simpler/easier/cheaper/safer/more effective?
What if you organised your business around these things, instead of around your own job to be done? (Hint: that’s probably ‘sell my products/services’)
Corporations, being founded on a theory of Homo Economicus, naturally believe that when someone complains, they are merely seeking personal redress.
That’s true, but it isn’t the whole story.
Most often people want recognition of their own case AND to make sure it doesn’t happen to someone else. Sometimes people just want to make sure the mistake isn’t repeated.
That means “Sorry” is never enough, even when accompanied by compensation. What people really want to see is evidence that the mistake is being rectified. That systems and process are changed to ensure it can’t be repeated.
Otherwise, the only conclusion to be drawn is that it wasn’t a mistake, but policy. And compensation a bribe to keep your mouth shut.
If you’ve read Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the chasm” (and I recommend it), you’ll be familiar with this diagram:
But what does it practically mean for you?
If you are a business offering something new and different from what has gone before, something that could potentially disrupt the status quo, you need to understand this curve.
As an example, here’s what it means for me.
In the UK, there are around 1,018,220 businesses that employ between 3 and 10 people, including the owner. These are my overall ‘market’, the people I want to serve.
I offer a service that’s new and potentially disruptive to the status quo, so however I niche down into that market, by industry say, or geography, or business life stage, this curve comes into play. It adds another dimension to the psychographic of the people I can help most, that I have to consider when designing, marketing and delivering my service.
Here’s how it splits:
25,455 of them are Innovators. They love trying new things, what matters to them is that things are new and better than the current best option. They’ll want to know how it works (and they’ll take it apart to find out). They’re not worried about support, or infrastructure, they’re just happy to have the latest cool thing to play with. These are great people to test really new ideas on. Until they get bored and move on to the next cool new thing.
137,460 of them are Visionaries. They are interested in getting ahead, and if they can see how a thing will get them ahead of their competitors faster, they’ll go for it. They don’t mind if it’s not all there, or if there is no support. They will happily support themselves. They will ask for your thing to be redesigned to suit them though, so be prepared to maintain several versions of your thing.
346,195 of them are Pragmatists, and much more demanding. They want to know whether a thing solves their problem better than the current market leader, for less than the cost of the problem. They want to know that you are a safe company to work with; that there is support, and maintenance and spare parts. As long as these things are in place they don’t care who does it, which means you can still be a small business, collaborating with other small businesses to provide a complete service. Pragmatists will only use a new thing if they believe that there are enough people like them already using it. They don’t trust Visionaries (‘flying by the seat of their pants’) and they trust Innovators even less. That gap between Pragmatists and Visionaries is The Chasm.
The same number of businesses (346,195 of them) are Conservatives. I think of these people as the ones who say ‘nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM‘. For them what matter is whether a thing solves their problem better than the current market leader, for less money. They want everyone else to be using your thing before they do. They want you to be not just safe, but respected in the marketplace. They also expect you to provide everything yourself – support, maintenance, spare parts. In other words, you have to be a big company like them. Or at least look like it.
Finally, there the 152,733 who are Skeptics. As you might imagine from their position on the distribution curve, they are the last to adopt new things, sticking stubbornly to whatever has served them well up to now, even if the new thing would serve them better.
I’m an Innovator looking to serve Visionaries.
What side of the Chasm are you on? More importantly, where are the people you seek to serve?
Systems of all kinds can persist for long periods, staying more or less the same. Not static, but always hovering around some equilibrium value, even as they grow.
This happens because of feedback. A change in the equilibrium value triggers a change in the flow of something that affects that value. Like your central heating thermostat, which uses feedback on the actual room temperature to regulate the flow of hot water to your radiators in order to maintain a temperature that feels comfortable to you.
A business is a system too. We’re usually looking to grow it, exponentially if we can. We don’t often think of it as something we want to keep in equilibrium.
But perhaps we should.
A business is a system for making and keeping promises. That means that whatever else we might like to see, the important equilibrium value is how many promises we keep – or perhaps even how many we exceed.
If we all made that our thermostat there’s a good chance that a better kind of exponential growth would take care of itself.
When you’re setting up a client in your systems for the first time, it’s tempting to ask up front for everything you will need for the journey.
Resist.
If your tailor is making you an overcoat, you don’t expect them to measure your inside leg.
Only ask for what you need right now, to get the client started. Otherwise you’ll overwhelm them with unexpected (and to them, unnecessary, perhaps even unnerving) work, to get information that may well have changed by the time you actually need it.
Keep your information gathering aligned with what you’re doing together. That keeps it feeling natural, and you’ll have all the right information when you need it – just in time.
