My experience with Amazon—how a bad product can lead to a good experience

A poor product performance needn’t dent your net promoter score. In fact, if you react appropriately, it may enhance it. Last week I purchased a window mount for a GPS device via Amazon. The product arrived in good condition and functioned effectively for a few hours. It then fell from the window having suffered a catastrophic failure; a rip in the rubber grommet resulted in the suction pad no longer sucking. This ensured a modicum of inconvenience as I was guided through the back roads of New Jersey with the GPS held in place by Blu-Tack—well consultants do have to be resourceful.

Simon Lunt23 September 2016feedback loops, voice of the customerComment

Can you handle the truth - part II

In ‘Can you handle the truth - part I’ I referred to the conceptual importance of feedback loops. In part II I relate a practical, personal example of how deployment of a mechanism for feedback built sufficient trust and honesty for an organisation to re-adjust the corporate strategy . Our approach to strategy process has four parts:

Simon Lunt23 September 2016Sensemaker, cynefin, feedback loops, strategy Comment

Can you handle the truth - part I

Last year I read ‘The Ghost of the Executed Engineer’ by Loren Graham. The book focuses on Peter Palchinsky, a Russian engineer, who served both the Tsarist and Stalinist regimes. Using Palchinsky as a proxy for the Soviet Union, Graham proposes that it was the Soviet’s lack of appetite to receiving (negative) feedback that lead to a paucity of innovation in the centrally managed economy, and its ultimate failure.. In CE terms, solutions to complex problems were always treated as fail-safe, rather than safe-to-fail. The claim may be exaggerated, but should not be dismissed too quickly. Peter Palchinsky loved presenting damming conclusions, but did so too gleefully. He seems never to have read the body language of the recipients of the feedback, and this lack of interpersonal awareness eventually cost him his life.

Simon Lunt23 September 2016engineering, feedback loops, science, stress inoculationComment

From Silence to Screams: Feedback loops in the Simple Domain

I have come to think of the Simple domain as the Enabling domain. However, most of our clients enjoy the excitement of the Complex domain, and dismiss the Simple domain as necessary though dull, but this is too shortsighted. If we manage them correctly, activities in the Simple domain enable us to spend more time and resource in the other domains, but if we get it wrong, there are huge negative consequences that can disable the resources allocated to growing and driving the business. Consequently, the greater the negative impact of failure of Simple systems, the greater should be our vigilance in ensuring that sensors are in place to pick up weak signals and hence avoid catastrophe. We don’t often talk about weak signals in the Simple domain, but I believe they exist.

Simon Lunt23 September 2016complexity, complicated, cynefin, feedback loops, simpleComment

THE FRUITS OF RIOTOUS EXPERIMENTATION

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