Slides from my talk at IA Summit 2012. Won't make much sense of you were there. In it, I discuss how business must engage in humanist practices and values in this messy and complex Connected Age.

1. Making Business Human:
Delivering Great Experiences in a Connected Age
#ias12
Peter Merholz
e: peterme@inflection.com, peterme@peterme.com
t: @peterme

2. WARNING:
There will be very little actionable wisdom.
2

3. Awareness of user experience
is at an all-time high
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4. Apple’s has the largest market cap of any company.
Simply Hired lists 4,500 jobs in the United States with
“user experience” in it’s description.
UX conferences set new attendance records every year.
“It’s a magical time to be doing what we’re doing”
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5. 362 firms
95% say they are
“customer focused”
80% say they deliver a
“superior experience”
How many of these
firms’ customers agree
that they deliver a
superior experience?
8%
from “Closing the Delivery Gap” by Bain & Company

6. Forrester’s 2012 Customer Experience Index
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7. Why are so many user experiences so bad?
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8. The technology is more immediate, accessible,
distributed.
Experience design processes and methods are mature.
We’re investing in these practices like never before.
But...
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9. Do you work in a company with an org chart?
Where you have a clear, hierarchical reporting structure?
Do job titles determine work responsibilities and salary?
Are there policies, procedures, and rules for you to follow?
Do people work in cubicles, visually isolated from colleagues?
Are meetings primarily about the status of various initiatives?
When engaging consultants, do you issue an RFP, and require a list
of deliverables that will be delivered within a certain specified time?
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10. If you answered “yes” to those questions,
then you work in a bureaucracy
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11. Many assume bureaucracies are just how
work is done.
But they were created for a purpose.
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12. 12

13. 13

14. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/2356663850/ 14

15. 15

16. The “iron cage” of bureaucracy
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17. Industrial/Information age Connected age
Products Services
Manufacturing Customer experience
Ownership Access
Stocks Flows
Efficiency Effectiveness
Analytical Generative
Silos Cross-functional
Hierarchical Hyperlinked
Algorithmic Heuristic
External rewards Intrinsic motivation
Individual Social
Isolation Relationships
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18. What are relationships based on?
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19. Image Frame

20. 2011 Temkin
Trust Ratings
2012 Temkin
Experience
Ratings

21. “Colleen [Barrett] is primarily responsible for the
humanistic culture that we have at Southwest
today...One of the really significant things she did was
give our people on the front line a lot of flexibility.
Basically, she ascertained that we could not anticipate
every situation that would evolve in a given station at a
passenger terminal. Therefore, she told our employees—
and meant it—that
as long as you are leaning toward the customer, you
are OK... They did not need to ask permission from
anybody to do so.”
Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines

22. If you trust your employees, your
customers are more likely to trust you
22

23. March 2011 on kottke.org...
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24. 24

25. How might we widen the circle of trust?
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26. Image Frame

27. Image Frame

28. Image Frame

29. Image Frame

30. 30

31. CUSTOMERS
Lose Win
Win
YAY!
BUSINESS
Lose

32. 32

33. 33

34. 34

35. Management
Trust
Staff Customers
35

36. A cautionary tale...
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37. Reed Hasting’s “Culture” Presentation
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38. 38

39. From the Netflix Blog
“...we have realized that there is still a very large
continuing demand for DVDs both from our existing
members as well as non-members. Given the long life we
think DVDs by mail will have, treating DVDs as a $2 add
on to our unlimited streaming plan neither makes great
financial sense nor satisfies people who just want DVDs.
Creating an unlimited DVDs by mail plan (no streaming)
at our lowest price ever, $7.99, does make sense and will
ensure a long life for our DVDs by mail offering...”
39

40. Netflix forgot that most people are not like
the people who work at Netflix.
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41. Netflix also hadn’t realized that any
relationship, even a business relationship
with customers, is an emotional one.
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42. 42

43. Foresee Holiday 2011 Retail Satisfaction

44. The value of
empathy
(roughly $10 billion)
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45. What’s with all this talk about
“design thinking”?
Well, everything I ever needed to know
about managing experiences...
45

46. The Marshmallow Challenge
http://marshmallowchallenge.com/
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47. http://www.flickr.com/photos/copleys/1842011981/ 47

48. Express visually and tactilely
http://http://www.flickr.com/photos/copleys/1842854394/
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49. All contributors are equal
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/2885861465/ 49

50. Kinesthetic engagement
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jK-jC2__Fw
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51. 51

52. side note: don’t let Facilities get in your way
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53. The Connected Age requires business to
embrace what makes us human.
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54. complexification X connectedness
= Chaos and unpredictability
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55. Industrial/Information age Connected age
Products Services
Manufacturing Customer experience
Ownership Access
Stocks Flows
Efficiency Effectiveness this
Analytical Intuitive stuff
Silos Cross-functional is
Hierarchical Hyperlinked messy!
Algorithmic Heuristic
External rewards Intrinsic motivation
Individual Social
Isolation Relationships
55

56. Great member experiences fuse left and right brain approaches
We need...
Left brain Right brain
Analytic Emotional
Rigorous Visionary
Bottom-up Top-down
Engineered Creative
Evaluative Generative
Quantitative Qualitative
And this is
insufficient 56

57. 57

58. My favorite passage from Steve Jobs
Jobs did not organize Apple into semiautonomous
divisions; he closely controlled all his teams and pushed
them to work as one cohesive and flexible company,
with one profit-and-loss bottom line. “We don’t have
‘divisions’ with their own P&L,” said Tim Cook. “We
run one P&L for the company.”
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59. 59

60. Just one more story...
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61. 61

62. Instead of the penetration of the organizational
systems into the body...we see precisely the reverse,
the extension of messy, open-ended techniques of
clothing, layering, and stitching from real fabric
into organizational fabric as well.
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63. More playful More emotional
More social More respectful More emotional
How can you make your organizations more human?
More creative More interdependent
More physical More sensorial
More trusting
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64. More playful More emotional
More social More respectful More emotional
How can you make your organizations more human?
More creative More interdependent
More physical More sensorial
More trusting
Thank you.
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