First, it can represent the question “What needs to be changed?’ What are the situations or worldviews that are not working and that, therefore, ought to be improved? These are the ideas that we rally together to challenge and to make better.

Secondly, it can be seen as the question “What needs have changed?” How have the needs of our audience or customers (or anyone else that we have a relationship with) different than we used to know them? These are the concepts that we need to keep up with or we will be left behind as progress happens.

Since the summer of 2005, ChangeThis has been on a mission to find and spread great ideas. The site publishes manifestos supporting important concepts that independent authors submit because they are passionate about inspiring others. The site offers these leaders the freedom to educate the world about the idea that they care most about. These writers have seen a need that they want to pursue and alleviate.

ChangeThis is doing important work, regardless of the approach that is being advocated. That is why I have submitted a proposal for a new way of thinking and working for customers worldwide. It is called Customer 3D. It describes a new dimension of performance for customers that a few exceptional organizations have figured out. It shows the elements that other organizations can use to operate in this new dimension with more humanity. It is a model that is proactive. It is a strategy in which the first priority is customer success.

I care a great deal about the ChangeThis mission and the importance of fresh, breakthrough points-of-view that will make the future better. Please take a moment to vote for the Customer 3D Proposal (#295) this month.

Jackson Pollock said “Every good painter paints what he is.” Customer-centering does not happen simply by adopting that tagline. It happens because the business sees the customer as its purpose. If an organization is built around efficiency and controlling costs, that leads to a culture of passivity. Active decision-making involves advocating for the customer.

Decision-making should be mindful of the customer. That transforms the process from a mechanical inevitability to one that is personal and imaginative because it is focused on the customer. While at first it might seem that we are giving up control, we are actually looking at situations intelligently and understanding how they differ from the past. We become more creative when we approach decisions from the customer’s viewpoint.

The paradox is that being customer-centered provides more stability to our organizations than the presumption of stability that appears to exist in a rules-driven approach. It generates greater balance. It is the scaffolding on which workers can stand while they are carrying out their labor.

The transformation takes time, but it never works unless it is intentional. Random efforts will not be successful if you are trying “to make a dent in the world,” as Steve Jobs set out to do.

Customer 3D™ organizations create customer-centricity by instilling freedom and flexibility into their decisions and employees know they are empowered to do the right thing. It is more purposeful and natural. The litmus test is this: If the consequence of each decision is a productive outcome for the customer, then it was a correct decision that will allow the organization to prosper.

Organizations are buying into the philosophy that, in order to develop a relationship with their customers that goes beyond transactional accuracy and employee courtesy, they need a new dimension in their approach. It’s an emotional connection that is built on authenticity and trust. In other words, your organization has to be important to those customers.

The premise that customers want a relationship with organizations they can rely on as a source, based on positive successes has not changed because of social media. What has changed is our need to understand how these networks scale. The old-fashioned model that believes organizations create customer loyalty through transaction-based encounters is inadequate to explain what today’s world expects. Organizations that understand becoming the “go-to” company for information and expertise that their customers value are superseding this model by creating a network effect that is now far more important. That is the space which future customer loyalty will occupy.

Adams points out that the majority of our communication is with the people (or organizations) with which we have the strongest ties. Imagine that you define your purpose as being the pro-active source of information about your expertise. What if you transformed your company to become a hub of valuable information and a destination to spread your latest ideas? That is relevancy that matters to your customers.

We are launching a website in four weeks which will introduce a new dimension of relevance about customer closeness. It will change the way you think about customers and will be a source of information about this new thinking. It will be called Customer 3D™. A new, more positive direction for the customer relationship journey is beginning.

In The Little Black Book of Innovation, Scott Anthony relates the story of A.G. Lafley’s strategy to re-orient Procter & Gamble’s direction by driving decisions based on deep customer understanding. In order to re-energize the company he told employees, “We have one and only one boss that matters: the consumer. The consumer is boss.”  This went beyond voice-of-the-customer surveys to a stronger focus on finding out what the consumer wanted but could not articulate.

I understand the customer-as-the-boss comment. It is designed to focus the internal organization on the importance of the external customer. Organizations that use this mantra want the business to demonstrate a new respect for the customer, which, of course, is admirable. However, it implies that there is an inequality in the relationship.

Customer 3D organizations think differently. 3D organizations consider customers as partners. They think about “us” when they consider those customers. They share the same “space” with their customers and own the responsibility for providing the highest value that can be delivered. Value is defined as what will make the customer successful. Instead of reacting as one might behave with a boss, equality and collaboration with customers opens up a much broader dimension of possibilities. Bosses are limiting. Collaborating on an equal basis is virtually unlimited.

Internal Issue: Product-centering “cuts off the air supply” in conventional organizations. When departments have their own agendas, work becomes disjointed in the eyes of the customer. In Customer 3D businesses, integrated thinking creates permeability between functional silos. Instead of what Steve Jobs called The Bozo Factor (Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson), collaborations happen naturally and improvements can be made holistically.

Internal Issue: The efficiency mindset dominates. It is focused on cost reduction and, in many cases, a parallel reduction in the number of employees. In this scenario, the best that can happen would be perpetuating existing performance levels. In Customer 3D companies, instead of people trying to tweak the status quo, they are using creative thinking to replace it.

Internal Issue: Employee morale is low and they are simply waiting to be told what to do. In Customer 3D organizations, employees are purposeful because they are focused externally on customer needs. Leaders are supportive of employee ideas. Beginning with the end in mind equates to visualizing how ideas will impact the customer.

Internal Issue: Change is not sustainable. Therefore, initiatives come across as flavor of the month approaches. In Customer 3D businesses, change becomes transformation and it sticks. There is an improvement culture in which all improvement projects are looked at as part of a single portfolio.

Customer 3D solves problems, but not in the ways you might expect. Becoming customer-centered weaves a single worldview through the fabric of the organization. It changes an organization’s overall performance. Not only do your customers see it, of course, but your employees, your Board, your suppliers—everybody sees that you are different.

In Designing for Growth, Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie describe how thinking about and responding to possible changes in a specific market would be approached by two different teams: a traditional team composed of MBAs contrasted with a team of design students.

The MBAs want an ordered approach because their world relies on economics and logic. Because of their proclivity for rational, quantifiable answers, they believe that, with proper analysis, they can prove one best answer. They don’t like to admit any uncertainty with their solutions. They want to tweak the status quo.

Designers, on the other hand, would use data to lay out future customer scenarios rather than spreadsheets. They would brainstorm how specific customer personas would react to different scenarios and might create variations of their business for the future and solicit feedback from customers and the advantages and disadvantages of those models. They believe that the status quo can always be improved.

Traditional companies think that future problems are puzzles, which can be precisely solved if they have the right amount of data. Exceptional organizations envision future problems as mysteries, which requires systems-thinking, prototyping and experiencing situations the way customer would encounter them. From a customer standpoint, conventional businesses see reality as exact, while Customer 3D organizations take the designer approach and see reality from the perspective of the humans in it.

The Customer 3D™ system approaches the future the way the design thinkers do. Liedtka and Ogilvie summarize it this way: “Don’t let your imagined constraints limit your possibilities. Aim to connect deeply with those you serve.” New ideas that benefit customers don’t have to be night-and-day different. Customer-centered champions recognize that solutions are simply better iterations of today’s reality; but they also understand that even better models can be found by continuing to experiment with new approaches that will add even greater value in the future.

Let’s compare a product-centered company to a 3D, customer-centered organization:

• Why does a traditional company develop such a territorial (silo) mindset? It’s because the employees in each functional area have been trained to believe that the product they are selling is the most important thing and the work they are doing in their departments is their most important contribution to the success of that product.
• Why does a Customer 3D company able to operate in a more cohesive way with the other functions throughout the organization? It’s because employees have a single focus—the customer—and, like the people in the white-water rafting photo with this post, this purpose unifies the reason for their work and makes sense of the decisions that need to be made. With no separation between internal working areas, positive stories about what has been done for customers will spread quickly, causing a ripple effect that creates energy throughout the culture by building on each success.

It is more than just teamwork. 3D companies are aggressive silo-busters. They succeed because they have institutional support that requires permeable “walls” between functional areas. WEIDMANN Electrical Technology, a St. Johnsbury, VT, based manufacturer of insulation for electrical transformers, for example, has a strong culture that encourages every employee to submit ideas for improvements. Their customer strategy has been driven by partnership relationships with their customers, such as their Value Enhanced System (VES) for insulation design. Instead of the boundaries between functional areas, which are common in old-fashioned businesses, their “external” focus creates greater bonds between traditional business silos. They are taking customer relations to a whole new place.

Customer 3D is a new approach used by high-performing leaders to reposition their organizations beyond simply serving customers to thinking like a customer. Because it is a system of co-creation that will drive the ability to innovate with new ideas and service design that will add value for customers, it is critical to have all functional areas working together to find and improve processes for the customer’s benefit.

Yes, it is cultural within each organization. It empowers employees to lift their heads up and to collaborate. It is a sense-making system that designs a new pattern of behaviors, which create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The product-centered organization entirely cared about selling. Sure, they were courteous and attempted to find common ground with their customers—favorite cities, sports teams, other interests. It was one-dimensional, however. The customer was strictly a “necessary evil” that had to be processed according to their internal procedures, and then forgotten after the sale.

The customer-centered group cared about the customer’s success. As a result, they asked lots of questions in order to be certain they had identified each customer’s needs. Because of that up-front work, they could customize their service offering to deliver the best value. The culture of this organization was obviously focused on the relationship with every customer much more than single transactions. Ironically, the second group earned the sale to my family because they demonstrated much better overall value.

The paradox is that companies who focus on the sales process are less successful overall than those who put customer needs first. Would the first group that I mentioned have told you they were customer-centered? Of course, they would. But, you can’t call your organization customer-centric if you see-saw back and forth between product-centered and occasionally adding a little customer-friendliness. Being customer-centered is intentional.

The article “Broken Windows” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in March 1982. It suggested that crime and vandalism increased when disorder was perceived to be accepted. A few broken windows, in other words, that were tolerated would eventually lead to more broken windows in the neighborhood. Therefore, a strategy to fix problems when they are small would prevent a future spiral down to greater disorder.

The theory is not wrong, because if a negative view exists about anything, from a building to an organization, then that troublesome perception can precipitate a cycle that worsens instead of staying the same. But it is outdated because it limits our thinking if we believe that is all that needs to be done. The problem with this philosophy, unfortunately, is that it galvanizes an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mindset in organizations, encouraging them to “stand on their laurels.” Today’s approach has to go beyond an “absence of problems” mentality to embrace innovation in order to stay ahead of the competition.

This is especially true in customer relationships. Simply fixing problems or situations that are broken is not enough. Companies must open windows to new service design ideas in an effort to connect with customers. Leaders in high-performing organizations must aggressively question “not broken” processes that appear to be “working” in order to discover how they can be further improved.

Organizations that will grow and prosper in the next three years will be the ones that go beyond a thirty-year-old broken windows theory. They will be the ones that challenge their current services and processes and have a system that anticipates opportunities that their customers will value—even before they ask for them.

Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse, offers an elegant example. Inspired by Christopher Alexander (A Pattern Language), she understood that she could be the architect of the future in the food industry. She observed, “I realized there was so much more we could do.” In an effort to find the best ingredients for her customers, she was inspired by recipes rather than ruled by them. The result she called a “delicious revolution” (The Art of Simple Food) and her goal was to touch people with a different worldview of food. In order to influence children to eat nutritiously, for example, she created a world-famous garden concept, which she called the Edible Schoolyard.

In every industry, there are exceptional performers that don’t have to look for customers. Instead, they draw them in by defining the future that these devotees want to be shown.  Waters created a demonstration kitchen at her Slow Food Nation, with no specialized equipment, but which was intended to show a set of basic techniques that all good cooks have in common. Not limited to the ingredients that could be found at local supermarkets, she found new sources by buying directly from farmers near her restaurant who were “planting heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables and harvesting them at their peak.”

The parallels with Customer 3D businesses are extraordinary. Waters was passionate about her life work. She created a worldview that her staff and customers embraced, united by a belief in a more sustainable future. Rather than trying to perfect what was already being done, she questioned what was not being said and then went after that new dimension. In searching for more flavor in her foods (for her customers’ benefit), she developed a philosophy that her customers (and a global movement) are drawn to.

The Customer 3D system helps organizations escape from an overdependence on the status quo. Instead, these companies question how much value they can be adding for their customers. They train for principles rather than events. Employees are empowered to be solutions finders, looking for creative ways to benefit their customers. These businesses believe that everyone in the organization contributes to bringing the future in to become today’s reality.