Disruptive innovation (The Innovator’s Solution, Christensen and Raynor) is easy to identify in hindsight, but much more challenging when it appears as relatively small changes that surround your organization. All ideas seem to be small ideas when they begin, especially when being accustomed to success lead your company to inertia and perhaps arrogance. The danger, of course, from a supplier’s standpoint is that not responding to these changes can cause you to set your expectations too low about what the customer wants. It is easy to think that customers simply want what we have been giving them all along. For valid reasons, psychological research has created the nomenclature “status quo bias” to define the fact that people basically like to leave things the way they are.

There are undoubtedly ideas in the everyday operation of your organization that are trending toward obsolete. They are just hard to see in the present and frankly, it is difficult to “ferret out ingrained assumptions that people never stop to question.” The more we are able to clear out the cobwebs in our minds, the less disruptive the years ahead will be.  Because we are faced with so many more complexities and alternative trends than in the past, the solution must be fact-based to overcome the blind spots. “Success in business ultimately depends on dealing with the facts,” writes Miller.

Make sure that your organization is prepared for change by putting some customer-centered monitors in place that will condition everyone to look for new ways by questioning the old ways. Put your own “GPS” system in place to recognize when a better route is available. Set up a process to pull information from the marketplace and to evaluate change on customers’ terms, not yours. This process is not about gloom and doom. Just the opposite—it will be a great platform to start discussions of ways to strengthen your organization by consistently looking for ways to outperform.

Flexicurity is what Matt Miller calls it (adapted from the buzzword originated in Denmark’s labor market). It is the confidence to search out Dead Ideas that your company is operating under and replace them with dynamic Destined Ideas which will shape a new direction. These ideas have a phenomenally greater chance of survival if they are grounded in what your customers need. So the flexibility of your organization delivers the security for the future. Imagine a delivery model in which your customers never felt they had to sacrifice anything because you were keeping them at the leading edge of new ideas. It’s powerful, isn’t it?

It is really difficult to gauge the impact of change while it is happening. You are too close to it. Don’t let success lead to arrogance, which holds you back from the willingness to question how long yesterday’s ideas will stay viable. The only remedy is to develop a system to help you be aware of challenges to your current ideas and to allow your organization to be adaptable to its customers.

Ranjay Gulati, author of Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, shares some very perceptive insights in a recent interview (http://bit.ly/aHk8QU). He correctly advises that customer-centricity starts with a sense of curiosity about the customers of a business. If companies want to stay ahead of the commodity trap, their leaders must instill a mentality of constantly learning about customer needs and how they are changing.

Bain & Company Chairperson, Orit Gadiesh, echoes the same emphasis on curiosity and business success. (Harvard Business Review http://bit.ly/bnA3FG). She says, “To forge strong relationships and find solutions…it pays to ask lots of questions.” This is “the only way to get to a workable solution to any problem. Having access to a multitude of outside perspectives makes me…better.”  It is true that asking lots of questions will yield lots of new information that can be used to solve customer needs.

The passive, more slowly-paced reactions of the past no longer work. So, ask yourself whether you are an armchair leader or an explorer. If your organization’s sense of discovery has waned, find a solution that will jump-start the passion about customers again. This culture shift is stronger than simply listening to customers. Be aggressive. Peter Drucker, quoted in The Starfish and the Spider, believed that “the purpose of learning is (not) to qualify oneself for a new and bigger job,” but rather “is self-improvement. It qualifies a person to do his present task with continually wider vision and continually increasing competence.” Curiosity is the basis of how ideas both begin and evolve.

The end result of this sense of curiosity is organizational flexibility. As Gulati writes in his book, customer-centricity drives companies to “become adept at monitoring fluctuations in customizing solutions real time” and to “anticipate changing customer needs and offer value-based solution before customer can articulate them. In other words, all elements within the organization become aligned to adapt to customer needs. “The goal is to immerse yourself in customer problems so you can offer up unique solutions.”

Customer-centricity will not happen unless your organization is curious about customers and what they will need in the future. If you want your company to be customer-centered, create a culture that is continuously looking for ways to learn more about customers. Don’t become complacent. Be an explorer.

I recently finished A Technique for Producing Ideas, by James Webb Young. Written in the 1930’s, it is an interesting reminder of how we can develop our creativity for our customers. Young’s writing has a genuine, matter-of-fact quality. It is refreshing to know that the old model for finding new ideas has not substantively changed. He first defines an idea as “a new combination of facts.” The success in generating innovative thinking becomes stronger when our “ability to make new combinations is heightened by our ability to see relationships.”

Young compares the idea-searching process to what occurs in a kaleidoscope. This toy has little pieces of colored glass in it, and, when viewed through a prism, they reveal new geometrical designs. Every turn of the cylinder shifts these bits of glass into new patterns. The more pieces of glass that are introduced, the more possibilities that will be available for new and exciting combinations. The same possibilities exist for inspiring customer-centered ideas in all organizations. A greater variety of experiences that our teams have will inevitably lead to fresher ideas within our organizations.

Too often, we mistakenly believe that ideas which will benefit customers will arrive magically and so “we sit around hoping for inspiration to strike us.” Young shows us that, instead, new combinations develop through persistence and use of a repeatable method. As he observes, “this (idea-generating) technique can consciously be cultivated.” He suggests a formal process for documenting specific information, which can be synthesized or “digested” when searching for new ideas.

Finally, he suggests to stop straining for ideas, but rather, to use a “period of rest and relaxation” while still “constantly thinking about it.” Think of how we gain new insights into solving a puzzle which we return to after a break. As long as we stay focused on what the customer values, time away from idea generating will actually bring fresher insights.

The takeaway from James Webb Young and more contemporary firms, such as IDEO, is that ideas most often happen through a systematic and collaborative process. Our ability to combine our experiences and direct them to improvements on behalf of our customers is essential to customer-centricity. Like a kaleidoscope, the more facets that we consider, the richer the opportunities for those customers. However, we cannot forget that generating new ideas involves an operative technique that we have to work at.

Organizations that want to develop an effective process for designing new, customer-centered solutions need to educate teams of employees to make the most of ideas and encounters they have experienced. When they embrace the fun and the complexity of patterns and relationships, as in a kaleidoscope, employees feel more comfortable with unleashing their creativity to benefit their customers.

The concept of “engagement” is clearly winning the race for the hottest idea in customer consulting circles these days. It is overshadowing customer “experience” and customer “delight” in the pantheon of business improvement words. Be cautious, however, and don’t believe that a single word can change your operation.

Bob Gilbreath, in The Next Evolution of Marketing, shares the definitions of engagement put forward by the Advertising Research Foundation, Forrester Research and his own company, Bridge Worldwide. These and other consultants’ descriptions all use words such as involvement and interaction and turning on a prospect and they explain the advantages for the supplier in terms of customer retention and recommendation. I have yet to see any of these manifestos explain the benefits that the customer receives.

These consultants and suppliers mean well. They are trying to invoke participation by customers in a community, which they, as a supplier, are willing to host. However, the advocates frame all of their literature around the belief that “active” customers are more loyal and will buy more and the cost of switching to a competitor increases over time. Isn’t that about the seller, rather than the customer?

Engagement, as commonly deployed, is too programmatic. It is transactional, not strategic. The problem is that when most organizations implement their version of engagement, it turns out to be one-way. It is from them to their customers, particularly in the realm of social media. How many companies are following the customers who are following them? Wouldn’t an engaged organization want to truly know about the customer they are trying to engage? It has become so diluted that the subliminal definition of collaboration or engagement is that the other party is buying from your company.

Over ten years ago, Seth Godin in Permission Marketing and Unleashing the Ideavirus, told us to “stop marketing AT people.” Rather than creating interruptions for customers, it is better to provide value that will grow your relationship with them. It’s a feeling of interdependence, not one-way. Value becomes the mortar to hold together the connection. The touchstone is that it must be on the customers’ terms, not yours, at a level that is both emotional and fun for them.

It is presumptive to believe that all customers want their supplier to be involved with them. I propose that Apple evangelists would still love the company because of its products and innovative thinking. Apple does not have to “manage” engagement because they build customer advocacy into everything they do.

Too often we become enmeshed with buzzwords to the point that we lose our objectivity. Engagement is a marketing term, an attempt to soften the words “selling” and “advertisement.” Do not undertake an engagement program unless you can define how it will benefit the customer. There is a false belief that markets and customers will shift behavior in large groups if engagement is available. What lasts are the fundamental values in your organization to take care of customers as individuals. Are you customer-motivated, or are you focused only on a new way to sell? Is your engagement one-way, or, are you truly trying to interact with your customers?

Be very reluctant to toss the word “engagement” out casually. Eventually, the word will lose its impact. The better metaphor for connecting with customers is dance—cooperation with a partner for a single purpose. In this customer-centered view, you would not “win” and “keep” customers and they would not be opponents, but rather, partners, moving in the same direction, enjoying the moment together, interested in each other. The actions taken include anticipation of customer needs and performing together to achieve success. Carried out properly, customers will never want to leave you.

Margaret Wheatley at www.margaretwheatley.com has an interesting take on keeping pace with change in her article “What Do We Measure and Why?” She challenges traditional business measures because they do not produce the behaviors that connect employees to their work and a shared sense of what they want to create for their customers. Visionary leaders understand that, in terms of measurement, “What was ‘right’ keeps changing.” But even though the established measures are no longer working, feedback is still important to “vitality and adaptability” just as in any living system.

Leaders need to set the tone for their organizations around gathering and applying the information necessary for them to “adapt and thrive” rather than assuming that the product or service offerings will continue to enjoy the same success in the future. They must support the approach to customers that is “context dependent” instead of unchanging. This culture learns new questions to ask in order for the business to hone its performance and it fosters an environment in which customers and organizations can “coevolve” and stay connected. I encourage you to read her article.

What has value to your customers? That is where their feedback is so important. Value equates to how the individual customer feels about doing business with you. It is your “fit” with their needs and it is embodied in an emotional connection. Execution involves a deep understanding and a high degree of flexibility because “fit” is judged by your delivery in its broadest, most proactive, sense. What if you could promise your customers that you will always look for better value for them—and mean it? If you are not articulating this philosophy of customer flexibility to your organization, you are voting by your silence for business-as-usual and showing customers you are really product-centric.

The challenge for the future is to keep up with changing customers’ expectations. The solution is a customer-centered system flexible enough to continually re-evaluate how you deal with your customers. With this deep-rooted customer focus, organizations learn to focus on adaptability and growth, rather than stability and control. If your customers are changing, and they are, you must have a customer-centered system that allows you to anticipate their needs and to change with them if you want to sustain superior performance. Capability of changing with your customers is the most powerful message you can send.

What we don’t see is the environment that allowed these ideas to germinate and blossom—a creative, customer-centered culture. Roger Martin, in The Design of Business, dissects several world-famous stories of innovation, including Cirque du Soleil, Apple’s iPod and Steelcase’s acquisition of IDEO. What they have in common is a leadership strategy committed to the belief that designing from the viewpoint of the customer will strengthen what the organization will offer. 

Target’s CEO, Bob Ulrich, for example, transformed an organization in “one of the dullest and dreariest industries in America: discount retailing” by “embracing design as a competitive advantage,” writes Martin. Target bought the patent to the now-famous Clear Rx™ medicine bottle by Deborah Adler because it was designed to be intuitive, and therefore safer, for the consumer. There are customers today who only have their prescriptions filled at Target because of these bottles.   

Target’s VP/Creative Director, Minda Gralnek, put it best. “The pharmaceutical industry often talks about addressing “unmet medical needs,” but it invariably means discovering new drugs, not redesigning the packaging in which they are sold.” (@Issue Journal, vol.12, no.1, www.atissuejournal.com) Adler deconstructed the standard prescription drug bottle to discover dozens of improvement areas. How versatile is your organization in defining “unmet customer needs” broadly enough to discover improvements which your customers will value?   

The caution-sign graphic with this post illustrates what must happen. Companies know their direction (the bottom vertical line) but are stuck at the inflection point. New ideas are simply not developing from a traditional product-centric approach. The solution is to shift (illustrated by the horizontal line) to a customer-centered approach. By thinking expansively about “unmet customer needs,” any business can take off with a fresh, invigorated energy that will lead to a much higher performance. 

Many organizations are bothered that they cannot make change happen by simply tweaking their existing systems. But tomorrow’s success does not come from yesterday’s thinking. Dramatic change can only happen through commitment to a heuristic system which enables organizations to focus on designing products and services driven by customers’ needs. That is how breakthrough thinking takes off.

Default procedures essentially manage customers’ behaviors by limiting the number of choices given to the customer. Sometimes, this can be positive. A chime in your car reminding you to fasten your seat belt encourages good behavior. A default to a standard shipping method is convenient and probably serves the needs of the majority of customers. However, they can be frustrating for consumers, as when forced-choice alternatives, such as agreeing to software installation screens, can alienate customers.

Or, when there are too many options, decision-making can become paralyzed. As John Sviokla put it in his “Design Your Customers’ Decisions” post on his Harvard Business Review blog, the presence of “excessive options” is a key reason that “an average of 60% of all online shoppers abandon their purchases mid-stream.” Amazon.com is legendary for framing options in a personalized context, such as “Someone like you also bought this other book.” As a result, it believes that its recommendation engine “increases the average purchase by 20%.”

An ideal metaphor for restrictive default procedures is a speed bump. In order to achieve sensible driving in restricted areas, speed bumps force drivers to slow down or encounter unpleasant jarring. Speed bumps were introduced in November 1979 in Brea, CA. If you are like me, you feel that they represent the epitome of frustration because they are not adaptable to individuals. Now, Mexican-based Decano Industries is developing a device which automatically lowers into the ground when drivers go the speed limit or slower. If they drive too fast, the bump stays up. What a proactive, customer-friendly innovation!

Default procedures offer companies the chance to save their customers time, money and maneuvering through complexity. In every process, however, leaders should not lose touch with reality. In Wired to Care Dev Patniak remarks that leaders should “transcend abstractions and imagine themselves in the shoes of the people they serve.” Sviokla puts it this way: “In a world of excess choice, an easy place to differentiate is in the careful design of the decision process itself.” (Sviokla).

There is a trend toward more personalized or “smart” defaults, such as always requesting non-smoking hotel rooms or automatically adapting decisions in online environments based on answers to previous questions. Car makers, for example, can recommend to online shoppers a sportier steering wheel style based on the selection of a high-horsepower engine during an automobile configuration. There are many other great examples in a December 2008 Harvard Business Review article, “Nudge Your Customers Toward Better Choices,” by Goldstein, Johnson, Herrmann and Heitmann. Thinking like a customer is the key to the great care and persistence and experimentation needed to perfect a procedure. If the end result is more customer-centered, it is worth it. It is the logic and authenticity of the customer experience that matters.

Customers’ relationships with suppliers will be exponentially stronger if they feel that those organizations understand them and have streamlined the interactions they are experiencing. Organizations that design customer-centered default procedures will be rewarded with loyalty and trust.

Remember the paging system for restaurants that was introduced in the 1980’s by JTECH and others? (Creating Competitive Advantage, by Jaynie Smith) The electronic signaling technology was originally created simply as a way for restaurant employees to communicate in order to get customers to open tables more quickly. But when these lighted buzzer devices were handed to the customers, the idea resulted in fewer patrons walking away from the restaurants that used them and more convenience for customers who did not have to listen for their names to be called from a waiting list. Life became easier.

Now, Somtu MMS (mobile messaging system) has a new service in which text messages, such as “Your table will be ready in ten minutes” can be sent to your mobile device (Tuned In, by Stull, Myers and Scott). Life got even easier for customers (and a little cooler) and the 1980’s solution could be obsolete in the future.

No organization can afford to stand still. The best way to avoid inertia is to think like a customer. Because innovation is on a continuum, companies must constantly evaluate where they are. As Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers observed in A Simpler Way, “there are no windows of opportunity (that will eventually shut) but infinite possibilities.” Searching for these possibilities helps businesses learn how to sustain the energy for customers which they had when the company first began.

The mindset that organizations should embrace is one of invention, not survival. Learn to experiment. Be inquisitive and willing to ask questions. Work is not a test in which you must fear not getting the solution right the first time. “Look for what works, not what is right.” (A Simpler Way). Once you start, you never will want to stop. Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers said it this way: “The surprise within the surprise of every new discovery is that there is ever more to be discovered.”

So, build a company whose culture is grounded in tinkering with existing systems to discover what is possible. Encourage teams to have “constant awareness” by asking these types of questions:

• How can we make this product or service more valuable to the customer?
• Are we evaluating each customer touch-point by the same criteria that the customer uses?
• What transparency can we add to ensure that customers fully understand our processes?
• How might we better anticipate customer needs?

Don’t lose your inquisitiveness about how to improve. Your customers don’t want you to stand still. They want you to pull them into the future with new ideas and services. That is why they are buying from you now and will rely on you in the future. Customers recognize that the sense of discovery in your organization means that you won’t be the same as you were a year ago—you will be better.

Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees. –Arthur Schopenhauer.

Too often, in our businesses, we lapse into cruise control. We get away from the core value of being customer-centered and what was once our purpose loses its vibrancy. There are three levels of purpose that define how we relate to customers. Freshness and growth, however, happen only at the second and third levels.

Level 1 is the basic, transactional level. It is necessary, of course, for survival, but not sufficient for growth. Think of it as embodying what Ted Levitt wrote almost 50 years ago, that the “purpose (of a business) is to get and keep a customer.” (Marketing Imagination). In fairness, at the time that he put forth that concept, most executives would have answered that the purpose was “to make a profit.” Level 1 represents what happens when an employee delivers “good service” (friendly, helpful, etc.) in a typical buyer-seller event. But, if we are not mindful, it’s too easy to become immune to our experiences and fall into a rut, believing this is all we need to accomplish.

Level 2 is embodied by a “solutions” approach. This is how Levitt described it in his HBR article “Marketing Myopia”: “Customers don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” Activities at this stage are operational and enhance our purpose well beyond the actions of pleasant employees offering an expected level of service. It is more customer-centered because it causes us to define the corporate purpose in terms of value to the customer rather than the product we currently sell. It is much better because it involves evaluating every touch-point in our processes to look for improvements that the customer will notice and appreciate.

Level 3 is transformational. At this stage, organizations have created a system that hones their capability to develop complete attentiveness to the customer. It provides a way for truth to emerge. It is based on design thinking, which makes us attentive, like a good designer and helps us “discard pre-existing ideas.” (Milton Glaser, Drawing is Thinking) It will help us to connect seemingly unrelated ideas or processes. As in design, we become deeply aware, or conscious of, what we are looking at only through the mechanism of trying to “draw it.” Ambiguity in business disappears because it clears the mind of all the clutter and lets us focus on what the customer will value. It is the nexus that positions customers at the center of a situation or process and connects them with our business as a whole.

This culture of “thinking what no one has thought about what everybody sees” is the essence of Level 3 behavior and will lead organizations to rise above the complacency with their everyday experiences. It is strategic, because working at this stage, as Glaser says, “moves the mind” to structure a new reality for customers. Level 3 attentiveness to the customer, like design, contains “the energy of its maker.” It generates success because it is grounded in the philosophy that the customer completes the work we are doing. Naturally, when organizations navigate to this way of thinking, they heighten customer loyalty because this approach differentiates them in the eyes of their customers.

The activities and thinking that take place at Level 3 create a new type of passion that radiates customer-centricity. The drive to Level 3 is the most purposeful goal of any organization. In design, Glaser says, “The task is to understand what we are looking at” and the same techniques apply to help us view our businesses in the context of what the customer is thinking. Level 3 frees up learning through movement and experience to generate a fresh, attentive view of how our products and services impact our customers. The result is a wholeness that the customer experiences and values.

The legendary architect, Christopher Alexander, revolutionized the approach to building with his concepts in The Timeless Way of Building. His belief was that we had lost our “fire” by creating structures and communities that no longer touched the humanitarian elements of our nature. We had forgotten the fundamental patterns that are universal, which give us “those moments and situations when we are most alive.”

Because these qualities had “broken down and were no longer shared” or even understood, the architectural industry was producing results that lacked “wholeness.” Alexander, therefore, developed a pattern language which was adaptable, but which made sense of “the endless play of the repetition and variety” in our cities and towns. This language of proper space and geometry “gives people who use it the power to create an infinite variety of new and unique buildings.” His synthesis has been called “the architecture of humanism” and it shepherded in techniques which resulted in a feeling of amplitude or fullness. It unfolded a process which was deep-seated and grounded in integrity. His book is a seminal work and you will gain a profound understanding of the world and the business in which you work by reading it.

There is an essential property to any system which accounts for its wholeness. In architecture, think of the awareness that you have when you see just the right use of space in a building. It is a very satisfying, abundant feeling that delights us as “customers” when we experience it.

In parallel with Alexander’s work, there is a fundamental quality of great customer relations that many organizations have lost. Let me be clear. This is not some nostalgia for “old-fashioned” customer service, which is often invoked. Most of us would be appalled if we could travel back in time to be dealt with in the way customers used to be treated.

The timeless system for customers is not going back, but beyond what exists today. The new paradigm represents congruence with your customers. It is authentic. It is the basis of a coherent approach within your business. It is satisfying to customers—not in that they simply liked the product or service that you provided, but that they felt deeply satisfied with their decision. It’s the difference between the feeling that you just did enough to satisfy your customers and awakening the feeling that you completely connected with them. It is the feeling of freedom that arrives when you know that your customers know they have absolutely made the right decision.

It is a system that can and must be built, but it is not found by reading a book and implementing a list of prescribed steps in your organization. It is complex and must be developed. However, it engrains in businesses Alexander’s “infinite power” to design unique products and services In the speeches that I deliver, I talk about the criteria for identifying the genuine qualities that make up this “customer system” with its unifying structure. It is fundamental, but when implemented properly, it will take your business to the next level.

The future will belong to those organizations that can grasp these universal concepts and find their fire. There is a paradigm in customer success that is timeless. Our role should be to constantly move our organizations closer to that system that is more natural and whole. The necessary first step is to understand it and to design ways to pursue it. It will dramatically change the way that you relate to your customers.