Getting to Thank You: A Practitioner's Guide to Innovation

By Chris Finlay

"Thank you" is how you know you are getting your product and service design right.

"Thank you" is what every customer wants to say, and what every business leader and designer wants to hear. But when 95% of innovations fail, it is hard to know what to do next in order to get people to fall in love with your products.

This is an essential tool set

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Finlay
• Release date: Mar 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9780991377114

Book preview

Introduction

For You

This book is the result of my deep desire to share what has helped me improve my business and to share my ability to create good things in the world.

I am a creator and problem solver who has spent a lifetime in service. I started my career early, at age nine, working summers at my grandparents’ hotel picking up litter and sorting beer bottles. Over the past twenty-five years I have been a waiter, chef, designer, innovation consultant, CEO of an international shoe manufacturer and retailer, and now the Director of Experience Design and Innovation for UnitedHealth Group. I grew up in, have evolved with, and been firmly employed in, the modern service economy. I studied how to create and deliver experiences in graduate school at the Illinois Institute of Technology, obtaining a master of business administration from the Institute of Design and a master of design from the Stuart School of Business. I studied how to communicate visually at the School of Visual Arts in NYC where I obtained a bachelor of fine arts. Through those experiences, I have learned a few things about getting to Thank You—and most of them the hard way. Getting your customer to say thank you on a regular basis is no accident.

The tools and ideas being presented here are for anyone looking for a practical interdisciplinary approach to innovation. Whether you are making chewing gum wrappers a little more fun, developing a new service for delivering cancer treatments, or defining options for starting a new small business or improving an existing one, these tools can be the difference between a half-baked idea and a hit. These tools will help you identify meaningful challenges and opportunities, evaluate them rigorously, and support the development of a clear chain of logic to help you create rich ideas and a powerful case for their value. This is not an exhaustive set of tools, but they are essential for anyone who is serious about innovation.

There are many ways to deepen the tools presented in this book by further investigating the specialties within the disciplines of design, business, social science, and their related specialties. I encourage you to explore them all and embrace the power and problems each one contains. Business strategy, management, organizational behavior, Web analytics, interaction design, graphic design, and anthropology are some of the most interesting and compelling areas of study that will further your ability to innovate.

A warning about tools: Tools make it seems as though there is one right way, or if you fill in the blanks, a solution will appear. The tools I have provided are suggestions about how to organize information based on experiences, and they may or may not be appropriate for you. Tools can be a great way to increase your chances of heading in the right direction. My purpose of including tools is to support you as you learn to think in new ways. As you master them, you may come to a place where a certain tool doesn’t quite meet your need, and then you should adapt it or create a new one that helps you answer the questions you need it to. We should always be actively shaping our tools as we go. As the well known Canadian philosopher and futurist Marshall McLuhan said, We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

Good tools always take practice to use effectively, and these tools in particular require committed people with the courage, care, and compassion to do great work. Using them is no guarantee of success, but I firmly believe that by working with them, even in rote fashion, you will come out ahead of where you would have without them. That said, if you simply view the tools as a prescription you will miss the value of the methodology as being open and iterative. Just as great chefs still use cookbooks for inspiration yet still improvise, you should use this as a starting place or reference but seek ways to improvise with the tools for the needs of your specific project.

Finally, I also wrote this book to connect with other passionate folks and would love to hear from you.

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CHAPTER 1

Thank You

It’s not about the world of design, but the design of the world. ¹

—Bruce Mau, creative director of Bruce Mau Design and founder of the Institute without Boundaries

I don’t think that anyone has really told [people] what design is. It doesn’t occur to most people that everything is designed—that every building and everything they touch in the world is designed. Even foods are designed now. So in the process of helping people understand this, making them more aware of the fact that the world around us is something that somebody has control of, perhaps they can feel some sense of control, too. I think that’s a nice ambition. ²

—Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, designer of the first laptop computer

Most designers don’t understand business. ³

—John Seely Brown, author and former director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

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Figure 1. The corn cob-shaped water tower greets those visiting Rochester, Minnesota.

As you drive into Rochester, Minnesota, you will pass a few of America’s favorite chain restaurants, a mall, and a grocery store. And you’ll know you are almost downtown when you see the large water tower on the horizon painted like an ear of corn. The big summer excitement in Rochester is the county fair, and regular entertainment mostly relates to the nearby lakes or watching movies projected on the side of the community center. Rochester is a pretty humble slice of America. What makes this little town known around the world is that, despite its humble nature, it is home to the Mayo Clinic, one of the most advanced and prestigious research hospitals in the world.

I spent a summer at the Mayo Clinic working as a design strategist for the SPARC Innovation Lab, which recently became the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation. SPARC (See, Plan, Act, Refine, and Communicate) was a real-time lab for health care service innovation. It was the first of its kind and served as a model for the development of many other innovation centers in hospitals and other organizations across the country.

In 1889 a tornado struck the town, and Dr. Mayo and the nuns of Rochester founded the Mayo Clinic to treat the victims. Dr. Mayo, and subsequently his sons, dedicated themselves to care that in many ways pushed the boundaries of medicine and its delivery. They saw an opportunity to improve physician education, and thereby patient care, by observing other physicians and by inviting physicians from around the world to study with them. At that time it was considered dangerous socialist behavior, but they knew they would find better ways to treat people by sharing information. Their courage to break boundaries changed the physician practice model forever.

The walls of the original Mayo Clinic buildings are literally etched with the teachings and traditions of the Mayo family, including their one-hundred-year-old value statement, The needs of the patient come first. That is not a hollow vision cooked up in a marketing meeting. It is lived by the employees on a daily basis. There are famous stories such as the one about an ER nurse arranging to have an eighteen-wheeler moved from the emergency lane in front of the hospital so it didn’t get towed while the owner was cared for. Or a janitor who went to a patient’s home to feed the patient’s cat. There is no shortage of these stories and they are told with pride. The small town of Rochester even has a commercial airstrip to accommodate the jumbo jets of princes, kings, executives, and politicians coming for treatment. There are very few places that are more committed, at every level, to innovation and to providing world-class service and amazing results in some of the most critical moments of people’s lives.

Our team audited Mayo’s most advanced service experiences—from transplant surgery to nicotine abatement to patient check-in—and met with some of the most brilliant medical innovators on the planet. We dug into each program with its sponsors, met the operations agents above them that pulled those services together, and reported our findings on a regular basis to Mayo’s internal medicine board, which has a huge influence on the future of the clinic. We gathered insights from our observations and meetings, then developed recommendations and designs for potential services and operational models to leverage the value of existing services and knowledge in more powerful ways. We used the past and present to find the future. It was awesome.

Even while surrounded by such incredible excellence and innovation, one of the service experiences that touched me most from my time in Rochester was the one I had at the Honest Bike Shop, a small store located next to the old train tracks and a not particularly inspiring Mexican restaurant. As I stepped into the Honest Bike Shop, I was greeted not by glaring fluorescent lights and crushing displays typically found at bike stores at that time, but rather by hardwood floors and lots of natural light. Present was a definite sense of openness and expertise. It was a beautifully simple presentation. It had a naturally inviting feel, a bit like the way I remember my grandfather’s tidy and well-swept garage. It was full of little innovations and care that added up to something wonderful. It was so touching because it came from such a small and approachable establishment. It showed that anyone can provide a meaningful experience for their customer.

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Figure 2. The front of the Honest Bike Shop.

The owner, known as Honest Paul, greeted me and asked how he could help. He encouraged me to browse, handing me a piece of plain white paper that had clearly been printed on the store printer and saying something like, If you would like to take a moment to read what we are all about while you look around that would be great. Honest Paul had handed me his personal history and mission statement. That is powerfully symbolic: a one-page proclamation of what he believed, how he worked, and what I could expect from doing business with him. It was captivating in its earnestness rather than being slick and pithy. It pretty well ignored all of the marketing advice of the day, but its honesty won me over instantly. You can read the full text in the back of this book; it is an endearing biography that leads you through why he does business the way he does, describing his career in the Air Force, his humble beginnings, and his hard work. The lines that really stick out for me are his guiding principles, his criteria for designing his business: Good repair and service, good products, fair prices and good reputation have brought about a thriving business, and he looks forward to many more good years of serving you properly. The last lines of his statement really spoke to me. Paul went on to show me around his clean and simple shop with pride, especially proud of the work stalls that had been built not just for technicians but also for owners to visit their bikes while they were being worked on. I could tell he had considered both me as a person and what I might need to be happy—not just what he could sell me that day. Paul was asking for a relationship and telling me about his commitment to his relationships over his life. Wow.

After a relatively straightforward discussion about its merits, I bought a twenty-dollar flashing safety light for my bike. No big deal. What was a big deal is that Honest Paul had convinced me to believe in his business and compelled me to tell others by connecting with me over a shared value of community, quality, and care. He expressed them overtly and subtly in the design of his store and the way he approached me. He showed me how much my needs mattered to him and were accounted for. I wanted his shop in my neighborhood.

As I reflected on that experience, what I realized was that from the moment I walked into that shop I felt like saying Thank You. It was a simple and powerful revelation. In that moment I realized that my goal is not just to properly thank my customers for their business but also to create products and services so meaningful they feel compelled to thank me.

Cheap vs. Deep

There are many types of Thank You, and they run the spectrum from cheap to deep. Cheap thanks is given as an afterthought, as a part of participating in polite society. You give thoughtless thanks when a waiter fills your glass of water. Forced thanks when your grandma gives you something you don’t want for your birthday. Relieved thanks when a cop lets you go with a warning. These all serve their purpose in polite society, but when I write about getting to Thank You, I am talking about a thanks that you are compelled to say. A thanks that if you didn’t say it, you would regret it. It is not about debt or guilt but rather about honoring someone’s earnest effort to do something great for you.

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Figure 3. Thank You runs from the cheap to the deep.

Deep thanks is very different; you feel it. Your body may tingle. It is often revelatory. It is insightful. It may be associated with seeing a powerful movie, reading a book that led you to understand something more clearly, or someone sharing a deeply personal story that helped you understand the world in a new way. It is a bit like watching the sunrise on a lake when you are snuggled in a warm blanket. You are just happy you got to be there. It is more than memorable; it is meaningful.

Deep thanks is the result of changing your belief about what is possible or what someone might do for you. It makes you happy to say it and happy to hear it. It is what we devote lives and careers to. In relation to products and services, a deep thanks is most often given because you feel like someone went out of their way to consider your needs and make something that feels like it was made for you. It often feels like they knew you—as an individual, as a part of a tribe—and went beyond their job requirements or tapped into some higher intelligence or power to give you what you needed at that moment. They made something awesome. They made something magical.

Deep thanks opens the doors to a lifelong relationship, a relationship with meaning that leads people to pay more, tell others, and invite your company into their homes. When customers are thanking you, it means you are getting it right, and getting it right means they are going to buy from you again. When companies consistently get their customer experience right through their products and services, those companies turn out to be stars like Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Four Seasons, Disney, Twitter—companies that are known the world around as innovators. They connect to people. They are smart and careful about how they serve people. These companies show people that they care by creating joy in their lives.

It’s not just for the big guys either. Small but dazzling businesses like the Honest Bike Shop can make this happen. Even small businesses can make Thank You moments that leave their customers overjoyed. Honest Paul’s version of innovation doesn’t cost much or take a lot of time. It focuses on the values that matter to Paul, work for his company, and matter to his customers. He built his business around them. He makes his choice about how to invite someone into his store, what he sells, and how he sells based on the values he has so clearly identified. They are his guiding principles. Paul is special but not because of his deep expertise in innovation. He gets to the heart of what matters and practices it daily to make his customers’ world a better place. Innovation isn’t defined by scale, budget, or time but rather by commitment and practice. Innovation is simply making something new of value or making something better.

Innovation and Thanks

How to innovate is not something everyone agrees on, but Thank You is. Business people, customers, and designers understand the importance of service and gratitude at their core. They agree that we all want to get and to give thanks, and that is where we need to start to work together. Finding out what to make—and why—in order to provide these Thank You experiences is the focus of this book. We know that the best products and services that evoke this connection are what set expectations for quality, service, and experience that businesses in every industry must compete with. It is what you have to be committed to in order to succeed. In fact, it is that ethos that is at the heart of Zappos, the online retailer purchased by Amazon for just under $1 billion ⁴, beloved by shoppers and the press for its deep commitment to creating Thank You experiences ⁵. It makes people happy and makes people money. Those things are often one in the same.

Stop worrying about innovation metrics before you worry about hearing Thank You. Thank You is certainly not the last metric you need to measure success. Thank You is both a beginning for collaboration and an end result for the customer. You may not always hear thanks directly from the customer, but if you listen through business performance, social media, front line employees, or net promoter scores, it shouldn’t be too hard to hear what people think about your business. You should be asking them anyway.

Getting to Thank You won’t always require months of research but ingraining the process for research, design, and decision-making is something that takes persistence and commitment. We all know what an outstanding experience feels like but few of us know how to create them. In order to unlock and understand the power of getting to Thank You to find new spaces to play and new ways to put the pieces together, we have to start by understanding the people we want to serve. We need to understand that customers don’t just buy products and services, they buy experiences and the meaning behind them.

Over the coming chapters we will dig into what an experience is, how it works, and what you can do to construct one in order to innovate and deliver value. We will explore how to uncover what is meaningful to people, generate powerful ideas from that meaning, and test and communicate those ideas to get you to Thank You. Many of the activities will feel familiar. Most of us have worked collaboratively with a colleague, built a requirements document, made a budget, or managed a project, but having the right perspectives and tools organized for innovation is something uncommon. These tools form a guide to know what to make and why in order to create and deliver value to your company and your customers in an increasingly complex world. In short, you hold a basic guide to modern innovation methods.

Notes

Massive Change, Bruce Mau Design, accessed March 23, 2013, http://www.brucemaudesign.com/4817/88330/work/massive-change.

In Remembrance Of Bill Moggridge, 1943-2012, Fast Co.Design, accessed March 23, 2013, http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670751/in-remembrance-of-bill-moggridge-1943-2012.

Robert Berner, Design Visionary, Bloomberg Businessweek Magazine, posted June 18, 2006, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-06-18/design-visionary.

Sarah Lacy, Amazon Buys Zappos, TechCrunch, July 22, 2009, http://www. techcrunch.com/2009/07/22/amazon-buys-zappos.

Bill Taylor, Please, Can We All Just Stop ‘Innovating’?, HBR Blog Network (blog), Harvard Business Review, May 30,2012, http://blogs.hbr.org/taylor/2012/05/please_can_we_all_just_stop_innovating.html.

CHAPTER 2

Innovation Imperative

Profit is not the explanation, cause or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but the test of their validity. ¹

—Peter Drucker, management thought leader, author, and educator

We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe. ²

—Christopher Alexander, architect and author

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Figure 4. Marketing Myopia is a Harvard Business classic.

My grandfather, Francis Wyatt Lawson, a submarine captain and inventor, passed away over ten years ago. While archiving his business papers last year, I came across his yellowed copy of a 1960 Harvard Business Review article titled Marketing Myopia ³ written by Harvard University Professor Theodore Levitt. I thought it would be a good read for novelty’s sake and was shocked by how relevant the content still is. The article turned out to be a classic. It went right to the heart of one the key concepts for innovation: Focus on what your product and service accomplishes for your customers rather than on always just tweaking the product performance attributes to convince customers to keep using your existing product. Making something smaller, faster, and in more colors won’t save your business if people don’t even want or use the core product. You should be most worried about whether or not your product is the right thing to offer at all.

What’s Your Job?

Levitt is further credited with the classic line, People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole! ⁴ People want the outcomes, not the mechanism, and whoever can deliver that will win. His ideas, summarized as What business are you in?, have been further championed by Clayton M. Christensen, professor at Harvard Business School and renowned innovation thought leader, in his Jobs-to-be-Done theory. The Jobs-to-be-Done theory is an excellent evolution of Levitt’s work and points to the simple but powerful idea that the job your product or service offers may not be what you think it is. In his article, Levitt gives examples of how businesses need to understand the job they are really doing for people in order to increase their competitive edge. For example, moviemakers’ jobs should be broadened to that of entertainment providers in order to compete against other forms of entertainment such as television or even fine dining. Railroad owners’ jobs should be broadened to that of transportation, rather than as just being in the business of trains, in order to compete against trucks and cars.

Christensen uses the example of a milkshake that some people bought because of boredom rather than as a dessert or for some particular nutritional value. In order to increase sales of milkshakes, an expert in fast food might be tempted to increase revenue by making a thicker or sweeter shake, but a better solution might simply be a marketing campaign to emphasize the on-the-go value, adding a game to the cup, or offering a cup size that was better suited for car cup holders. Identifying the role the product plays takes a deeper understanding of people’s behavior. You can see how easy it is to discover options when you know what people are trying to accomplish. Simple insights bring important ideas to life. They make our products and experiences that much better.

The jobs a company’s products and services need to perform, and the level of detail with which the company needs to do its job, are both rapidly evolving. The Internet spreads the smallest of cultural trends and influences around the globe in minutes rather than in years or even seasons, morphing both meaning and value. This means that a new product feature offered in Japan yesterday can create new expectations in the U.S. today. It will change what people want because they will be inspired by what is now possible. And what is possible changes rapidly with advanced sensing technology such as accelerometers that tell your iPhone which way is up and thinking devices such as tablets and their microprocessor brains becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous. All of that technological capability creates deeper, richer, and fresher information, requiring new experiences to make sense of it. Technology has been magical and revolutionary but we will continue to see that the real magic will be the relationships we facilitate and the experiences that