Fueled by the digital crack that is social media and generative AI, today’s Mindful Monday post is a strange ramble of thought streams.
The first was spawned by a MeetUp over at the Open Service Community, where we got to hear an interesting talk about power skills by Sean McLean (unfortunately we couldn’t record it, since we were using what is fundamentally a gaming platform which didn’t lend itself well to capturing the session). But I enjoyed Sean’s talk, and it got me thinking about all kinds of nuances between experiential learning and practice-based thinking.
This led me to (naturally) head over to ChatGPT and ask more questions. To be honest, I don’t know whether I was asking what I wanted to know, or what I wanted to hear, but it sucked me in like a cloud’s data gravity. I even wound up asking ChatGPT to create a blog post in the thread, which you can find here.
At this point I thought I’d gotten over Friday’s dose of digital crack when this morning I listened to a ‘1-2-3 with Roy’ about not letting the customer disappear from customer experience.
This seemed to trigger a savage flashback to all sorts of memories, recent and not so recent.
I immediately (of course) thought of how the USM process model is customer-focused and has embedded feedback loops into all processes, and therefor all workflows. This brought to mind a couple of diagrams that illustrated the ‘critical path’, which emphasizes that customer feedback is primary and that administrative actions internal to the provider are outside the critical path.
Figure 1 – Basic Workflow
Figure 2 – Workflow showing critical path
Of course, Roy’s 1 minute, 23 second clip was spot on; you can’t claim excellent customer experience without evidence…and that evidence has to come from the customer!
This quickly circled me back to Sean’s message about Power Skills, which seemed to trigger this morning’s wicked rant. Power skills, formerly known as ‘soft skills’, are really important for getting at the heart of customer feedback and I think that’s why there’s such a focus on them today.
But this seemed to send me over the edge, into former rants well over a decade old now:
Implementing a CMDB is Like Blogging Alone: Why Products & Process won’t be enough to reconnect with the business – MyServiceMonitor, 2007
The problem with Change, Configuration and CMDB implementations is they do not really enable a real-time connection between IT staff, and between IT and the business, which tends to perpetuate vicious cycles of tribal warfare.
“When people lack connection to others, they are unable to test the veracity of their own views, whether in the give or take of casual conversation or in more formal deliberation. Without such an opportunity, people are more likely to be swayed by their worse impulses….” – Robert Putnam (2000) Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community, New York: Simon and Schuster: 288-290
So I start this morning with my head buzzing about customer experience, practice-based thinking, power skills, feedback loops, enterprise routines (a la ‘social circuitry’) and other rushes of wild, sometimes incoherent, thoughts.
The structured routines that the USM method helps the enterprise create are ‘social circuitry’. They connect the customer experience dots by capturing customer feedback along every enterprise routine, across complex, diverse service supply chains…
Time for a walk.