The Show Business side of Service Design

Business901 podcast guest, Adam St. John (aka Adam Lawrence) of Work-Play-Experience discusses the theatrical aspect of service design and how theater can play a vital role in developing your customer experience. Adam is a professional comedian, business consultant and writer with a background in psychology and the automotive industry. For years he has been using expertise gained in the world of theatre and film to help companies influence their customers.

An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe:  Theater seems to be the convenient analogy. Is there a deeper relationship between service design and theater?

Adam:  Very much. I always say it's not a metaphor, it's the same thing. I really do fervently believe that. That's my first point, again, really with the comedy. Let's widen up comedy and talk about all kinds of show business whether it's theater or film or music or dance or any of these things. What are they all about? They're all about setting up a process, if you like, or a set of stimuli or a story, whatever you want to call it, setting up a sequence of events which influences somebody's emotion and makes them feel the way you hope they will feel. It always interacts with their own experience, of course, but you're trying to guide them along a certain emotional path. I think service design is the same thing. The experience end of it is a very clear parallel. What do I see, what do I feel, how is it presented to me? That's very clear.

You've got to understand, also, theater is not just performance. Theater is a development tool. Theater is a tool which you can use to model any kind of human interaction very, very quickly, very, very cheaply, and actually quite effectively. It's not just the performance side of theater which interests us; in fact in our work we hardly ever use performance techniques.

What we use are rehearsal techniques which is how a theater goes out there and uses the resources it has on a limited time frame asks itself a question. We have a process here. It's a play in this case but it could be a service design, of course. It says how might this be, how might this turn out in the end, and looks at all the options of doing that in a very fast, very iterative, very full bodied ‑‑ they use their whole body, you don't sit down and think and rehearse, you get up and do.

That brings in much bigger emotional level as well. I think that really is a very big overlap there. We took these tools out of theater, like the rehearsal and other things we can talk about, and said let's apply these to business processes. How can we rehearse a business process?

I just want to point out there rehearsal is not practicing something but it's always the same. Rehearsal, again, is developmental, how might it be. Then you start getting these really, really great insights into the emotionality of things and also the options that you have open to you.

Joe:  Are we scripting everything?

Adam:  That's a very good question because absolutely, emphatically maybe. It depends what you mean by script. I never believe in giving somebody words they have to say. As an actor, of course, I get that all the time. I have a job as acting still and then I get precise words I have to say, but it's always up to me to interpret those. I think in a service environment customers have a very, very good nose for anything which is inauthentic, anything which is not your own words in a very simple level. We believe not in scripting a process down to the word but in exploring the ways it might be, maybe setting up a palette of options that somebody in a front line situation could use with this service and then encouraging them and helping them, again through a rehearsal process, to find their own way to make it authentically theirs and bring it to life.

There's a tension in many people's lives between show business and authenticity because a lot of people think show business is fake. They think it's about a façade, about being sleek, about pretending to do something. That's not a good understanding of actually what show business is.

I love Anthony Hopkins. Sir Anthony Hopkins, one of my favorite actors. When Sir Anthony Hopkins plays Hannibal Lector if he were pretending it wouldn't be scary. The reason it's scary is because he shows part of himself, something that's inside all of us, to make that role possible.

Theater is really not about pretending to be something. It's about choosing which aspect of you to show. It's actually about getting better at showing who you really are and that, I think, is something service design can really use, that point of what values do we have here? How can we show those values in a controlled, conscious way to make a rock and roll experience for our customer?

Related Information:
Gamestorming for Service Design
Service Design via a Design Thinker ebook
Do you co-create value with your Customer?
A Service Design Thinking Primer

Time Based Thinking limits Lean Sales and Marketing

Lean has an infatuation with time, just look: Lead Time, Takt Time, Cycle Time, Machine Time, Process Time, Value Add Time, etc. With all this time-based thinking what it the first thing we try to do when applying Lean to Sales and Marketing?

The first step involves mapping our sales cycle looking for waste and improving the total time from the beginning to the end of the entire stream. This is great stuff! The power of the Value Stream Mapping process is that it enables the team to see the entire picture. We know waste in marketing is not as readily identified as in other areas. But one example of sales and marketing waste that can be identified is sales cycle time. We can even get agreement that the longer a customer/prospect stays in one of the process stages of the value stream or in the queue waiting to go from one stage to the next, the greater the chance of losing the customer.

We know enough to look at how to optimize the entire process instead of just a particular stage. Therefore, our first step would be to evaluate the total time spent, not resources allocated or used. Moving through the value stream quicker is many times just a matter of evaluating the internal delays that occur in the process. By removing them, we enable the customer to make faster and better decisions. We also create more credibility with our customer for ourselves as the “go to guy (organization)” and as an organization that has done this before.

It makes sense, the perfect application to apply Lean to Sales and Marketing. You try to find the one best path – the value stream. It is easy; we have already created a marketing funnel to allow us to readily identify the process. We just need to use a few Lean Tools to bring the process under control.

Houston, we have a problem! Organizations can no longer feed products to customers, as I described in the blog post, Kill the Sales and Marketing Funnel and in a few other posts that you can find on this blog under the Marketing Funnel Category.

In the process of interviewing Mary and Tom Poppendieck for an upcoming Business901 podcast, I got off the subject and discussed project versus product management. Afterwards, they sent me an excerpt from their second book, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash. In the excerpt (which I have paraphrased and shorten) they gave the typical description of projects; they are funded and have a beginning and an end. Success is than measured based on whether or not the cost, schedule and scope commitments are met.

This mimics many of our traditional thoughts in sales and marketing. When we try to apply Lean to Sales and marketing it is re-emphasized. Project thinking is basically closing a sale in the shortest amount of time.

What if we treaded our sales cycles more like a product than a project? What if we treated scope (what we will do) with an expectation that it will evolve as knowledge is gained (My book, Marketing with PDCA discusses that Lean Sales and Marketing is built upon the philosophy that there has been a subtle shift to knowledge as the way to engage, develop and retain your customer base). What if we viewed success on engagement and dollars (lifetime preferably) per customer? Or increase in market share? Or even rewards based on number of long term customers? What if funding occurred not on monthly budgets but incrementally on engagement?

The overwhelming theme that has evolved is that engagement has replaced time as a defining metric in sales and marketing. An example is one of the defining metrics at a retail store, time spent. We have always viewed that the more time spent in the store, the more purchased. If we take this thinking and put an interactive component to it and rather than view time spent in the store but the experience and level of engagement created with the customer at the store and online, time becomes relatively in material. It is the experience.

How does Lean apply? Forrester Research identifies four measures of increasing engagement as Influence (Plan), Interaction (Do), Intimacy (Check), and Influence (Act). As you may notice, I assign the PDCA cycle to these measures of engagement as a way of combining Lean Thinking to the Engagement cycle. Demonstrating a shared outcome with your customers should be the ultimate strategy of your organization and your PDCA improvement cycles. Many organizations still view improving capabilities of internal processes in sales and marketing as an effective strategy; such as the reduction of cycle time. The strategies that we need for improvement must be on the demand side. We must simply focus on the customer, not internally. We do not live in a world of excess demand. As a result, our planning cannot be isolated. It is only validated through customer engagement, not a time-based derivative.

Related Information:
PDCA Cycle of Zingerman’s Deli
In love with your products more than your customers?
PDCA for Lean Marketing, Knowledge Creation
Lean Marketing Creates Knowledge for the Customer

The Future of Lean with Dan Jones

I had the pleasure of interviewing one of the noted experts in the Lean Community, Dan Jones.  Dan is a management thought leader and advisor on applying lean, process thinking to every type of business across the world. He is the founding Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy www.leanuk.org in the UK, dedicated to pushing forward the frontiers of lean thinking and helping others with its implementation.

Daniel Jones is the co-author, with James P Womack, of the influential, best-selling management books:
The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production
Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated
Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together
Seeing the Whole Value Stream.

Dan will not disappoint you in this podcast. Though he is firmly rooted in the principles of Lean, you may be surprised by his forward-thinking and interpretation.  An excerpt can be read in this blog post, The Challenge of Lean with Dan Jones.

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Related Information:
Has Lean Thinking fallen short on the Demand Side?
Thinking Back from the Customer –Lean Summit 2011
4 Disciplines of Execution – Lean Simplified
Defining the Roles of Lean IT