Why is Product Thinking still the Prevalent thought?

Many of us believe that all we need to do is create better, more innovative products, the Apple mystic? The product continues to be the primary focus of business. Can we stay ahead of competition by products alone? Or even with products in general?

We have used Lean to make products that are easy to use, manufacture and make money with. Manufacturing is shrinking, and services have become the dominant force of business. Many companies are defined by their services, versus their product. There is a need for organizations to differentiate through service quality and customer experience. However, we still market services in much the same manner as we do products, through features and benefits.

We typically think of Service as a verb or an activity that is consumed by our customers. We think of Service in forms of organizational functions such as Engineering, Purchasing, Shipping, Marketing, Accounting, IT, Human Resources. When we set out to improve one of these functions, we look at how we do the work. We focus on our own activity.  The carryover of product thinking that better, faster, cheaper wins is a total misnomer. The focus on our own activity encourages internal thinking and misplaces our priorities. While addressing services from this viewpoint may seem to be productive and worthwhile, it misses the point in design. If we intend to make services profitable, we must accept that customers do not care how we do our work. They might not even care that we are incompetent at certain functions. Customers want us to provide a service to help them achieve a desired outcome. However, have we designed our services to demonstrate that value?

Shameless Plug: Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop (Learn More) teaches us how to…

• Think of services as products or deliverables.
• Close the performance gap between customers and your organization.
• Create services that are countable, occur in discrete units and can be plural.
• Create services that can be part of a package.
• Create services that are not only supporting but also self-supporting. 
• Create services that can be cost leaders not cost losers.
• Create opportunities through services.
• Create revenue through services.

The workshop is based on this outline developed for the Lean Service Design Trilogy. We will use the Lean methods of SDCA, PDCA and EDCA as they relate to each discipline and the path between Service through SD-Logic (The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing) to Design.

Sign up Now for Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop

The above is an online workshop, if you would like information on the full day offline workshop, please contact me.

Should you Gamify your Simulations?

I have read several books on #Gamification and found them either touting the use of rewards and badges or the technical aspect of design. I never did find that middle ground until I read, The Gamification of Learning and Instruction by Dr. Karl Kapp. The book started with the basics (it’s not about rewards, games and badges) giving me a true understanding of games and maybe more importantly gamers. He then proceeded to get into just enough technical detail so that I would be able to communicate and participate in the creation process with a designer.

Many other books use examples such as frequent flyer programs and other reward schemes that have already been used for decades. Dr. Kapp starts with why anyone wants to use Gamification – Engagement! He goes on to create a learning experience that gives you the basic understanding for both an instructor trying to learn or create a game and the designer who is trying to understand how to construct a game. He marvelously constructs a bridge between the two disciplines.

Dr. Kapp’s examples are current and readily applied to the real world. After reading the book, you feel that not only do you understand the Gaming world better, but you are much more willing to take a stab at trying a few games on your own. Something the author recommends that we all do if we are serious about Gamification. I have already purchased two copies of the book sending the hard copy to a client and a Kindle version for me to use as a reference tool no matter where I may be. An excerpt from next week’s Tuesday podcast, and I will forewarn you; it is a long podcast.

Joe: Many of my listeners have been running simulations and board games as trainers for a long time. Do we need to be upgrading our skills? Have you converted any of these old simulations, to present‑day Gamification methods?

Karl: “Yes, two things about that. One, Gamification doesn't always necessarily have to mean technology. Technology certainly enables it to happen, so creating it like a just‑in‑time board game, for example, is a great example of Gamification. Creating a simulation to teach a buyer how to buy product or how to place a product, I think that's an element of Gamification.

What is really happening now is that a lot of times we felt those were good ways to go, and we thought they worked well, but now we have some empirical evidence that shows that Gamification actually does drive engagement. To be on the front end of what's happening and understanding how that works, we really need to upgrade our skills. We also need to understand there are a lot of people out there that do not like Gamification. In fact, there's visceral response is negative to the term Gamification.

I think one game designer famously wrote a blog post, Gamification is B.S. Nobody should do Gamification; I can't believe anybody's doing that. I think what he missed was the fact that it really translates into engagement. A lot of training and development folks have been creating engagement, but now the engagement is going to a different level. For example, we're completing a workflow on order entry or on the shop floor, or you're trying to get people to enter their hours.

Are there engagement techniques that you can use to help these people focus on what they already should be doing? Is there ways to help them see the value of what they're doing in a different perspective, framing it differently?

I think there is a need to upgrade the skills and think about what Gamification is. Some of the things we've done before, some of the new things that we're doing, and also new combinations of what we're doing, which really makes this a very powerful tool for encouraging learners to be involved, engaged and activated.

What I like most about it, is the thought process. Game developers go through such a different thought process than people designing instruction. If we get instructional designers to go through that thought process, I think they can make some really powerful instructional elements and interactions. That's the concept behind the book.”

About: Karl Kapp is a professor of instructional technology at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. He teaches a variety of courses to include game design and how to design learning courses and environments, Additionally, as the assistant director of Bloomsburg's acclaimed Institute for Interactive Technologies (IIT), Dr. Kapp helps government, corporate, and non-profit organizations leverage learning technologies for employee productivity and organizational profitability. In his spare time, he has authored or co-authored four books on the convergence of learning and technology with his latest being The Gamification of Learning and Instruction.

You can find Karl on Twitter @kKapp  or his blog, Kapp Notes.

This podcast will serve as a great introduction to Paul Myerson discussing his Lean Supply Chain & Logistics Simulation later in the week. This is part of a series of blog posts outlined in A Lean Service Design Approach to Gaming your Training.

The Marriage in Lean Service Design

This may sound like Abraham Maslow’s saying, “If all you have is a hammer; everything looks like a nail” and if it does, I will admit that my principles and practices are with a Lean based approached. Most of the work I have seen to date in Service Design has been educational or Public Sector work. I have seen where private companies have instituted Service Design but many times the cost has been funded from a public entity. I think Service Design and its forerunner; The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing type thinking may be Crossing the Chasm from early adaptors to early majority.

In my use of Service Design, I have had mixed results with most companies very interested in learning more about Service Design but few willing to take the initiative to design and implement Service Design.

It has been very similar to what I have found in Lean Sales and Marketing; interested but to implement? As a result, the best prospects are mature companies well into their Lean Journey and willing to take on a pilot project. Even at that, it is usually initiated by the Lean Champion who wants to introduce the Standard Tools of Lean and improve processes versus using Lean as a vehicle for growth.

The umbrella of Lean offers Service Design a method of entry into a well-established market. Lean has been very successful in Services and Design through traditional practices. However, Lean Design is rooted in tangible applications (excluding software for the moment). The leap of faith that must occur is to move away from these traditions and institute a wider scope of Design to Services. The Design Thinking concepts that are most commonly associated with IDEO seems to provide the clearest and accepted understanding.

Below is a Venn Diagram on how I view the three disciplines of Lean, Service, and Design. I have also included SDCA, PDCA, EDCA as a way to demonstrate the use of Lean in Services and Design. I like to use the term EDCA learned from Graham Hill  to designate the Explore aspect of Lean.  I view it as more of Design Type thinking content that allows for that collaborative learning cycle with a customer. This is a link to my blog post on the tools of SDCA, PDCA, EDCA: http://business901.com/?p=8490.

We live in a service centric world. Even companies to include most manufacturers are defined not by their products but the services they offer. Can we continue to give away services to sell products? Has production capacity slowed that we now have excess overhead? Maybe, we are a mature Lean Company and have become so efficient in our services that we have excess capacity? Is it time that we design around our services? Is it time to discover, how to develop our services into a profit center?

Shameless Plug: Lean Service Design Workshop  You could also attend a live presentation by joining our SlideCast on Thursday July 12^th at 1:00 PM Eastern. It is by invitation only, so drop me an email through the contact page on my website.