Xperience This!

The following blog post dissects dimensions of employee engagement through an ecosystems-based point of view.

The Metaphor: Companion Planting

Outside of my MISI work, I spend part of my time working in a Philadelphia City Harvest community garden. I employ a gardening method called companion planting.

Companion planting cultivates reciprocal relationships between diverse yet interconnected entities. For instance, nutrient rich soil provides the foundation for healthy growth. Specific vegetables are paired and planted with complementary herbs, flowers or beneficial weeds that work with one another to manage pests, enrich flavor, attract helpful insects and enable resilience. My role as the gardener is to provide the resources for mutually beneficial interactions to unfold over time. The effect is a self-sustaining ecosystem where all integral parts, both human and non-human, participate in its making, flourishing and evolution.

Even though companion planting requires a certain amount of work upfront, the results are manifold. A higher yield of quality vegetables contains the right amount of nutrients and flavor, unmatched by monoculture production. Beneficial vegetation and insects abound. And the positive results travel beyond the garden. People are properly fed with nutritious food. A city corner is beautified. Neighbors work together to maintain the city block. The neighborhood is proud. A proactive community-based movement continues to grow in Philadelphia and beyond.

People’s lives are made a bit better.

Human Approach: Think In Ecosystems

Solutions that don’t encompass or work in concert with others across [the many] aspects of our lives significantly reduce their ability to succeed. – Nathan Shedroff, Author of Design is the Problem and Making Meaning More »

MISI XD Account Director (AD) and strategist Jerilyn MacLaren-Hall co-presents a webinar with Morris Museum Executive Director Linda Moore. The topic: creating a great customer experience by first working with the museum’s employees to learn from them and to help them understand how they can contribute to a memorable museum experience. Based on her work with the museum and many other companies intent on improving their customer experiences, Jerilyn writes a white paper. The topic: how to create a great customer experience by first creating a great employee experience.

MISI XD AD and strategist Lisa Woodley leads a workshop at a Life Sciences Commercial IT Summit. The topic: how to prepare internal teams for the changes to come and create internal advocates when a company implements new technology solutions. Based on her experience helping companies understand and manage cultural change, Lisa writes a white paper. The topic: The Dawn of the Era of iT - how new trends in information technology are forcing IT organizations to be more customer-centric, with their “customer” being the employees they serve.

I travel to Moscow to present a keynote at UX Russia 2011. My topic is Beyond the Interface to the Interaction. I organize the presentation around three of MISI XD’s 10 Immutable Truths of XD. One of the truths I focus on is #6: XD Acknowledges that Employees are People Too. Among the points I make in my presentation is that companies have come to recognize that employees are customer experience professionals’ secret weapon. They experience the customer’s issues, they generate real world improvement ideas, and they build the links between the company and the customer experience.

Customer Experience (CX) - the idea of designing the end to end, multiple touchpoint, multi-modal experience as a whole as opposed to a series of discrete interactions – has been maturing as a discipline for many years. More companies are appreciating the power of CX to differentiate their products, services and/or brands in the marketplace and to create loyalty. Titles like Chief Experience Officer or SVP of Customer Experience are becoming more common. And new CX maturity models – measures of how committed an organization is to a strategy of customer-centricity – are being introduced into the marketplace by a variety of practitioners. What has not gotten as much play as we believe it should, is the role each employee plays in contributing to the desired outcome of a great, loyalty-inspiring customer experience. As Jerilyn writes in her white paper, “If you or your colleagues don’t buy into the value of your product, your brand and the customer experience you are seeking to create, you won’t be able to live that promise when working with your customers.”

No surprise then that Employee Experience has been a major theme at MISI XD in recent months, and will continue to be as the results of our work with our current clients develop into additional insights to the power of individual employees to make or break the customer experience.

Three is a powerful number. When events happen in threes I tend to pay attention. They don’t have to be momentous events, like revolutions, earthquakes and hurricanes. Sometimes it’s simply a message or theme that repeats itself until you realize there’s a there there. Last Friday one of MISI’s account directors sent a congratulatory email to her account team for a job well done. It struck me as having a theme similar to two other notable events: 1) Liam Bannon’s cover story for Interactions magazine on the evolution of HCI; 2) Steve Jobs resignation as CEO of Apple. These three events shared a theme that – particularly for those interested in experience design – is worthy of our attention: In a world increasingly transfixed by and dependent on technology and technologists, the voices of humanists are on the rise. More »

The first iPad advertisement from March of 2010 presents a primarily consumer-focused marketing effort. The ad shows a man viewing photos, accessing the internet, reading a book, and checking his e-mail – all from the comfort of his couch. Thus far, Facebook-browsing and YouTube-watching have been far more common activities in iPad advertisements than checking corporate e-mail or marking up a business proposal.

Yet the iPad has taken off in businesses, particularly in the financial services and health sectors.[1] Applications such as Pages, Keynote, Numbers, and Documents to Go were some of the top grossing apps in 2010, a strong indication that iPad users are seeking to perform work-related tasks in between completing Angry Birds levels[2]. And with companies such as JP Morgan Chase and Mercedes-Benz fully adopting the device, the iPad is clearly no longer confined to the realm of personal or recreational devices. Why is this happening? More »

An organizational change management (OCM) group I’m part of was having an interesting discussion last week. Someone posed the question, “How do you address change sabotage?” He admittedly chose the word “sabotage” to be provocative, and it got me thinking. Sabotage is much more than just resistance to change. The dictionary definition of sabotage is “destruction of property or obstruction of normal operations.” It’s active, intentional, and does damage. It’s not simply intent or internal ill-will. It’s an effect. There’s a critical difference between a saboteur and a plain-old complainer.

Every organization has some small percentage of complainers: those stalwart curmudgeons who don’t like anything. But what is it that gives that complainer enough power to transform them into a saboteur? To answer that, you have to look at things from your employees’ perspective. More »