Immerse Yourself

We were once invited to teach a course to a bunch of senior executives in the automotive industry. As a part of our preparation for the course, we learned that one of the perks of attaining the c-suite was that executives didn’t have to go through the pesky car-buying experience, because they were upgraded each time a new model came out (talk about auto-upgrade, ba dump bah!). They didn’t even need to pump their own gas! A company tanker drove around topping executives’ cars off in the company parking lot.

No wonder the car-buying experience is so dreadful! Every step up the corporate ladder brought employees a layer removed from the customer experience, the very experience they were supposedly responsible for improving. One of our early recommendations included forcing the executive team to go through the normal-human car-buying experience, financing office shenanigans and all.

Sadly, this is no fringe exception; all too often, it’s the norm. Once, when scheduling a “field trip” for a team of senior finance executives, I was somewhat patronizingly informed, “Oh, you don’t understand: these guys don’t talk to customers…” as if that made the course, you know, less necessary for this particular group. (I could hardly write that sentence without laughing!)

Insulation stifles innovation, because it chokes the wellspring of creativity: unexpected input. Jerry Seinfeld once remarked that the trappings of success threaten to rob you of the very irritations that provoke fresh thinking. It’s no different in commerce than it is in comedy. And yet, how normal it is to be one-too-many-degrees-removed from the very experiences we ought to be reinventing.

Just the other day, we co-facilitated a live session in a class with a new prospective strategic partner. The system broke while the whole class banged on it, and the collaborator remarked somewhat sheepishly, “You know, this is the first time I’ve watched folks trying to use the software as a group...”

One a more personal level, I was recently asked to write a guest blog post for another author’s blog. My exact instructions to folks who guest post on my blog were fed back to me. Boy, was it hard!! But wow, how incredibly important to be subjected to my own process!

What about you? When’s the last time you did the thing you’re asking customers to do? When’s the last time you tried to sign up for your own service? Or went through your customer journey as a customer?

It’s easy to write scripts for others; it’s transformative to go through the experience ourselves.

Related: The Inspiration Discipline

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