The Outsider’s experience

I have been doing a lot of work recently with organizations that aim to serve people with multiple, sometimes conflicting, needs. I work with charities, and the not-for-profit sector, who generally have several different end users: individual funders, corporate funders, government, volunteers (of which there may be many different types), and program recipients (which may be different for every program implemented).

As part of the work I've done, I frequently find myself asking similar questions, all of which are aimed at figuring out the same information (and helping the charities see it for themselves). I have put together a short list of questions, along with an explanation, that I use to help figure out what's going well, and what isn't.

The value of working with any organization lies not in the programs the organization wants to deliver, but in the delivery itself. Delivery is not about how things look from within the organization or whether metrics are being hit, but about how smooth, easy, and helpful things are for people on the outside.

What defines good interactions?

1. Are my needs met?
2. Are they met rapidly?
3. When the organization makes a mistake, how do they recognize it, and how quickly is it rectified?
4. Does the organization understand my needs?
5. How much of the time I spend interacting with the organization is spent on things I want (adding value), as opposed to things that interfere with me getting what I want (waste)?
6. How many people do I have to talk to in order to get what I want?

It is imperative to take the outsider's perspective whenever possible, because it is incredibly easy to become blinded when we look around with our normal perspective. It frequently seems normal to divide the company based on the functions that each team is responsible for. But customers don't experience things in a functional way - their experience is holistic. Customers don't care if a problem occurs with the person they interact with, or deeper within the company. And they certainly don't want to have to chase the solution themselves.

Some of the benefits are highlighted in this article, but the truth is that this concept goes back nearly 60 years, to when Deming started working with the Japanese to build quality into their processes. Deming's main point, and one born out by time and experience, is that you can't inspect quality into a process. It is either built with quality, or it isn't. If it isn't, no amount of tinkering is going to fix it. The questions I ask above are meant to help identify whether quality is part of the process, by challenging organizations to figure out whether they're actually delivering what their customers need and want, or whether they're delivering what the company has told itself they want.

NB: This list is subject to updates.

This post owes a lot to the concept of failure demand