Comments on: Customer Nirvana -When great products meet awesome service…

By: Bob Champagne

Bob Champagne — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:41:04 +0000

Thanks for the comments- all good points. I think “incrementalism” can kill us on both fronts. On the operational front, it leads to “just enough to get by” behavior and prevents step changes in efficiency and production. On the product side, it prevents the advances that are only made by creating and innovating rather than reacting and following. What both of you are pointing to is a “culture” of innovation that needs to be part of operations as well as product development and innovation.

By: Tammy

Tammy — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 05:12:10 +0000

I think it’s important to focus in on the iterative process that measurements and refining products and services requires. Nothing is constant and we can bogle our minds trying to understand what influences thinking and changes in our thinking.

Actually, Doug’s glove scenario above is indicative of this very thing and I’m impressed with the way he took the customer culture and applied it in a safety “lineside” setting. That’s what we should all be striving for.

By: Douglas Dale (@DouglasCDale)

Douglas Dale (@DouglasCDale) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:32:57 +0000

Interesting concept Bob, I am in complete agreement about the idea that solutions need to be first looked at before trying to improve the process. Matter of fact, I believe that too often incremental improvement is the death of innovation. More often than not, companies do not go back and try to answer the original question that they were trying to solve which prevents them from innovating. I have started to help clients go back and “stay in the question” longer and work toward new more innovative solutions rather than getting a process change or improvement and calling it “good”. I believe that it is human nature to recycle old solutions and really never get to the more creative approach.
For example, one utility client who was dealing with safety performance issues kept trying to improve their pre-job briefs and developed KPI’s for how long and how often they were occurring. After their performance continued to slip, we tried a new approach. By staying in the question longer, we found out that many of the safety issues had to do with cutting and scraping their hands and they were actually using the wrong type of gloves for many of the tasks they were performing. The group created a board that showed the different types of gloves that were available in the tool crib and the application for each (they also got rid of several types of gloves). This one action improved their safety performance and had little to do with how effective the pre-job briefs were or the way they measured safety performance.