THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE PUZZLE
Reuben Ray
I excel at managing, measuring, analyzing and determining people's worth as individuals and team members. Experience of multiple HR practices for Talent & Performance management linking to Total Rewards.
The BEHAVIOUR DIFFERENTIAL beneath the Experience impact by Reuben Ray
In its zeal to differentiate between generations and also remain unique, Snapchat uses different access patterns. Younger generations have a ‘cooler’ attitude towards a newbie accessing such platforms and claim of a higher intellect is usually the booty to boast. Why do we fail to 'input the experience’ across a diverse audience of users experiencing our policies and products?
As a Product Manager, or one in charge of People Experience at the workplace, the impact is puzzling due to human habit of perceptional stereotyping. When we believe something will work because it works in our mind, we have a higher dependence on context and less on semantics of the intent. The fact that two scenarios are enacted in differing timelines, at the least, leaving aside the other differing factors, are often ignored for convenience of contextualising experience impacts. This is why parents buy the same ice-cream for weekend Nexflix experience and post-meal desert expectations, for ice-cream is ice-cream!
Let’s jump straight to the issue; why does this happen?
We can classify it into 3 broad reasons; let’s investigate and observe.
User knowledge levels determines the stereotype we would relate to, to expand the experience in our mind. Someone who has heard about Baskin & Robbins ‘Netflix & Chill’ ice-cream flavor would buy it while others might justify for the ‘tried & tested’ typical taste which never went wrong in satisfying the palate.
If we break down our experiencers, we will find 4 broad knowledge levels;
领英推荐
These four levels of experiencers define why conversations meander and issues blow into conflicting consequences, far beyond its core intent. The best place to find the first two types are in our social media posts and comments, who seemingly have every piece of information to relate to a unique situation or experience while the last might be Nobel prize winning scientists and academic scholars of the subject and practice. The practitioner is the Leader among the four, trying to monetize anything or siding with the interested party. This is the ‘experienced’ senior leadership which wants to be taught the least or be subjected to any learning, as if it has unlocked the wisdom to success merely through aging.
The itch for action comes from our biological drive to be the expert and solution provider in a puzzle, trying to gain social & political brownies irrespective of knowledge levels. It’s a dangerous itch which prevents us from refrain or inaction, not realising the saying, ‘when in deep shit, don’t sing’ and get exposed! As humans, we do have a ‘flight-fight-freeze’ tendency to situations, based on how we decipher the context. It is this zeal to act that makes us rush to a conclusion, celebrate every event, raise our voices in anger or run away from responsibility. People with knowledge also at times itch for action, forgetting the core objective and failing to reason with logic.
Our desire for control as Experience creators often fail to deliver the intended impact because we believe we must be in control before anything or anyone else gets ahead. The One vs. Two Doors Decision Framework by Jeff Bezos explains why we must avoid being hasty in creating consequential doors which lock our decisions and make us feel guilty later. Here is one example of how retailers with experience rushed to get ahead when Amazons entered the consumer markets.
Across retail stores, customers felt offended being probed by staff trying to enhance the store experience; the stores feared loosing out on the customer and stopped quizzing customers; they simply gave up on the idea and creating alternate modes of enhancing the experience, thus loosing big time to the crowds of Amazons. Everyone wants to be educated, but no one wants to be taught!
An experienced Leader more often succumbs to the crowd because they either might not have a direct ownership or responsibility for the outcome, or they lack the spirit to contest the practiced version of the truth; this behavior to still be the one-leader-solves-all is the desire to be the one in control and thus end up deliver the common, industry-practice version, not necessarily the most effective one. An example to fit in here; various articles including a book by Duff McDonald state that McKinsey advised AT&T in 1980 that there would not be more than 900k subscribers of mobile phones in the US. The actual numbers were around 109 million, thus making AT&T leadership avoid taking a decision to enter the market. Similar stories abound across corporations like Kodak & Sony, Ford & Coca-Cola.
How does one solve for this? It is a repeat, but let me repeat; there is no ‘one’ solution. Anyone offering a single version or one solution is limiting the experience to a single cluster or group of humanity. If you designed an experience to cater to a singular category, your bias for action would have contained the bias for social and intellect to a great degree. What about the knowledge levels? Well, one can filter for it!