Operational Excellence: Human Experience Architecture & Research

I’ve gone from a MoreSteam friend, to a student, to a content creator and now full circle as a presenter for their Best Practices for Operational? Excellence conference so needless to say I was very excited for this.

Staying on brand for my 2024 departure from talking about my usual content I decided to take a chance and talk about a term my wife Ashlee Aouad and I came up with on vacation when discussing what the evolution of OE might be (yes we talk about OE outside of work to each other which is true love ??).

Human Experience Architecture & Research (HEAR) is what we eventually landed on because in order to HEAR work you have to hear people first.

Humans want two things:

1. Have experiences (usually shooting for good ones).
2. Share the building and emotions of those experiences with each other.

Even the hard experiences are meaningful.

We reminisce on the journeys surrounding those experiences & the mountains we climbed together. My roommate and a guy I consider a brother Wesley Chamblee was inducted into the Wabash College Athletics Hall of Fame with me a few weeks ago. We definitely had great times together at Wabash but a lot of our shared experiences were running ourselves dead at track practice (repeat 200s and 550 over distance days are no joke) and going to the computer lab to work on research papers until 2am.

They were difficult experiences but we wouldn’t trade them for anything. We formed a bond for life rooted in those trying but fulfilling shared experiences. And when you think about this fact it actually relates to almost everything in life. Work, vacations, concerts, memes, everything really… is rooted in the human desire to experience life and share experiences together.

Since my presentation was very much story and discussion driven I told a few of you who asked I would write my thoughts out here about how to best approach HEAR.

Human Experience Architecture & Research & Operational Excellence (OE).

Make it a cultural state to achieve.

We need to shift our views on OE towards the cultural state it brings and the benefits it has for people and their happiness. Frameworks are great and all but those are just tools and a means to accomplish the end objective. It’s much more of an emotionally compelling North Star to rally around a culture we want to achieve together vs focusing on the statistics and numbers because look, numbers are just humans in disguise. So why not focus on the real deal?

Make OE a journey to take together.

If humans want to have and share our experiences, it’s on us as OE practitioners to help create that journey and experience. We should always be focused on building, sharing and going on that journey together. It cannot become an “I tell you to do xyz” thing but must be an experience reassuring people “Hey, let’s go on this journey and create this culture together.”

Trust equity.

This is all really just focused on going from Ashy to classy.

(Notorious BIG: Sky is the Limit ft 112 for everyone who asked where that phrase is from)

1. Having the right answer doesn’t matter if you haven’t earned trust equity.
2. Having the fastest answer doesn’t matter if you haven’t earned trust equity.
3. You can’t change people’s minds without changing their hearts - which can’t be done without earning trust equity.
4. If you don’t have the capacity to care about people on a personal level, hire someone who does because you can't fake it to earn trust equity.

We can only gain trust equity by showing people they can and should trust us by caring about their dreams & their futures, showing up for them and delivering on what we commit to them. Without that you will never leave the ground because your journey needs to be together.

Sometimes you have to do things a bit differently than you would have like, but if your goal is to help others, you need to ask yourself if the most perfect solution is necessary or if you are protecting your ego. If it’s the latter, push it aside and get an ashy win because when people need help, they need help and that’s what we are here to do.

Again: Very few answers matter without trust equity.

Gambling trust equity.

When you show people they can and should trust you (in a genuine way), they will be more willing to try new things you introduce. This is because you’ve shown them that your main goal is to empower everyone to go on this shared experience of creating a great culture for all.

Being honest and transparent / believing in something enough to put your reputation on the line for it while being realistic about the probable outcomes is huge. People don’t get frustrated when things go wrong, we get frustrated when things go wrong and we were never made aware of the possibility that they could go wrong.

Delivering on that gamble is the crucial piece. Saying “just trust me bro” and failing to deliver will begin to degrade trust equity you’ve built in your relationships. Delivering does not always mean delivering a perfect result. Sometimes it means delivering a solution that helps and sometimes pushing the button on the exit plan is that you made people aware of at the start.

Building an OE culture.

Really… it’s just about repeating the cycle.

Again, you can’t shortcut or fake trust equity.

The only way to show people they can depend on you is to show up and show them they can depend on you.

Over time the culture will inevitably build itself as you introduce concepts and lead by example / ideas to people when they are ready. This is how we turn this into shared experience instead of dragging them on an experience for you. Training programs, tools & templates - it’s great to build but we have to make them for the people we want to help, their problems and not for ourselves.

Because again, as humans we just want to:

1. Have experiences (usually shooting for good ones).
2. Share the building and emotions of those experiences with each other.

Everything we do is just a vehicle to enable that in our lives - so let’s not get so wrapped up in the process, the technology and the data that forget they are all driven by those human elements.

Shout out to MoreSteam for doing the unglamorous work of getting all of the people excited about doing unglamorous together in such a glamorous fashion to learn from each other. It really is always an amazing conference.

I am thankful that my OE peers at the conference resonated with an hour long discussion around relationships and trust building. Similar to my Hall of Fame induction speech I went back and forth on whether it was the right topic and the right avenue. Luckily the gamble paid off and the discussion was super interactive - so many of you contributed great ideas and thoughts that I walked away with to think through.

Anyway, I hope this post reminds at least one person it's all about architecting fulfilling human experiences for us to share... together.

~ Your Operational Excellence Ninja guy who likes to take random life side quests.