What we can learn from Lego about product and experience design?

The CEO of Lego offered, "If you want to understand how animals live, you don't go to the zoo, you go to the jungle". So they "went to the jungle" and as a result had the largest study in the world on how kids play. Those insights caused them to change direction and they went from losing money to making money!

Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar, offers “in any business it is important to do your homework, but the point I’m making goes beyond merely getting the facts straight.? Research trips challenge our preconceived notions and keeps cliches at bay. They fuel inspiration. They are, I believe, what keeps us creating rather than copying”.

From my perspective, Ed is suggesting that copying isn't good! Sometimes that feels like driving by using the rearview mirror. Benchmarking feels like copying to some degree. Isn't the benchmark how good we are compared to peers? Is it what we ought to be in the eyes of the consumer? Isn't benchmarking an obsession over the competitor to say we are at least in the middle or a little bit better than everyone else? Maybe we need to add an additional piece of insight to the benchmark research. That will be to benchmark our assumptions about the progress people want to make and what they will hire to make that progress against expectations of the people in their circumstances!

A friend of mine and I were discussing "experience" last week. Sometimes this feels like a nebulous word like innovation! How much money has been spent on "experience" and "digital transformation" toward experience only to discover that the consumers' experience ratings on our organizations didn't improve?

In the past, I have written about reading Game Changer by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan . I ?couldn’t let go of what that book taught me about the deep immersion work P & G did to improve their laundry detergent. Intuit's depth of work to improve their software for personal and small business use is unparalled. Disney did deep immersion work for a band around your wrist! If this is happening for laundry detergent, mops, software, movies, theme parks, etc. is it fair to ask the question for companies in the healthcare industry if we couldn't adjust our approach?

I am not being critical of the work underway nor of the work that has been done. Questions lead us to a better place and, as Clay Christensen said, create space in the brain for new learning! What i am asking is do we need a system that demands the understanding of the friction/problem/aspiration in context and then a relentless and prioritized commitment to deliver that BEFORE we buy or build or redesign?

We can do better and I know we want to because I believe Empathy is the Heartbeat of Healthcare! Many feel the obligation to get better; to get better we have to do better. I spent a full day in the hospital grounding with a CRNA just to learn. I asked her when the last time was that a leader spent an entire day following her to discover what friction the teams encountered while working to take care of people. She said it had never happened in 10 years. Everyone is busy and that is one reason I recommend grounding! Grounding will help us prioritize the friction to fix and help us not spend time investing time and money on assumptions of the progress people want to make and the friction that stands in the way.

We need a refreshed approach to patient, family member, doctor, nurse, crna, phlebotomist, engineer, etc. Notice I don't use consumer in this case...why? It isn't that much extra work to simply call out the people in the movie! In some settings, those words are appropriate. With internal meetings, I suggest we call out each role in the movie! Sachin H. Jain, MD, MBA wrote a great article and suggested we lose meaning when we use jargon words to describe people. To gloss over and call everyone a customer or consumer, etc. may lose the uniqueness that is needed to design for delight! That simple edit in behavior keeps the people at the forefront of our thinking and design. We need to ask our teams; who did you observe? where? how much time did you spend there? what friction did you see? what were the aha moments? etc.

An example may help to shed light on how today's corporate "experience" measures such as digitally-booked appointments or time saved documenting may not comprehensively measure what matters. A team was recently asked to conduct deep user research on an ambient listening solution.? While the corporate measure was “save time” and may have actually meant"save time documenting so doctors can see more patients and generate more revenue" the physicians and their teams don't measure those things. This is what they measure: ? ?

1. More time with family, dinner with the wife and kids
2. Go to daughter’s volleyball games
3. Pick up child from school and help them with homework
4. Be more present with family while at home
5. Don't have to pause Netflix while watching with wife
6. Cook breakfast at home
7. Eat dinner earlier
8. Enable weekends to actually feel like weekends
9. More exercise; time to bike or walk
10. Work in the yard; do housework
11. Sleep more: sleep better
12. No longer sneaking into the home office in the evening
13. Study for Boards

Where will the dashboard be that measures those? Will there be one? And if we think that measuring those isn't the key to winning, then maybe we are missing the boat. We must measure and report on the measures that matter to the people we are creating experiences for!

Jeaneanne Rae, of Peer Insight, shared that “the human condition is a much more fruitful starting point given the level of competition today”. I couldn't agree more. If "going to the jungle" is important enough for Lego (plastic toys), Pixar (digital movie), Proctor and Gamble (detergent, mops, etc), and IKEA (self-assembled furniture), then maybe the real prescription to changing Healthcare experience isn't digital first; maybe it is going to the jungle to truly understand the progress people seek in their circumstances as the best input for designing experiences people want to have! Transformation needs to be driven through the lens of the progress people want to make in their circumstances and the experiences of making that progress. Business models designed based on that in-depth understanding will be more successful than those designed on assumptions about the progress and experiences people seek!