“Centricity” implies focusing your attention on someone and responding in a relationship-nurturing way.

That ex you dated in school and who demanded your attention all the time didn’t work out. Most of us have to divide our attention among our siblings, spouses, children, in laws, bosses, colleagues…and customers.

So, when someone hangs a poster in the copy room that says, “We are Customer Centric,” I have an out of body experience. I envision myself standing in a Dilbert cartoon.

This brings me to my first point.

No one can be customer centric all the time.

If you were, you’d get fired.

Our job descriptions tell us how we fit in the organization. Customer centricity might be mentioned. But, the bulk of our job responsibilities consist of responding to colleagues, bosses and deadlines. Not customers.

Imagine a coworker in marketing, IT, accounting or production who is customer centric all the time. You’ve repeatedly asked him for that report. He’s not actually ignoring you. It’s just that he’s customer centric. Not you-centric. His boss gets the same treatment.

How long do you think it would take for this guy to be voted off the island?

The only exceptions might be sales people and customer service reps. If I have to borrow someone’s watch, I’ll hunt around for a Timex in sales or customer service. Those employees deal with customers every day and know the most about what they go through.

Back to our job descriptions…

We have to schedule client executives for slivers of customer centricity one to three months in advance. That’s because executives’ calendars are chock full of organization centric meetings, projects, emails and reports.

It takes weeks to schedule a workshop. This brings me to my second point.

Customer centricity happens for a few, rare moments. You have to make the most of them.

My job is to make moments of customer centricity payoff in these ways:
1.    Align managers on what they need to know
2.    Imbue them with an accurate, empathetic understanding of what customers go through
3.    Identify opportunities to surprise, attract and retain customers
4.    Resolve misalignments that could undermine innovation efforts
5.    Frame and prioritize customer experience improvements
6.    Plan and implement initiatives

If this were easy, everyone could do it. I’d be out of a job. It’s not easy. It’s hard because we have limited time to make progress at each step.

We also need to apply several skills simultaneously: customer experience research, change management, strategic planning and business process design, for example…which brings me to my last point.

Delegating customer centricity to people who can’t advance innovation efforts in compressed time frames won’t get your organization very far.

Often, customer centricity is assigned to a functional area with a deep, narrow portfolio of skills. Marketing research, customer service or human resources are common assignees. The new “customer centricity department” will put more meetings on your calendar. They may hang nice posters in your copy rooms. They may report on their heroic efforts, which will delight your executive team.

But, their chances of marshaling organizational resources to innovate anything meaningful to customers are remote…possibly near Pluto.

Customer centricity is a momentary, shared state of empathy with customers. Creating and leveraging these moments depends on unique combinations of skills and methods. They also require that the highest levels of leadership be engaged and energized by rapid progress.

If you’re committed to customer centricity as inspiration for improving your customer experience, please contact me…when you can find a minute.

Jason M. Sherman is president of Cleveland-based, Whyze Group. Whyze Group is a leading provider of qualitative, customer- and user-experience research and innovation workshops to Global 2000 clients. The company has been recognized by the Baldrige National Quality Program, business associations and numerous business media as a leader in research and innovation.

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Jason direct: (440) 785-0547.

In the Cleveland Plain Dealer this Sunday, Mary Doria Russell writes about Imagine, a new book by Jonah Lehrer about how creativity really works.

Lehrer writes that creation isn’t a linear process. Innovators are ordinary people who encounter predictable walls. Rather than beating their heads against them, they quit. They find ways to go around them.

Everyone encounters barriers.

Successful innovators who’ve hit walls have something in common: They quit.

They didn’t quit their jobs. They gave up on unproductive lines of reasoning. “They really, truly gave up, often howling in frustration,” Lehrer says.

That’s when innovators “go forward by stepping sideways.” They quiet the linear, rule-constrained left side of the brain. Then, they unleash the conceptual, imaginative, right side. Your right brain soars with your best ideas when you’re just dozing or standing in the shower. The right brain makes unexpected connections. “Suddenly, you just know.”

Another Sunday paper described a painter who abandoned the conventional rules of the art game and built a $100 million a year business. His name is Thomas Kinkade, “painter of light.” Kinkade’s works hang in one out of 20 American homes.

The Sunday New York Times describes how Kinkade imagined a new path to success. He ignored the art critics, targeted consumers who rarely bought art and bypassed art gallery distribution channels. He chose instead to sell his sentimental, mass-produced paintings directly to consumers. He marketed his works through franchise galleries, cable television and online.

If you’re not advancing on the path you’re on, quit. Imagine another route to connecting with customers.

Successful innovation is about connecting with buyers. Kinkade’s lateral thinking coincided with reconnecting with his faith and others who shared it. He said, “People who put my paintings on their walls are putting their values on their walls: faith, family, home, a simpler way of living…they beckon you into this world that provides an alternative to your nightly news broadcast.”

Thomas Kinkade was one man who thought differently. What about when you’re one manager among a team of managers?

Getting managers to agree on a lateral route to innovation requires a special combination of skills.

After you have your eureka moment, how do you get others to follow along? Chances are that others have similar ideas. But, for reasons related to decision making processes or office politics, those ideas don’t get a fair hearing.

Others with different ideas probably feel similarly frustrated. This isn’t a deliberate or even conscious stifling of creative thought. It’s a natural outcome of diverse people working in one organization. There’s a lot of pressure on company leaders to keep everyone’s oars in the water, rowing in the same direction.

As a result, most leadership teams’ approaches to innovation could be described as “satisficing”. They suffice to satisfy key influencers within their organizations. Satisficing usually results in tweaks that customers don’t perceive or don’t care about.

Has satisficing happened in your organization?

Satisficing is a normally occurring barrier to company innovativeness. It has its own inertia. It usually needs to be acted upon by an outside force to change it.

In upcoming posts, I’ll talk about how leadership teams have acquired and applied three critical skills to overcome satisficing and get innovative in ways customers care about:

1. inhabiting their customer’s frame of reference
2. Identifying lateral innovation opportunities
3. orchestrating the delivery of powerful customer experiences

What do you think? Could more companies stimulate innovative thinking? What’s holding some back?

Jason M. Sherman is president of Cleveland-based, Whyze Group. Whyze Group provides qualitative, customer- and user-experience research and innovation workshops to Global 2000 clients. The company has been recognized by the Baldrige National Quality Program, business associations and numerous business media as a leader in research and innovation.

Connect with Jason on Linkedin.

Follow @JasonMSherman on Twitter.

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Email Jason here.

Jason direct: (440) 785-0547.

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I quit my job with a big company ten years ago to start Whyze Group. I love my life. Have I ever looked back? Yes.

Fleetingly.

I miss the social perks, the rows of offices filled with fun, quirky colleagues. And, despite the layoffs and executive greed regularly described in headlines, I sometimes long for the illusion of security I felt getting a regular paycheck that had a Fortune 500 logo on it.

Today, my corporate clients, pressured to do more with less, are feeling less secure in their jobs. I listen to them and apply a comforting salve of acknowledgement and advice when I can. I obsess over the production of scintillating reports and presentations that make our clients heroes within their companies.

My obsession extends to other areas. Are we fulfilling our mission?

I look for validation: our ten year track record, our growing list of Global 2000 clients, the level of confidence clients place in us, the caliber of people we attract–Ivy leaguers, visionaries, and the kind of people Seth Godin calls linchpins.

Revenues have grown, too, but it’s never been about the money.

It’s been about the mission. That is, to help companies learn what customers experience and to innovate so that all parties–companies, customers and investors–benefit.

Altruistic? Yes.

But, when I attempted to confine myself to pure pragmatism, I kept returning to this thought, “What’s the point of shooting lower than altruism? We can do well by doing good.”

And, we have done well and good:

• We’ve been innovators in qualitative research and hybrid methods for surfacing deep insights into customer experiences.
• We created ways for organizations to far more easily internalize and use what they learn. I’m proud of our case studies.
• We presented the first national AMA workshop on research and innovation in 2003.
• Our white paper on research and innovation was the first of its kind cited U.S. Department of Commerce Baldrige National Quality Program.
• We invented the Management Beliefs Audit, which helps organizations align their people and resources toward achieving what’s most important to customers. (Whyze Group is still the #1 search result on Google for this.)

We began doing these things more than ten years ago because they were consistent with our mission–providing easy ways for companies to acquire insight, learn and innovate.

Our mission is resonating with a growing legion of fans. Our clients talk about how working with Whyze Group is different here and on Linkedin.

Our mission is also getting more interesting. Social media and mobile computing are dramatically expanding opportunities. They’re driving demand for services like ours that provide the insight expertise, creativity and perspective needed to maximize these technologies. We’re partnering with top experts in social and mobile who augment the unconventional whyzdom we provide and are incredibly stimulating, fun people to be around.

I’m very excited about the next ten years.

I’m grateful to Whyze Group clients and colleagues for supporting our mission. I’ve gotten to work with people I enjoy and have had the privilege of choosing how I invest my energies each day.

There’s an irreplaceable joy that comes from that.

To all Whyze Group clients and colleagues, thank you.

- Jason

Jason M. Sherman is president of Cleveland-based, Whyze Group. Whyze Group provides qualitative, customer- and user-experience research and innovation workshops to Global 2000 clients. The company has been recognized by the Baldrige National Quality Program, business associations and numerous business media as a leader in research and innovation.

Connect with Jason on Linkedin.

Follow @JasonMSherman on Twitter.

Receive alerts by email.

Email Jason here.

Jason direct: (440) 785-0547.

No worries. Here’s some info that will help you fake-it-’til-you-make-it as an authority.

The most common format for online focus groups today is the bulletin board. Bulletin board focus groups are great for reaching geographically dispersed participants and participants who’ll respond more openly if they remain anonymous.

The basics:

• Bulletin board focus groups are not like face to face groups where the participants, observers and moderator meet for two hours, then go home. Participation in bulletin boards is “asynchronous,” meaning participants don’t have to be online at the same time. Participants answer questions each day at the time most convenient for them.
• In fact, participants don’t have to live in the same city. They can be in different time zones, happily typing their responses from their homes or offices.
• Participants usually spend from 15 to 30 minutes each day on the bulletin board. Most groups last  three to five days.
• Observers can log into the conversation from their homes, offices or on the road. The bulletin board is divided into areas where the moderator’s questions appear, and where a related image, narrative description or video is shown. Participants type their responses in a reply box. Another section shows all participants’ and moderator comments.
• Typically, participants type their answers before seeing the responses of other participants. Participants can then discuss their reactions with each other. The moderator can type follow up questions for the group, send private messages to individual participants and interact with client observers through the software.
• iTracks, Qualvu and 20/20 provide bulletin board software platforms that are popular today. Each has unique strengths, but operate similarly.
• Unlike face to face groups, where moderators can instantly sense confusion and reframe questions in real time, a bulletin board moderator is limited to clarifying questions through posts, emails and phone calls to participants. This can take some time. To avoid having to reframe questions, bulletin board moderators need to be adept at projecting how participants will read and interpret questions.

Choosing a Moderator

This leads me to another important consideration when hiring a moderator: Make sure your moderator can guide your project team as well as customers through this process.

Team members have usually been immersed in an industry for several years. They forget what it’s like to think like customers, who may be engaged for only seconds. This is normal. Without coaching, team members frequently write research questions that are overly complex and jargon-packed. Their questions can be “technically correct” but ineffective in eliciting meaningful customer reactions. They often miss opportunities to surface critically needed insights.

Your moderator not only needs to be a qualitative research expert, but also a coach who can diplomatically nudge team members toward coalescing around meaningful, achievable objectives. His contributions will show up before the groups in the research design process, during the groups and afterward when your team will appreciate sage guidance about what they learned and how to apply it.

Jason M. Sherman is president of Cleveland-based, Whyze Group. Whyze Group provides qualitative, customer- and user-experience research and innovation workshops to Global 2000 clients. The company has been recognized by the Baldrige National Quality Program, business associations and numerous business media as a leader in research and innovation.

Connect with Jason on Linkedin.

Follow @JasonMSherman on Twitter.

Receive alerts by email.

Email Jason here.

Jason direct: (440) 785-0547.

A customer experience management audit revealed that managers knew what skus were moving and at what margins, but little about what drives positive customer experiences.

Whyze Group performed in-store cue scans at our client’s and competitors’ stores. We also conducted interviews with customers, store employees and corporate staff.

Many of the most valuable insights we garnered were through metaphor analysis. Metaphor analysis enabled customers to use images and photos describing their deepest emotions about buying and giving gifts. One key finding was that men and women differ in their gift shopping and giving habits. Through metaphor analysis, our clients discovered several meaningful opportunities to enhance the gift giving experience at relatively low costs.

In addition, our client identified numerous opportunities to improve customer experiences through revamped store layouts, staff training, compensation and return policies.

We helped managers prioritize those opportunities that would most quickly and cost-effectively enhance customer experiences and repeat business.

A leading property and casualty insurer needed to improve its customer experiences fast to avoid continued flat line growth. Customer referrals drive sales in this industry and our client was at significant disadvantage.

Whyze Group facilitated a customer experience management audit with the company’s innovation team.  Once the team reviewed and discussed all of the evidence from research studies the company had conducted, team members agreed that the company’s value proposition and customer experience were less compelling than those of competitors.  Even with all the company research at hand, the team was still unsure of where to focus the company’s innovation efforts.

To fill the team’s knowledge gaps, Whyze Group mapped the customer experience, surveyed customers, interviewed employees and led cue scans with the innovation team.  These were instrumental in imbuing the team with a visceral understanding of what their customers really go through.  Moreover, the team galvanized around a focused set of opportunities to improve customers’ experiences.  

The most important finding was that nearly all of the company’s investments in the customer experience were focused on getting prospects to buy policies. Customers received little or no attention from the company after they bought. 

This lack of attention mattered to customers in varying, but significant degrees.  Whyze Group identified four customer personae.  Each was unique with respect to their mental models and expectations of insurers.  Of the four customer personae identified, one was particularly sensitive to the level of care they received after the sale.  

Whyze Group facilitated a series of customer experience design sessions aimed at delighting this persona.  The innovation team identified six customer experience innovation opportunities and prioritized them according to criteria that we helped them develop.  These included the number of customers affected, the increase in experiential value to customers, the change management challenges for the company and brokers’ businesses and the effectiveness to which each innovation would fulfill the company’s brand promise.

We identified and prioritized a set of initiatives that are being implemented with the support of the CEO and executive committee.

These changes open up new opportunities for companies that can learn and adapt most efficiently.

Here are six things you should know…

1. Declining birthrates are eroding the economies of developed nations. Their deleterious effects will likely be with us for a long time.

Reputable demographers and economists with the WCF, tell us, “The population of the world, particularly in developing countries, is aging. The baby-boom generation is reaching retirement and will need to be supported by the generations that succeeded them, all of which have had fewer and fewer children. This means fewer and fewer workers paying into the social security, medical and welfare systems of the world. Economies will be strained and governments will slow bleed as relative production dwindles and tax revenues decrease.”

Greece

Last month’s media coverage of worker protests in Greece might leave us to believe that the cause was the Greek parliament’s reigning in liberal social welfare programs. But, Greece’s fiscal math worked before. Not anymore.

The birthrate required to sustain population equilibrium is 2.1 children per woman in Europe. Greece’s birthrate had been declining for years. As of 2004, the Greece’s birthrate was 1.3. Today, there are too few younger workers to pay for the social security of Greece’s retirees.

Europe

Similar problems plague Spain (with a birthrate of 1.3), Italy (1.3) Germany (1.4), Netherlands (1.7), Norway (1.8), France (1.9) and Ireland (2.0). In Russia, the birth rate is so low that the government is paying women to have more children. According to the WCF, Russia is expected to lose one-third of its current population by 2050.

Japan

Japan is facing similar demographic imbalances and economic challenges. According to a market update circulated by Charles Schwab last week, “The problem in Japan is that “cheap money” hasn’t stimulated demand, a liquidity trap exacerbated by an aging population that’s shifting away from consumption.”

United States

Similar challenges exist in the United States, though they are somewhat ameliorated by influx of immigrants, particularly immigrating women, who bear more children on average than women born in the U.S.

2. Deflation is a risk in developed markets.

Schwab’s update continues, “The weight of deflation is also a factor. Consumers believe that prices could be lower in the future, providing little reason to consume or invest today, so economic activity gets delayed. Lower demand results in a drop in production, job cuts and wage decreases, resulting in a reinforcing and detrimental cycle. Global economic growth is slowing, and with the threat of a double-dip recession in Europe amid fiscal austerity, there’s increased potential for deflation, not inflation, for most of the developed world.”

3. As a result, consumers say they are reverting to post-World War II spending and savings patterns.

Recent McKinsey&Company research shows that 90% of U.S. consumers 36 to 65 years old with incomes of $25K to $100K say they are reducing spending. The personal savings rate, which was zero in 2008, climbed to nearly 6% of disposable income in 2009, approaching the 9% savings rate of the post-World War II era.

Less than half of surveyed U.S. consumers believe the stock market will outpace inflation over the next 30 years. Eighty-five percent of consumers ages 36 to 45 believe that it won’t.

Unlike recent business cycles, this downturn appears to be leveling off at range of economic activity that will remain with us for the long haul. Consumers and business leaders looking for help from financial services institutions and governments are finding them bereft of solutions.

4. The future favors companies that efficiently learn and adapt more efficiently in response to customers’ new savings and spending habits.

Learning and adapting sound simple. However, most companies fail to integrate the components of learning–data collection, analysis, knowledge sharing–with the components of adapting–planning and managing change.

5. Change management skills are required to get organizations to adapt more quickly, but change management is a blind spot for most CMOs.

This is where there is plenty of opportunity for improvement.

“CEOs and CMOs agree that the formula for success involves leading innovation, improving marketing’s alignment with the rest of the organization, business strategy and marketing execution. Yet, both CEOs and CMOs agree that marketing is not as effective as it can be,” according to a report by executive recruiting firm, Spencer-Stuart.

6. As we reported in our 2009 white paper, “Bridging the Research-Innovation Gap,” (downloadable from our home page) most companies’ learning and adapting processes are quaint and inefficient.

Companies are attempting to learn and adapt via assembly-line management practices conceived at the turn of the last century. Potentially valuable customer insights are thrown over marketing’s silo wall to next-in-line executives who either don’t understand them, don’t believe them, don’t remember them or are unwilling to use them.

Hundreds of executives and marketing researchers have read our white paper and support our conclusions, which specify 11 ways to bridge the research-innovation gap. The U.S. Department of Commerce cites our paper as recommended reading for U.S. business leaders.

With businesses and consumers becoming more budget and value consciousness, demand will likely continue to shift toward companies that operate more efficiently.

That applies to innovating more efficiently, too.

Over the last ten years, Whyze Group has helped dozens of top companies innovate more efficiently. We integrate customer experience research, design and change management to enhance the innovativeness and performance of companies with which we work.

• Customer experience research surfaces the influences of someone’s experiences, memories, goals, mental models, perceptions and emotions on their behaviors around brands and products. This understanding of ‘the person’, who has a life beyond the limiting role of ‘customer’, helps us more accurately anticipate how people are going to respond to specific new product and service ideas.
  

• Customer experience design uses a workshop approach to designing advertisements, sales processes, products and services, packages and post-purchase events that deliver experiences  customers deem worthy of rewarding with their loyalty and referrals.

• Change management is applied in creating leadership alignment around what leaders believe and need to learn about the customer experience. Change management is integral in implementing organizational changes needed to deliver the intended customer experience.
  

Jason M. Sherman is president of Cleveland-based, Whyze Group. Whyze Group provides qualitative, customer- and user-experience research and innovation workshops to Global 2000 clients. The company has been recognized by the Baldrige National Quality Program, business associations and numerous business media as a leader in research and innovation.

Connect with Jason on Linkedin.

Follow @JasonMSherman on Twitter.

Receive alerts by email.

Email Jason here.

Jason direct: (440) 785-0547.

We recently did some new product development research for a manufacturer trying to learn how tradesmen evaluate competing power tools. Personal construct psychology informed our approach.

Personal construct psychology (PCP) is a framework for understanding the categorical templates that people use to organize the realities of the world. Each person’s templates evolve in accord with what they learn from past experiences. They lay their templates over new, similar experiences to anticipate what will happen.

By understanding which constructs customer use to distinguish offerings, you can begin to understand which elements of message, product, package and experiential concepts differentiate offerings in customers’ eyes and which don’t.

In our initial draft of the discussion guide, we asked tradesman, “What makes some of these tools better than others?

We got these answers:

• “Durable. It’s going to get banged up on a construction job.”
• “The manufacturer stands behind their product. They’ll take it back if it breaks.”
• “You can maintain it easily to increase its working life.”
• “How much it costs to use.”

While these comments were helpful, they weren’t entirely satisfying. We felt we had tapped constructs that tradesmen use to evaluate the quality of tool manufacturing. This was only tangentially related to what we wanted to know: what constructs do tradesmen use to select tools they’re going to buy?

So, our client agreed to change the question from, “What makes some of these tools better than others?” to, “What makes some of these tools more useful than others?” The word, “useful,” evoked a different contextual construct. It surfaced memories of on-the-job customer experiences where some tools were frustrating to use.

Here’s what we learned over and above what we heard before…

• “Speed. How fast it does the work.”
• “Maneuverability. It needs to fit in tight spaces. It needs to be lightweight.”
• “Portability. Sometimes, electric plugs get kicked out by other workers on a job site. That costs me time. Help me avoid having to use extension cords.”
• “Safety, Make sure it can’t tip over while it’s on. Put a guard on it so no one backs into and hurts themselves. Pat a safety lock on this so there’s no change it will turn on when it gets knocked around in my tool bag.”
• “Run time. Make it so I don’t have to replenish the power source as often. Give me a way of knowing how much run time is left so I can replaced the power source before I start a job.”
• “Adjustable controls. Let me adjust the power to a level suitable for doing the job.”

Much richer stuff. In this case, using just the right word meant the difference between acquiring pedestrian insight and scratching the surface of strategically valuable wisdom. It informed a variety of decisions about the product design and package copy.

We typically find that customers in a product category,

1. cluster into groups who share common, but not identical sets of, constructs that help them anticipate what their experiences will be, and
2. assign varying levels of importance to each dimension (e.g., speed, maneuverability, portability, etc.) across these groups

Personal construct psychology informs approaches that complement segmentation. At times, it can provide insights that go deeper. You learn not only what customers needs exist, but also how customers distinguish new products that will help them better meet their needs.

Bottom line: If you know why and how your prospect thinks and feels (not just what they feel), you can anticipate how they’ll act in new situations. That focuses creative thinking around those few new product ideas worthy of developing further.

Jason M. Sherman is president of Whyze Group, the leading customer experience research and innovation firm.  Whyze Group works with B2B and B2B2C Fortune 500 organizations. The company has been recognized by the Baldrige National Quality Program, business associations and numerous business media as a leader in research and innovation. Inquiries: Jason@whyzegroup.com, (440) 785-0547.

What is choice architecture?

Marketers are probably most familiar with one element of choice architecture: the order and placement of choices. We rotate the presentation of survey questions, for example, to neutralize the influences of order bias.

“Researchers tell us that if a candidate is listed first on the ballot, he may well get a 4% increase in votes,” say Thaler and Sunstein in “Designing Better Choices“.

But, the mere order or placement of choices is only one dimension of choice architecture. The actual construction of the choice options, including the content and number of options is a second dimension. A third is the environment in which choices are presented.

Choice architecture is an component of behavioral economics, popularized by recent bestselling books Nudge, Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational.

At Modern Healthcare.com, Rebecca Vesely writes, “Over the next five years, the government will put behavioral economics into practice on a large scale through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Starting in 2014, employers can offer workers rewards worth up to 30% to 50% of their cost of health coverage for participating in a wellness program and meeting health benchmarks.”

AFSCME is already seeing the benefits. Vesely reports, “Prior to 2007, [AFSCME] was seeing steady double-digit increases in medical claims. But since implementation in January 2007, paid claims have been flat, and are below 2006 levels…The union also is starting to see movement in risk factors such as smoking, weight loss and cholesterol.”

But, reducing choice architecture to “carrots and stick” is an oversimplification.

In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely, demonstrates more subtle, but equally powerful influences of choice architecture on our behavior. Ariely shows us an advertisement for The Economist Magazine that he found.

The ad offered three subscription options:

• Electronic Only: $59
• Print Only: $125
• Electronic and Print: $125

Would more people choose the Electronic Only option or the Electronic and Print option?  Ariely conducted a test with 100 MIT students to see what they’d choose. 84 students chose the Electronic and Print option. 16 chose the Electronic Only option. None chose the Print Only option. Why would they?

The Print Only option seems irrelevant. But, it isn’t!

Here’s what happened when the seemingly irrelevant Print Only option was eliminated. Ariely offered another 100 students only two subscription options and asked them to choose:

• Electronic Only: $59
• Electronic and Print: $125

Now, only 32 students chose the Electronic and Print option. That’s 52 fewer students than when three options were presented. What happened?

The presence of an irrelevant option, a decoy, influenced twice as many students to choose the more expensive subscription.

Ariely describes the cause as “relativity”. We’re wired to compare the things that are most comparable. The choice between Print Only at $125 and Electronic and Print at $125 is a no brainer.

Behavioral economics is revealing that we choose and act in ways that are decidedly irrational. If you want to discuss choice architecture, please give me a call.

Jason M. Sherman is president of Cleveland-based, Whyze Group. Whyze Group provides qualitative, customer- and user-experience research and innovation workshops to Global 2000 clients. The company has been recognized by the Baldrige National Quality Program, business associations and numerous business media as a leader in research and innovation.

Connect with Jason on Linkedin.

Follow @JasonMSherman on Twitter.

Receive alerts by email.

Email Jason here.

Jason direct: (440) 785-0547.

The program announcement includes many of the trendy buzzwords that have become all too familiar to those of us in the innovation trenches–open innovation, social entrepreneurship, bottom of the pyramid, flat world, crowdsourcing and the be-all-end-all, technology…Ugh…double ugh.

Since I’m not planning on attending, I can’t speak with any authority about the outcomes of this conference. It’s not that I don’t feel this conference could be useful. I just find that the vast majority of attendees at these events are mostly consultants and academics who already get it.

I’ve often felt that we were talking to ourselves, validating ethics, ideas and principles that are mostly inarguable. But, these ideas haven’t been practically implemented by the very people who would benefit their organizations and maybe even the rest of us by putting them to use.

They, by the way, also mostly get it, or are at least receptive. They don’t attend these conferences, I suspect, because they can’t implement it..or do attend because they are looking for ways to implement it. They need playbooks, not platitudes, nor quick fix psuedo-solutions.

Our conversations with clients breeze easily over the principles of innovation. They get it. Where they get stuck…and fear-struck, is where we start talking about applying these principles in their organizations. They want the playbook, the nitty gritty details of how we help them implement innovation–or change– in their organizations.

Their concerns pertain largely to the organizational barriers to innovation, or, to put it in simple terms, how not to get fired in the course of deflecting their organizations, with all their histories, traditions and lines of authority, away from the status quo.

Open innovation? Bottom-up ideation? Social entrepreneurship? “Fine,” they say. “How do I get people in my organization to be more responsive to customers when their bosses, whose interests may not be aligned with customers, are the arbiters of their immediate economic security?

The playbook starts with understanding the playing field, or more accurately the organizational mine field, which we describe in “Bridging the Research-Innovation Gap” (available for download on our home page.) Once you know where the mines are, it’s easier to avoid them, survive and even live a fulfilling life as an innovator.

So, I hope this conference marks the beginning of the Ideas Economy 2.0, where we begin to hold as self-evident that encouraging creativity and sharing ideas are good, like motherhood and apple pie. We need more of the playbooks that enable those principles to be exercised.

I’ll be watching.