I would like to address the issue of “time†again. Having done projects in strategy, innovation, organizational design, technology commercialization, etc I find that the concept of time is largely seen as a hidden factor. It is seen as a component that we can do nothing about and yet if we had to change our linear views to a view where we live in a time-space domain, we will have more success in achieving radical outcomes.
Lets bring it back to basics in relation to a current discourse. Client enlightenment can be seen as a strategic competitive attribute of any business. In order to achieve the ultimate in “service†levels you need to unpack the value constellation of the act of engaging with a client. If this act is repetitive, simple, and well defined; a human should not be doing the task in the first place. But on a different level; if the task requires a “personalityâ€, a different set of requirements are needed.
The time to perform a function can be seen a good measure if the task is automated, but if human touch is involved, the measure should be experience based. Companies forget that the dimension of experience is holistic and that time makes up a small component of the overall views formed by the client. Take the Disney experience; you are “wowed” by an all encompassing experience. You are really missing something if you have never been to a Disney Land/World.
Our ability to leverage the machine-only, human-machine assisted, and human-only dimensions of thinking can assist with determining breakthrough strategies in competitive behaviour. Look at Amazon.com, they won customer service awards without a human touch (I will look at their Mechanical Turk concept later). The focus is on self-enlightenment where the supplier of “experiences†focuses on the function, option and feature of the experience – where the dimension of time is removed all together and managed by the client on their own terms.
In describing a philosophy of delivery, look at these statements: customers must be enlightened OR we enlighten customers. The sentences look the same but the latter has a much more personal feel and focuses on a dimension that brings you closer to the act. The former is more of a procedure, or a statement of governance that might work well during defining non-client facing activity. It is about the emotion of how you then deliver the “statements of philosophy†in a way that time is only a dimension worth looking at if a closed-loop action is required. And yet, if we use statements like these and do not mention the time factor, does it really matter?
Using a spherical approach allows us to integrate time and space in such a way that the sphere around the client is covered with experiential tokens. It should be done in such a way that the time line is managed on an experience dimension. Would it be possible to have the world vividly documented in time-space-social information like Hypermedia Berlin? Prof Todd Presner, the creator of the concept, has this to say: “What if you could visit a city at any point in time, create a social network through time and space, and seamlessly interface between the past and the physical world of today?”. Can we record experiences about our customers in this way? Could “motion situations†help us describe a new form of existence in time and space (or time-space-social)? And then use this information to determine real-time feedback mechanisms to increase customer enlightenment?
Design for TIMELESS and enlighten through USE by understanding MOTION situations.