Solid Service Principles are Crucial

by Damian Kernahan

Below is the latest blog I just received from Seth Godin. He (as he does most days) makes an important point especially for Service based companies and provides additional reasons why Service Design can be such a potent weapon for progressive companies.

It's not JUST the steak or the phone call or the insurance cover that your customers are buying when they look to buy something from you. It's not JUST the all the elements that make up the customer journey and everything within it. The touch-points that deliver it, the spaces where engagement with customers occurs through channels such as in-store, call centre, postal mail, or online. The 'moment' within each touch-point where there is an interaction and your staff or systems engage with your customers.

These are all crucially important and without it, your business will not thrive and grow new and recurring revenue streams. But how do you handle situations when the unexpected happens. When there is no script, no exact procedure?

We have been working with a large Australian based firm recently who is acknowledged as a great Service Innovator and relative to their peers, they are head and shoulders above in terms of customer experience and growth. However they also know that their competitors are quickly imitating them in marketing, minimising the perceived gap. It's time to leap ahead again with a sustainable differentiator.

Having developed deep insight through design research methods we have developed innovative human centered Customer Journey Maps, an Experience Strategy and undertaken Intention Engineering.

However you cant stop there. On top of that we have developed the mortar that holds all those bricks together. It's a set of Service Principles that allow their team to take the right decisions each and every day when there is no touchpoint, no planned interaction. It provides an important guide, a set or principles on how to act to remain customer focused even when no-one is looking and no one is listening. It fills in all those 'in between moments' that all add up to the delivery of an exceptional customer experience and transformed loyalty and profitability for companies.

As is quite often the case, the ideas are the relatively easy part, the real expertise comes in how you hang it all together and make it work in a repeatable, sustainable manner making it work within your clients organisational systems and infrastructure. That is our singular goal here at Proto Partners and should also be for each and every Service Design firm.


Seth's blog entry is below

Scott McCloud's classic book on comics explains a lot more than comics.

A key part of his thesis is that comic books work because the action takes place between the frames. Our imagination fills in the gaps between what happened in that frame and this frame, which means that we're as much involved as the illustrator and author are in telling the story.

Marketing, it turns out, works precisely the same way.

Marketing is what happens in between the overt acts of the marketer. Yes you made a package and yes you designed a uniform and yes you ran an ad... but the consumer's take on what you did is driven by what happened out of the corner of her eye, in the dead spaces, in the moments when you let your guard down.

Marketing is what happens when you're not trying, when you're being transparent and when there's no script in place.

It's not marketing when everything goes right on the flight to Chicago. It's marketing when your people don't respond after losing the guitar that got checked.

It's not marketing when I use your product as intended. It's marketing when my friend and I are talking about how the thing we bought from you changed us.

It's not marketing when the smiling waitress appears with the soup. It's marketing when we hear two waiters muttering to each other behind the serving station.

Consumers are too smart for the frames. It's the in-between frame stuff that matters. And yet marketers spend 103% of our time on the frames.


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Damian Kernahan is the managing partner of corporate growth consultants, Proto Partners, www.protopartners.com.au.

Empathetic Biker-Centered Design in Denmark

by Damian Kernahan

I really thought this was perfect sense and showed a good understanding of human behaviour or in this case challenges. Simple, elegant and effective - all things that good Service Design should be.

Check the railings that the man is holding onto and resting his foot on. It's located on a little Copenhagen traffic island where cyclists often wait, reports Copenhagenize.com.

The City of Copenhagen has implemented this double railing simply as a convenience for the cyclists who stop here. A high railing to grasp with your hand and a foot railing for putting your foot up, if that's what you fancy doing. Either way you can also use the railing to push off when the light changes.

The foot rest reads: "Hi, cyclist! Rest your foot here... and thank you for cycling in the city."

It certainly is a fine example of the City understanding human behaviour and basic anthropology.



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Damian Kernahan is the managing partner of corporate growth consultants, Proto Partners, www.protopartners.com.au.

Planning and Designing Excellent Service

by Damian Kernahan

It's the Me-conomy stupid.

And so sums up in just four words the feeling a lot of us have as consumers as yet again we encounter another average service experience with a company we have provided our custom, our dollars and our time, often over many years.

In this article we will look at trying to understand why we so often have these average customer experiences, why services are still most often developed using an industrial product mindset and how that might be improved. We will also provide a new approach to ensure that services are more regularly designed with the end user in mind rather than as an organic process, which has little connection to the importance of the crucial revenue stream that it has been set up to deliver.

It has been proven there is a huge gap between companies' and consumers' perceived customer experience. Bain and Co conducted a study several years ago across 362 firms. Of those firms, which were a representative sample across businesses, 95 per cent said they were customer-focused. Of those companies, 85 per cent believed that they delivered a superior experience for their customers. And the corresponding amount of customers that agreed with them. Eight percent! Yes, that's right, only eight percent of customers believed that they were being delivered a great experience. By my count, that is a rather large discrepancy between what the company intended and what they actually delivered upon. It's an even scarier number for any company that operates as a service business given their product is 'customer experience'.

According to the ABS, nearly 75 percent of the business conducted in Australia is produced by organisations that provide services as their means of generating revenue and growth. Importantly, that figure is growing annually, not only in Australia but across nearly every developed western country as manufacturing moves offshore to cheaper more cost-effective countries.

With the service sector growing in terms of both numbers employed and its importance to the economy, the requirement of having a process to maximise the value of the service exchange to both company and customers becomes even more crucial, especially in a world that is becoming increasingly complex.

In the '80s there was only one way to access the funds in my meagre bank account and that was by fronting up with my passbook and talking with the teller. Now, in addition to the traditional teller, you can transact with a bank via phone using the keypad, Internet, Paypal, and even more recently via smartphones. The world has changed and with that has come added complexity. With more channels and avenues to connect with customers and for customers to connect to service providers, logically that should result in a better service experience. Paradoxically with this increased complexity and choice has come greater difficulty in providing the customer with a better experience.

Accenture published a global report in January of this year with specific focus on major western countries, one of which was Australia. It showed that over 52 percent of customer expectations were never or rarely met and 64 percent of customers left at least one provider last year due to poor service.

So, why is that? Why, given the size of the service economy, the number of jobs and the importance in delivering business growth, is the service experience so average? It can't be that business leaders don't believe in delivering a great customer experience, because apparently 95 percent of business leaders do.

Our hypothesis is that service organisations in determining how they will reach their business goals have a firm belief that they face a choice. They can deliver increased margin and profitability at the expense of the customer experience. Alternatively, they can choose to focus on delivering the superior customer experience that nearly all managers are aspiring to and forgo potential margin and revenue because of the investment needed to do so.

And using traditional approaches they are absolutely right. Using the skills and frameworks that thousands of postgraduates - including myself - learned in the leading MBA programs in this country, we very quickly determine that we need to make a trade-off between the two choices at hand. As the saying goes, 'money talks', and nine times out of ten, forgoing the customer experience in exchange for the most efficient process will always almost win out.


DESIGNING SERVICES

Businesses have used design as part of their new product development process for decades. But unlike products, services are produced only at the point of consumption. So how do you design something that is ostensibly intangible?

The good news is that using proven approaches developed over the past 15 years by leading US and European Business consultancies-cum-'Big D' design companies such as IDEO, organisations now have a legitimate and robust process they can successfully call on to prevent the need to trade-off between profitability and customer experience.

Working alongside small and not-so-small organisations, some firms have successfully demonstrated that when you spend the time to design and determine what the ideal service scenarios look and feel like, it significantly increases the chances of the customer experience actually being delivered as it was intended. When that occurs consistently as part of the customer journey, it significantly enhances the value of the service for both the service provider and customer.

The discipline that is resolving this trade-off is known as 'service design'. Service design is the thinking and design that goes into every interaction that a service organisation has with its customers, in such a way that the organisation delivers both a dramatically improved customer experience and increased profitability. It helps organisations identify where, when and how their services can be improved and made more valuable for both themselves and their customers.

As a discipline, service design occupies a new space combining the skills of management consultancies, research agencies, and marketing and design firms. The firms occupying this space formed as a result of the inability of traditional approaches and disciplines to solve the myriad of non-traditional problems and complex business issues.

The positive impact of design on practically every measure of business performance, especially service businesses, including market share, growth, productivity, share price and competitiveness, has been shown repeatedly by data from the UK Design Council National Survey of Firms. It shows that:

• More than 80 percent of design-led companies have introduced a new product or service in the last three years, compared with just 40 percent of UK companies overall.


• 83 percent of companies in which design is integral have seen their market share increase, compared with the UK average of 46 percent.


• 66 percent of companies which ignore design have to compete mainly on price. In companies where design is integral, just one-third do so.


• 80 percent of design-led businesses have opened up new markets in the past three years. Only 42 percent of UK businesses overall have done so.

So how does it work? Well it begins with understanding what a company is trying to achieve. Most business challenges for service-based organisations boil down to successfully answering one, or more likely, both of the following questions:

• Retention - how do we improve the customer experience so we grow our loyal customers?


• Acquisition - how do we create ways for new customers to engage with us?

Upon closer inspection, service design firms often help answer questions that need solutions. They typically look something like the following:

• We currently just make products - how do we go about becoming a service-focused business?


• How do we build a strategy around a coherent suite of services that supports our product range?


• How do we come up with compelling service propositions that meet customer needs and deliver against our strategic objectives?


• How can we deliver new and improved services around a particular brand?


• How can we add far greater depth to our service concepts to ensure long-term competitive advantage?

If you find yourself asking these or similar questions in your business and want to take a positive step in creating better services and happier customers, then there are five areas that you can immediately focus on to start the journey.

A good starting point is to look at the following service design principles as a way of determining where, when and how your company can approach the creation of better services.

Using these principles alongside a methodology, tool set and skillset that have been purpose-built to drive service innovation, will provide the significant boost required to drive new and improved growth for any service-based organisation.


PEOPLE

Services, unlike products, are only created at the point that users and service providers come together. Providing a great customer experience relies very heavily on the delivery by staff of that experience. Without scripts, training and a deep understanding of the outcome they are ultimately trying to create, staff will never be able to deliver a sustainable and consistent experience for their customers. The other key point is that people leave, get promoted, forget and are fallible. Knowing this ensures that companies take these aspects into account when designing the system.


SERVICE PROPOSITIONS

Services are often referred to in service design literature as 'propositions'. It makes sense, as a service is often a collection of different elements and touchpoints that combine to hopefully deliver a compelling service proposition. The reason this takes on such great importance is that unlike manufactured products, services are quite often developed organically, and they lack the pro-active design and development required to ensure that service providers take all the available opportunities to maximise the desired experience. Companies generally focus on the 'during' phase of the service and spend far less time on what occurs 'before' or 'after' the service exchange. And the economic tragedy of that is that these areas are quite often the sweet spot where significant value can be created for a very small investment.


TOUCHPOINTS

One of the key differentiators of service design is that it looks in great detail at the entire customer journey of any service. As indicated earlier, a service takes place over time and a well-designed service also enables customers to access information, help or customer service the way that they wish to, not just the way that a service provider thinks it should be provided. By starting with the end-user in mind when designing the various touchpoints, it significantly increases the ability of the service provider to determine where and when they wish to inform, engage or influence the behaviour of current or new customers.


SYSTEMS

How many meetings have you attended where multiple ideas are generated to improve the experience for your customers? You know these meetings because they are filled with statements like 'wouldn't it be great if we ...'. And you know what is always missing at these meetings? It's the backend systems or processes to link these 'wouldn't it be great if we' statements to the operational aspects of service delivery. Focus on the development of user-centred (useful, usable and desirable) customer opportunities and understand and appreciate how the operational limitations of the back end systems will impact the successful execution of the idea. This ensures that as an organisation you always keep your promises to your customers.


SHARED VALUE

Finally, service design focuses on creating mutual value for both company and customer and is one of the crucial aspects of delivering the required performance. Innovation, it is often said, is created when someone solves the previous requirement to trade-off between two options. And in using the same logic, service design resolves the need to trade-off between value created for the company or the customer. The process is about maximising the total mutual value for both parties - a much smarter and far more 21st century approach to growth.

Which brings us back to the opening line of this article, "It's the me-conomy stupid", borrowed from a David Armano presentation.

If last century was about organisation control or organisation-led service, then this century will be about customer control or customer-led service.

The internet has given us the ability to access information and knowledge easily. We no longer need to accept things at face value, we can check to see if there is a better and/or cheaper option. We can look around with a few clicks and see if what brands and companies are promising, they are actually delivering. No longer do customers have to wait to determine if they will be in the 92 per cent of customers who are likely to receive average service; they can look online and choose which companies have proven repeatedly that they will deliver the service and the experience they promise.

With so much at stake for service-based companies, the opportunity exists even in the face of greater complexity to deliver against the constantly changing and increasing expectations of their customers to their great benefit. And if those companies listen hard enough they will have thousands of their customers saying to them, "But enough about me, let's talk about you ... what do you think of me?"


Giving Service Design Wings

Nestled in a nondescript brown industrial park near Mascot, an inner city suburb of Sydney, something very interesting is taking place. It involves a $10 million capital investment, a 5000 square metre facility and 18,000 staff per year in an effort to deliver better service for the company's customers. And the company involved? Qantas.

Qantas has embraced service design as a key driver of reaching its vision. As part of its journey as possibly the first Australian company to embrace service design, it is now focused more than ever before on its quest to deliver what it describes as "the combination of world class product and flawless service at every customer touchpoint".

With $1.7 billion invested in product, Qantas decided that service design was key to leveraging that hard investment in order to deliver the service standards needed to compete in a fiercely contested market.

For Qantas, the move to focus on delivering better customer service involves three key elements:


USING SERVICE CHAMPIONS AS ADVOCATES

Understanding the scope of its challenge, last year Qantas endorsed over 200 sales, cabin crew, customer care, pilots, engineers and corporate staff to act as service champions across the business. Their role is to continue to reinforce service levels and encourage other staff they come into contact with to deliver against the standards that Qantas has set for itself.


THE 'CENTRE OF SERVICE EXCELLENCE'

An old engineering apprentice workshop was rebuilt as a purpose-built facility to help employees experience and understand the Qantas brand and desired customer experience. The end-to-end customer experience has been recreated in the facility so that employees can feel, see and touch what the brand represents and more importantly how it is presented to customers (THE 'EXCEPTIONAL PROGRAM').

As the kick off to a wider company change program, this year Qantas is planning to take 18,000 of its staff through a one-day learning experience at the Centre. Initially, they will learn and experience how they can play their part in delivering the right level of service for their customers. In a good example of practising what they preach, from the time attendees are picked up by a dedicated bus at Sydney airport to the time they leave the facility at the end of the day, every interaction they have has been carefully designed to ensure all staff are clear on what is expected. To reinforce the initial day, ongoing initiatives have been developed to reinforce the key messages and maintain staff commitment levels.

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Damian Kernahan is the managing partner of corporate growth consultants, Proto Partners, www.protopartners.com.au.

Innovating From the Outside In

by Damian Kernahan

In the previous article of the Australian Innovation report (Summer 08), we spoke of customer-centric innovation being the management discipline for the new millennium and provided an inside look into a number of Australian companies that have excelled as a result of taking a customer-centred approach.

In this article, we will take a step further and delve into the emerging discipline of user-centred innovation - or user-centred design, as it has come to be known - and investigate how some of Australia's leading companies are using it to advance their growth agenda.

Web designers have had a focus on usercentred design and have used it successfully as a discipline for many years and any Google search you care to undertake will be littered with web page and digital references. So what is 'user-centred design' and why hasn't it taken off in the mainstream of Australian business? Why haven't Australian businesses embraced using a methodology that allows them to get up close and personal with their customers and truly understand their customers' unmet needs and wants for both products and services? And what is the process for user-centred design and how can companies employ it to keep hold of their most valuable customers in a market where every customer is increasingly precious?

This article intends to examine the answer to all those questions and hopefully shed some light on an increasingly powerful process that is driving substantial growth for some companies ahead of their competitors.

The term user-centred design was coined by Donald Norman from the University of Southern California in the 1980s. He defined it as "the process in which end-users influence how a design takes shape. It is both a broad philosophy and a variety of methods." The most important concept, he believed, was that users were involved one way or another along the entire journey and not just at the end of the process.

Over the past two decades user-centred design has developed greater recognition and is now seen as a philosophy and a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of the end user are given extensive attention at each stage of the design and development process. From a commercial perspective, IDEO, the leading innovation consultancy globally, has successfully employed this approach for over twenty years and call it 'human-centred design' defining it as "a process and a set of techniques used to create new solutions for the world. When we say solutions, we mean products, services, environments, organisations, and modes of interaction."

The reason the process is called 'humancentred' (user-centred) is because it starts with the people who the products or services are being developed for. The starting point of the process is to examine the "needs, dreams, and behaviours of the people we want to affect with our solutions". This is a very different lens than most companies start with. Normally they only use a business lens that asks "How can I sell more phones/insurance/movie tickets etc to my current and future customers?"

By comparison, user-centred design seeks to listen to and understand what customers may want. Once it is clear what customers are looking for from the universe of what is desirable, the next phase is to view the solutions developed through the lenses of feasibility (what is technically and organisationally possible) and finally viability (what is financially viable for the business).

It is the solving of the business problem through these three lenses that creates significantly increased value for the companies employing the methodology.

Early users of user-centred design included Proctor & Gamble back in the 1970s. As a pioneer of in-situ or user-centred research, they sent researchers into customers' homes to observe them directly as they went about their daily chores. Interestingly, what they found was that P&G's in-situ market research helped to solve problems that the customers themselves were not aware of.

In one of the earlier examples, P&G, when conducting in-home research, observed that some liquid laundry detergent ran down the front of the bottle when it was being poured. Soon, P&G came up with a simple redesign of the spout that funnelled any drips back into the bottle. This simple user-centred innovation led to a dramatic increase in sales.

As with most of these things, customers had been happy to use a workaround and to wipe the drip away with a piece of cloth. This is a classic case of being able to improve the product based on user needs, something that will unlikely come out of a traditional research program that employs focus groups. Why? Because often the elements that make for inconvenience are perceived as so small that they never bubble to the surface using traditional research methods.

For an approach that sounds so compelling and has produced so many commercial successes overseas, why hasn't it taken off in Australia and why aren't companies using it to advance their growth agenda?

Interesting research conducted by David Tunnicliffe of Arnold & Bolingbroke last year went some of the way to answering that when he found that there is not much in the way of innovation in research methodology in Australia. In his findings, dynamism was rarely a quality attributed to market research. Across the sample, there was a palpable sense of there being little drive, from within the research community, towards genuine innovation.


"Why hasn't Australian business embraced using a methodology that allows them to get up close and personal with their customers and truly understand their customers' unmet needs?"


At worst, respondents felt qualitative research methods, in particular, to be verging on hackneyed and predictable but also a more general feeling of there being "little new under the sun" was commonplace. The perceived absence of methodological innovation served to increase reliance on individuals. One respondent from a well-known brand consultancy said that "Even the young clients tire of the routine of the groups behind the glass. I often feel this too; I'm not sure how to move toward more of an ongoing conversation with consumers rather than this artificial kind of intervention from time to time in a group discussion."

Across the sample, there were calls for greater innovation from both marketing services companies and clients with one respondent saying: "What I don't want to do is some standard research that is going to result in the same old debrief. I would welcome a more creative approach to methodology." And another, looking for a more innovative approach: "I'm always keen to see new methodologies; out-of-the-box thinking. What everyone does is no longer interesting. If I can see that someone would add to the pot, that's more interesting."

In addition to well-worn and decreasingly valuable research methods, we believe most Australian companies take a more confined approach in attempting new products innovation versus taking a wider, more expansive view of how successful innovation can be achieved and where the greatest value for their organisation can be created. A trap a lot of companies fall into is to think of innovation too narrowly - they define it merely as the thing your firm offers. Another more powerful option and one which successful companies use is to use reframing as a tool, by using a different lens and turning that lens onto other aspects of their business to reveal new possibilities and value creation.

The Doblin Group helps companies look at creating greater value by innovating not just in one area like 'product', but by applying a lens across ten different areas, which then forms a multiplier effect when applied to a firm's business problem.

Across the ten types of innovation, they include 'inside-out' categories such as core and enabling processes, product/service performance, service systems and customer service.

There are also what they call 'outside-in' categories which include channel, brand, customer experience, business model and value networks. The inside-out perspective is similar to the traditional understanding of value chains. It asks the question, "What strategic assets and/or core competencies does our organisation possess and what products or services can we produce with them?" This is the framework that a lot of companies use and is normally quickly followed with a generative project to develop a range of new products and services which the company hopes will be seen as innovative by the market.

What is missing is the outside-in thinking that inverts and complements this traditional perspective, asking instead, "What do our customers want and need and how can our organisation construct new business models, a new ecosystem of partnerships or external relationships or a significantly improved customer experience to deliver it to them?"

This second step of truly understanding consumers' unmet needs and wants is where the value is created and where user-centred design plays a valuable role in helping organisations achieve that value.

Which draws the inevitable question of why focus on needs?

Dev Patnaik and Robert Becker, who are the founders and principals of Jump Associates in the USA, are probably among the leading experts in 'needfinding', one of the key planks in delivering commercially successful user-centred design. They have proved that an understanding of people's needs can be leveraged across an entire business activity, providing increased value beyond the development of any single product. They see four compelling reasons for companies to focus on uncovering needs as the starting point of a user-centered design approach.

The first is that needs last longer than any specific solution that may be developed which is often the focus of most companies. They say that thinking of the company as a provider of a solution may encourage the company to continue improving that solution, but it rules out creating entirely new offerings that satisfy the need in different ways. Conversely, focusing on needs encourages companies to continue innovating better ways to serve those needs, independent of current solutions.

Second, needs are business opportunities waiting to be exploited by companies that understand that although solutions may come and go, needs are generally enduring and are satisfied by a range of solutions over time. A good example is the need for humans to enjoy music wherever they go. Over the past few decades that need has been satisfied by cassette players, compact discs, Walkmans, computers and most recently MP3 players. Same need, different solutions.

Third, focusing on needs provides a roadmap for development and a method for determining what corporate skills and new offerings should be developed to grow their businesses. A company may not currently possess the capabilities necessary to satisfy all those needs, but by identifying the ones that cannot yet be satisfied and working toward meeting them, the company can plan the appropriate medium to longer term investment to be able to deliver against those consumer needs. Twenty years ago, Eastman Kodak realised through customer studies that people didn't just want film and photo processing, their underlying need was to capture and enjoy images of daily life. As we know today, Kodak has maintained a strong competency in this area and, where in the 1990s they found themselves facing significant contraction of revenue due to the introduction of digital cameras, they continue to be a dominant force in the imaging value chain.

Lastly - and this is probably the most important - people become accustomed to their problems, often developing workarounds to circumvent a need. In doing this they become oblivious to the needs' existence and as a result, traditional research and marketing approaches will never uncover this problem, which is potentially very valuable if companies are awake to the opportunity. A good example of this is the requirement for cooks over decades to either bend over or raise up the measuring cup to eye level to read the measurements on the side of the cup. The OXO measuring-cup now allows you to look straight down and see the quantity of what you are measuring and is an excellent demonstration of developing a product which is truly human-centred.

The feedback from the Australian marketing community on the lack of innovation in research approaches in combination with the lack of outside-in (or need-finding) focus by companies potentially presents a real issue not only for manufacturing companies, but more importantly for service-based companies that make up 80 per cent of the GDP of the Australian economy.


"User-centred design involves consumers from a very early stage and understands that there are core users and extreme users who are quite often looking for very different experiences..."


Unlike product-based companies, which can (but don't always) invest significant attention and investment upfront into product development prior to manufacture, service-based companies rely more heavily on needing to use a range of service innovations, because the very nature of services means they are intangible. As they are normally consumed over a passage of time across a number of interactions, consumers use these additional cues to judge the quality of the offering when they are consuming the service.

So how do those companies, who wish to develop more compelling products and services utilising user-centred design on their own company's business problems, start?

The first step of the process is to identify who your users are by asking a number of simple 'who' based questions. These include: Who pays for it? Who uses it today? Who told someone else to buy it? Who installs it? Who sells it to the customer? And, who looks after it if it goes wrong?

Next, companies need to spend some time observing their users and ask a lot more questions because you will find out things that consumers would never normally tell you using traditional methods. What patterns do you find from things that keep appearing? What opportunities present themselves? What things really surprised you? What are the things that people want or think they need? What are the things that people find difficult about your product or service or cause them trouble when using it? And finally, what works and can be built upon to make the experience even better?

Too often consumers are asked to pass judgement on products and services that have been developed in isolation from them and as a result quite often they provide a failing grade. User-centred design involves consumers from a very early stage and understands that there are core users and extreme users who are quite often looking for very different experiences. Seeking to understand both sets of needs can provide really rich input for the further improvement of your offer.

A key part of being user-centred is about prototyping your ideas and having users start to show you how they would use them. IDEO uses the term "build to think" to emphasise the value in undertaking prototyping, or doing whatever it takes to communicate the idea to users and allow the developers of new products and services to walk in the footsteps of the end users. Wisely, they say that the value lies in building very rough prototypes. Make them quick, dirty and early and don't be afraid to throw away early prototypes and build new ones because at the end of the day, that's what they are for.

And finally, understand and appreciate the value of a multi-disciplinary team that brings great breadth and depth to solving your business problem. Most companies have industry and company orthodoxies that are hard to see beyond. User-centred design relies on assembling different points of view and people in order to solve your most pressing business issues.

So, if you are up for going on the journey, remember that success will require leadership that provides absolute clarity about which customer problems the firm is dedicated to solving; the ability to assemble deep insights into the unmet needs and wants for your customers; the skill and focus at developing new customer experiences along with new ecosystems and business models to deliver those experiences; and good change management processes and systems to turn unfamiliar business designs into fast-growth businesses that can scale quickly.

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Damian Kernahan is the managing partner of corporate growth consultants, Proto Partners, www.protopartners.com.au.