True ‘customer’ insight is a hot topic around boardroom tables, but often subsequent to a review of financial performance. Strategic thinking involves understanding the perceptions and intentions of many stakeholder groups in order to create value propositions and engagement strategies. Failure to deliver perceived value to ‘customers’ tends to negatively impact the ability to deliver value to any other group of stakeholders.
Who is the customer?
The first challenging question. Determining who you want to provide value to may involve modifying the market segments you target. Identifying the customers you don't want to serve is also critical. Consider inviting these elegant but invasive Green Parakeets into your garden and watch the small birds leave.
Who knows?
Decisions on who to target need to be informed by evidence so critical questions include ‘ how can we hear our customers first hand? And ‘who knows the history, perceptions and intentions of each customer?’
Who listens?
Consultancies and academic researchers have advocated an increased exposure of executive committees and boards to customers who reinforce organisational beliefs AND those that challenge assumptions. Listening to perceptions first hand can be educational but also uncomfortable.
Boundary workers with unique insights to share need to be invited to speak directly to strategic decision makers and supplement the real voices of customers. The voices of those who know may be filtered out before they reach the boardroom.
Reliance on Big Data without the addition of human intelligence can lead to misinformed strategic decision making. Sifting messages from noise and recognising patterns is a critical board competence.
Creating opportunities to listen to customers and boundary workers may require 'Leading by Wandering About' as opposed to MBWA (Managing by Wandering About). Physical and virtual wandering about are habits cultivated by effective directors and enabled by governance professionals.
What happens
If you engage in conversations with customers, you build an expectation that change will happen. You also build an expectation that the conversation will continue. This presents challenges in establishing who is responsible and accountable for deciding and delivering changes and how performance and perception of value delivery will be monitored.
Ensuring that change is visible and supported by necessary hard wiring and soft wiring of your organisation involves adopting systems thinking, understanding the inter-connectivity of all parts of your organisation.
Establishing which stakeholders are consulted before strategic decisions are taken and which stakeholders are informed after decisions are made, provides the foundation for an effective engagement strategy.
So now after a year of courting a charm of Goldfinches to our garden, I am off to persuade the Green Parakeets to move on.
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