Tag: ideas

How do you want to fail?

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Don't feel blue! Hopefully most of your failures won't be this bad.

Failing fast is a common mantra in tech and digital media – moving through a lot of wrong approaches in order to learn the lessons and get the experience needed to work through to the right approach. In particular, it’s great advice not to be afraid to plunge into ambitious projects and to deal with the issues that come up without being fazed.

However, it’s not enough just to fail. Failing is an art in itself.

Let’s say you’re working PR for a consumer tech company that uses online documentation as the first line of support for customers struggling to install and use a new product. But your product has gone through a lot of reworking, and your online support is far out of date.

So the question is – is the brand experience worse for:

  • A customer who goes to the website and gets no help at all?
  • A customer who goes to the website and gets the wrong answer to their problem?

Partially, the answer depends on in what way each support document is wrong – perhaps one has a button whose name has changed and another mis-addresses a critical functionality issue – but customers’ experiences with each of them reflect on your brand in different ways.

Or, if you’re coordinating with the engineers reworking your product as they try to update its software, there are similar questions to face: if you reset all customers’ software to fix an problem that only some customers are facing, will that be worse than letting the pre-existing issue continue?

No one’s perfect. One way or another, you’re going to fail some customers. How do you want to fail them?

Image is “IMG_1624” by Neal Jennings, available under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. ©2014

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Learning to Notice ideas

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I know these aren't Fate dice, but they'll do.

Before I talk about ideas, I have a short story about games. Bear with me, if you will.

Every weekend, I spend a few hours playing a roleplaying game called Fate. It’s a fantasy setting (dragons, pirates, gnomes, all sorts of similar excellent critters) and the characters we play are – well, not heroes exactly, but people trying to shape a world that’s much bigger than they are.

One of us is a world-class swordswoman, another silver-tongued, others wield the primal forces of the world. Me, I’m good at a skill called Notice. All it does is let you notice things. But what that means (in this particular game) is that it lets you define the scene. Roll well, and you can describe a detail that might not have been there before, a detail that you can turn to your advantage.

So we’re facing off with some palace guards in an open southern courtyard. I look around for something I can turn to my advantage. Roll Notice – and I have the opportunity to add to the scene the detail that there’s a big awning providing some shade from the sun over half the courtyard. We knock it down, and suddenly half the guards are tangled up in cloth, making things easier for our merry crew.

What am I getting at with all this?

For clients, I often take the data they’ve collected (let’s say, social media data, or customer metrics) and making recommendations based on it. That’s the scene set before you. Here’s the numbers you have – what do you do now? And that’s a great place to work from (many folks don’t even collect metrics, so if they don’t, you may want to work on selling that in first).

But there are many things that aren’t in the numbers. Or at least, not in those numbers. Those are easy – they’re in front of you and you know they relate. But you don’t want to get so focused on the scene that’s been set before you that you forget to search for the detail you could add to the scene. What isn’t there that – if it were – would be fantastic for you? Then, can you get it to be there somehow?

It’s not a new idea – the idea of thinking about a problem sideways, or from another angle. But I think it’s still worth asking: What can you add to the scene?

Image is “Dice five” by @Doug88888, available under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. ©2008