If you Google Sears Sucks, you’ll get about 317,000 results. So I’m hardly breaking new ground here. What I’d like to do is tell you is provide an example as to why Sears sucks, give you an opportunity to vent your spleen about Sears, and hopefully convince a few executives to pay attention and/or a few people to give up on Sears and shop elsewhere.

Excerpted from the recent annals of Sears’ home service web chat exit survey, which I recently took time to complete:

OK, if high-quality, efficient customer service is the point of all this, I have to laugh. First thing I did was Google “Sears service” plus my Sears’ location, hoping to find a direct number to call. No service number. Only a general number for the location. So I called that number. I then waded through a preposterously poorly designed phone bank – Service, which I found out is only findable directly if you happen to know in advance it’s called “Parts, Service & Repair” – might want to make the voice-recognition system recognize parts of that compound name and or similar names; got news for you Sears, no one is likely to know your precious little term for this offhand. Then I’m in “Waitsville” for about 20 minutes. While waiting, I thought I’d try to find something online and discovered the home services site. But there’s nothing in the UX that tells me where to go to get status on a repair!! So after several fruitless clicks, a chat invite automatically pops up. Note any UX person worth their salt will tell you that auto-triggered chat popups are a last-ditch option for bad websites seeking not to fail users completely. Nevertheless, still on hold, figured I might as well give it a try. Lo and behold, though I had to give the chat person more information than he should have needed to find the status – location and last name should have been plenty, not that plus phone and home address which they ALREADY HAVE – collecting it again for “security reasons” for an appliance repair is preposterous) he DID get the status eventually; ironically, I got my answer literally at the same moment as someone finally took my phone call. I hung up when they said hello. Elapsed time: 33 minutes of my precious Saturday, just to find out if my vacuum was ready to pick up. Now, I ask you: is this good customer service?

More to the point, is that really the best a struggling American corporation can do for its’ customers??? What the heck going on over there??

Recently, I helped a consulting client put together a new web-tech-based strategy for growth. We used a combination of tried-and-true innovation techniques and industry- and company-specific stuff that seems to have worked very well, so thought I’d quickly share what we did:

1. Define the problem(s) (Drucker Methodology: Define the Central Problem)
   Drucker makes a big point of isolating ONE problem. While I appreciate the reasons for doing this, in practice, making a point of stating the “one problem” to your client can be stating the obvious, and also is sometimes not the best starting point for solutioning. On the other hand, when a client hands you a set of challenges it is definitely helpful to assess whether there is an overarching theme that ties them all together. In this case, the “one problem” was that the industry’s value chain had evolved and was out of sync with company strategy. Stemming from this unstated “one problem” were a  set of problem statements involving various aspects of the company’s operations and marketing. So, whether one tells the client to start with the “one problem” or accepts their thematically-unified framing of the problem and just keeps the “one problem” in mind while in process, it is key to understand the problem(s) thoroughly and ensure all involved in brainstorming understand them as well. If there is more than one problem and there is no thematic linkage between them, they should be handled separately.
2. Develop a solution ideation plan
   Leadership already had a general idea of how they wanted to work on solutions, so the consulting challenge was to help flesh out a plan and it was executed efficiently. We gathered a diverse team of experts for a closed-door, one-day ideation session. Some participants had deep expertise in the company, others had expertise in potential markets and technologies that leadership identified as likely fertile ground for innovation and growth. Outside participants were to be compensated and non-disclosure agreements signed. As an outside consultant and a solution space expert, my role was to gather key information from internal and external sources, develop written guidance to prepare participants in advance of the meeting, moderate the meeting itself, and create final written recommendations including next steps and mid- and long-term goals.
3. Gather information and create a narrative for participants to absorb in advance
   I gathered background information to understand the problem/solution universe in a series of meetings with key management. Initially, I met with four of their management team; once I understood better the dynamics of the team, I homed in on one or two team members to get deeper-dive answers. I did this to minimize  involvement of team members and to encourage in-depth conversation, asking specific questions about market conditions, operations, marketing resources and capabilities, etc. In this case, that person was the Marketing lead, because marketing was the central to the challenges at hand. As I gathered information, I put together a narrative of the situation complete with supporting company and industry data. The final narrative was a combination of information authored by myself and management. I also included a description of the purpose of the session and the agenda. Overall, this document was critical: by developing a shareable narrative of the company and the relevant problem/solution space, I could be confident that all participants would start from a baseline understanding and that I could effectively guide the session, fading back or directing as needed.
4. Conduct the brainstorming session
   The session itself was comparatively easy and enjoyable. I emphasized informality but strove to enforce a policy of respect for everyone’s point of view (e.g., no squelching!). In this case, the group was comprised of respectful but strong-willed people, so there was little need to suppress dominant participants or encourage shy ones. While it can be a risk to use a group for ideation (groupthink, for example, is one cause for concern) I believe that the combination of independent preparation combined wit the group working session can be optimally effective. By engaging several well-prepared knowledge experts in a controlled working session, we were able to develop solutions on one day that might have taken weeks for a single consultant to identify and elaborate alone. With this approach, keeping the session on task and on-time was relatively easy. I took copious notes, both personal, in a notebook, and for the group on a whiteboard, and engaged a second note-taker as well to help ensure the outcome was balanced. This was also worth doing because, after all, note-taking had to take a back seat to mediation at times.
5. Summarize findings and make recommendations
   The big payoff! This task was time-consuming, yet pleasant. I gathered up all the notes, which I was careful to record in such a way as to make this part easier, and wrote the final document. The task involves: restating the problem(s); listing relevant decision factors; delineating the solutions (or ideas) developed; explicitly stating how they will address the problems; and finally, creating plans to pursue each solution, broken out into immediate, mid, and long term goals.

I think the above approach worked very well mostly for two reasons: First, I did enough research and shared it with participants to ensure everyone was empowered to provide maximum value in the session itself. Second, I kept the endgame – a series of actionable, rationalized recommendations – in mind both for myself and for all participants.

Have you attempted to use techniques like this to jump-start innovation? Let me know what worked (and didn’t!) for you.

Consider the plight of today’s economists. Only a few short years ago their profession was at new heights of respect and consensus. Now, “economist” is a curse word on the lips of every unemployed person in America.

Prior to the onset of the financial crisis and the “Great Recession” of today, Alan Greenspan once famously stated that he believed “systemic financial risk had largely been eliminated,” in part through the advent and spread of various new financial innovations. Most everyone who cares to has heard about this enough times to have this line practically memorized by now.

However, what isn’t heard very often is consideration of what Greenspan said shortly after the crisis had really set in. In October 2008 testimony to angry members of Congress, Greenspan testified that his prior assessments stemmed from an ideological belief that financial system participants would regulate their own activities out of a sense of professionalism and risk-aversion. In short, he failed to consider that actors in the financial and credit industries were motivated by other factors, such as a systemic preoccupation with short-term returns – e.g., participants taking a herd mentality toward activities that pushed to the very edge of legality and beyond, and with no consideration for risk – everyone was doing it, so how could it be risky? The irony of this seems to have been lost on the media, and maybe on us as well.

The significance of this is hard to overstate. The Fed Chairman – by way of providing an excuse to the American people – essentially blamed the people in the system for the financial meltdown we are still enduring today. I would’ve asked, but Mr. Chairman, hadn’t these people always acted in a quintessentially predictable way? E.g., in what they believed to be their own self-interest? What was hard to predict about that? Wasn’t it obvious by early 2008 that participants had, out of competitive necessity if not pure greed, stopped critically assessing risk in their decision-making out of self-interest?

As someone who has at times been tasked in the past to drive change in large organizations through introduction of new or redesigned systems, I am trying to take away a few key learnings from this collapse:

1. To build or manage a system well, the “people” variable must be understood. Strive to consistently understand motivations and create incentives to ensure desired behavior.
2. There’s no monopoly on poor judgment when building and managing systems in which people are a critical variable. It will surely continue to occur at the highest levels of politics, government, and business management.
3. Group-think kills. Taking conventional wisdom at face-value, being overconfident, over-focus on executives in attributing success or failure, etc. are lazy and dangerous modes of thinking. Constant critical assessment and independent thinking are still required.

What else? I’m sure there are other considerations. Let me know.