Revisiting Systems Thinking | Customers, Etc.
A short series that touches on adaptive leadership and thinking in systems
When I wrote the post “Why I Write” a few weeks ago, I touched briefly upon the short-lived customer experience (CX) management practice at FullStory. Prior to making CX management a full-time role, we had experimented with a cross-functional team that would look at CX “winces” and try to figure out how to solve them.
Winces were often tough to solve. Some problems would go away with just a meeting and a discussion, but many problems stuck around, despite our best efforts to get to the root cause and weed them out.
In addition to being tough to solve, they could also be frustrating because they touched on deeply held beliefs like FullStory’s watchwords. We had put so much energy into communicating our values and putting them into practice—why did we have examples where we weren’t following them? Was the organization fundamentally broken?1
This is a short post this week because I’m giving a talk called It’s Not Broken: Diving Into CX Systems at ElevateCX in Atlanta this week.
If you came to this newsletter from the talk, welcome! The next few posts in this newsletter will revisit themes about adaptive leadership and thinking in systems.
Check out a page of resources I put together, which includes all of the past posts from Customers, Etc. in those topic areas.
See you next week!
For the record, these winces were the exception, not the norm, but when you were working hard to try to solve them, it really could feel in the moment like things were broken.