Of Habits and Hiatuses – and what they have to do with Alcoholism and Customer Service!

Want to learn to play the guitar?
Or tennis?
Or be part of a dramatics club?
Or drive a car?

What does it take to learn/ be good at any new thing? Well, apart from a natural aptitude at it, it takes continuous practice. Everyone has heard of the 7 habits book (I’ve never read it – hate these prescriptive types – give me trashy romance anyday!). But the essential premise of this one is that high degree of effectiveness is something that 7 habits can achieve. It’s a powerful concept when you think about it – the fact that you can learn to be successful – it’s not something that you are born/ blessed with. Opens up a whole new vista for everyone! Well, I guess it DID open up a whole new industry – the training/ soft skills/ project management/ leadership coaching one…..

The basic premise of “habit formation” is – you repeat an action over and over again till it becomes ingrained in you. Musicians and athletes call it “muscle memory” – apparently physiologically, you can wire your neural networks to anticipate and then execute on certain behavior – such that you keep getting better at it.

For those of us who have done/ are doing it, we know that hard work is addictive (dreams of “just chucking it all away” notwithstanding) – the good news is – in general, it leads to success – and, most people know, success is addictive. Ask any sales person – she closes 2 great deals – she will find it easier to close another two (You’re on a roll, baby!). The negative cycle unfortunately is equally repetitive – folks dogged by non-success find it all too easy to slip into a vicious cycle – thus kind of predicting failure, experiencing it, then predicting more — very self fulfilling prophecy types.

This is also, in a way, how substance addiction works – not very many people know that alcohol and drug addiction is a disease – it can strike a wide variety of people. Basically, doing one thing over and over again (in this case drinking/ using drugs) sort of takes over your psyche – such that the point of existence becomes – how can you get your next fix! (read this article on addiction to know more)

Look at kids – the ONLY way for kids to know tables is by rote – say them aloud time after time! The only way for them to get chemistry formulae is by doing them over and over again (its called “mugging” in Indian slang – something my older daughter hates and protests vociferously against every single day!). But also, and this may sound blasphemous to those advocating free thinking/ free play, I have a firm rooted conviction that children actually respond reasonably well to routine (habits again), and as long as you kind of combine this routine and “freedom” well, they turn out the better for it than just pure unfettered chaos!

Process organisations know this – they break up a task into minute sub components and then excel in repeating that sub task such that it can be done flawlessly. They then take it to the next level, and work at improving the way of doing that task – faster/ better/ cheaper, whatever.

Science bears it out too – the laws of inertia – actually say precisely this. An object at rest remains at rest unless moved, and so also an object at motion…Ofcourse, the best example would be Pavlov and his dog – drool drool at the trigger of a bell! All to do with habit.

But, the point of this post was not only what habit does, but what happens when there is a hiatus.

Thanks to my retirement, I had gotten into a good routine of aerobics class in the morning, and then, towards the latter half of the year, swimming in the evenings. People tell me I now look – well, not slim and svelte (I can NEVER be slim and svelte) but, “more toned” 🙂 (dammed with faint praise!). Ofcourse, Diwali came, I didn’t go a few days, and lo and behold – the hiatus just kept extending…on, and on, and on… It’s the same for the blog – I wrote a post every day for the first month, then it became twice a week, then once a week, till, for the past 4 months – nada! I guess the hiatus became a habit, and, as most of us know, it takes MORE effort to go BACK to something than to start it in the first place. Well, new resolutions and all, this week I started aerobics, swimming, and now, blogging – wish me well to take it to the next level – of it becoming a habit again!

You know, many women who take breaks from work for family reasons, fear exactly this – that, they will be either so used to the break, or so out of date, that they won’t be able to find a suitable position in the workforce post. I can empathise – for me, the retirement “hiatus” is now almost a “habit” – to the extent that I’m not sure I can go back to active working (nor do I particularly want to – I’m just having too much fun!).

Getting back to work on Monday after a weekend has kind of the same feeling – my younger daughter, a hedonist if there was one, told me one day, “Ma, I have a Friday feeling of euphoria, and a Sunday feeling of gloom!”

Just so you know, the FIRST step in any de-addiction program is – a complete break from drinking. So, most rehab programs actually advocate a month of keeping away from EVERYTHING – family and friends, reading, the phone, and ofcourse the substance – such that the brain gets time to get used to NOT having the addictive substance. Only after a month or so, are the users even allowed to talk to their family/ friends – because the brain has had a hiatus from the habit, and is now receptive to treatment and cure options.

It works the same way for organisations, doesn’t it – process organisations, who, of necessity breed habit formation – have to carefully engineer “creativity” via hiatus – so, it could be the innovation room/ an off-site, or just a few hours every week that are DIFFERENT from the normal. (See my earlier blog on process vs. creativity)

In today’s customer centric world, one needs to think about the customer journey in the same way actually. It is well known that getting a new customer takes 7 times as much effort as keeping an old one happy. But, to regain a customer after he has turned off your brand (in other words, after his habit of consuming your product has been broken), takes double that effort of new customer acquisition – with, only a 50% chance of success! That’s why, the customer service/ experience function is increasing in importance in most companies, and there are actually C Suite positions in Chief Customer Officer!

On this note, maybe too much Money and Power are also habit forming – who knows, maybe that’s what prompts falls from grace of erstwhile icons like Rajat Gupta, Ramalingam Raju and Tiger Woods (novel argument for the defense counsel, huh? “Your majesty, my client suffers from habititis, and couldn’t bring himself to hiatusitis!)

Creative/ Innovative Business Processes – Oxymorons?

Every day of the week – I hear my kids grumbling. Basically they don’t want to go to whichever class it is that they are taking these days – tennis/ music/ swimming/ dance/ drama. They don’t like it/ they are not good at it/ the coach is too strict/ they don’t like the people – grumble grumble grumble…My take on this is – that they in most cases they haven’t acquired enough expertise at that skill to really enjoy it. And my earnest blandishment to them is always – come on, unless you practice again and again, you will not acquire that threshold level of ability, and will never ever have fun doing it – its a hump, u just need to “try try again” but once you get it, voila!

I experience a similar feeling but a bit in reverse while executing household chores – now that my girl Friday Tulasi is no longer with me, I have to wash dishes, sweep and swab the house and cook a lot more than I ever did before. But, since I perform these jobs infrequently, I am sure I don’t really employ the most efficient way of doing them – in every subset of the task actually – whether it is the washing, the stacking, the drying or the storing! I do it well, but if I did it everyday – I wd do it so much better.

And this is actually what makes the process industry. As we know, processes are made up of steps and sub steps that can be repeated endlessly – this is the reason they can be documented, then taught and then performed by a wide variety of people – and that’s also why they can be outsourced.

In EmPower, we had an interesting scenario in which our 3 operations department were actually at different levels of “processizability” (yes, I just coined that word). And therefore covered pretty much the whole spectrum. The “Process” oriented departments needed the basic skill/ expertise of the process – in some places it was domain knowledge of healthcare/ in some cases it was good knowledge of Microsoft office functions/ in some cases it was English writing and summarizing (unfortunately, 30 million dollars or no, Summly didn’t work for us (we tried it much before yahoo bought it :)!); and then they needed the skill of taking a series of task steps and performing them as documented. The characteristics that merited excellence in performance here were the ability to undertake these same tasks faster/ better/ cheaper – so, process improvement; productivity efficiencies; and ofcourse quality were the metrics of evaluation. This is where the normal process engineering measures like lean and six sigma were applicable – and folks did green belt and black belt projects…So focus was on automation/ tools to make work better/ business process management techniques etc..

From the demand side, what these functions necessitated were task orders that were essentially the same/ similar business problems, for many different businesses/ brands/ industries – with some minor twists. So, you couldn’t throw in a “new” angle to the problem – the client had to choose from an almost predetermined menu of choices – a bit like a buffet meal. They got solutions that worked like clockwork – because over a period of time we had gotten so good at doing them.
Also, the business problem itself was not so much exploratory/ unstructured but a repetitive one – and the focus was on the “what” not so much the “why” and “how”.

On the other end, we had a department which got faced with business problems that no one knew the answers to – it was about finding out reasons/ detecting patterns – so fairly exploratory/ research and analytics oriented. The brief was “tell us what we don’t know”! The evaluative metrics therefore became frameworks/ client satisfaction/ hypotheses generated and methodology of proof provided and presentation simplicity and clarity…

The issue for us in order to scale however was – how would you processize this – the consulting companies have done versions of this – they templatize frameworks, have standard modus operandi – and I think, pretty much by the sheer bank of experience of solving problems over the years, have quasi answers to most questions they will see. But, when you are using a very new, very evolving medium – in our case Social Media – and part of the brief is to find out “what the client doesn’t know” – it was tough to use previous experience.

Having said that, we still injected processes – there was one for brief capture, then for what to research, then a source database for where to research, the research process was documented and continuously kept getting evolved, then there were processes for analytics and then one for story writing. Our teams followed all these in most cases – but interestingly, for this department, the places where one output scored over another – by leaps and bounds – was when the folks doing it actually “broke the process” i.e., went beyond the bounds of it – and injected some of their own thinking/ innovation into it.

I guess that made the difference between the first and the second type of functions – in one, the process WAS the solution, in the other, it was the means to get the solution – and a means that we attempted to replicate in order to scale, but the solution would get much better – the more creative you got at it.

This made for many many fights between the market facing and the operational folks – obviously, for the client facing folks, the attempt was to throw the ball out of the park – always! Great ambition – and one that would ensure that the client was delighted and came to you for more – the ops guys however had to battle doability/ bandwidth/ kind of resources and ultimately the cost of this creativity – vis-à-vis the meager returns they got out of it. Their point – you want innovation, you pay for it – the whole point of processizing something is that it can be repeated in a human agnostic way – that also reduces the price due to efficiencies built in and the resource cost which you can keep arbitraging – but then you cant expect creative/ innovative thinking! If you want a Ferrari or a Bugati, you jolly well pay for it – if you want cheap, buy a Nano!

The trade offs were actually spectacularly different – business processes in general have higher probabilities of client satisfaction. The client’s expectations are well understood – both by you and her, and since you have done this many times before, you can execute well. Think of the fast food chain restaurants (we have our own versions here called “darshinis” – those are probably the best processized service outlets I can think of – every task is pre-known, documented, broken down; every person is assigned one (or more) of those sub tasks – these are all sequenced in a particular manner – even exceptions (like if your chicken wings are taking too long, the KFC front desk folks offer you either coke or crispy chicken) are envisaged and recorded. At our darshinis, the job sequencing is brilliant – one person takes orders, another puts banana leaves for u to eat, the third serves you, the fourth serves you a different set of dishes, the fifth offers you seconds, the sixth offers you water again and the seventh comes and takes the banana leaves after you are done – and cleans up the mess – to start all over again! Fast, cheap, efficient…great client satisfaction

I see examples of it in my vegetable shop – this is an open market stall – has the freshest veges, and an assembly line service operation – every client is asked what they want/ helped in selection – with the salesmen actually filtering out the not so fresh veges/ weighing done/ upsell – cross sell done/ money totted up and checked out – all done in matter of minutes. On top of which, these guys greet you with a smile, generally remember what you bought the last time (all in their heads – no computer/ loyalty database); send a man to help drop your heavy load to your car, ask about your maid Tulasi who they know has gotten married; know when you buy a new car – and even give you a discount when you don’t have exact change! Customer satisfaction? No, delight!

On the other hand, the customers who have asked you for the holy grail “creative insights” – take much longer and harder to get satisfied – coz they don’t know themselves what will satisfy them. So, then it’s a looong engagement process to align expectations, take them along in your journey – keep them abreast of your findings so they are always in the know – on short repeatedly and iteratively manage them…client relationship leading to client satisfaction maybe..But, the flip side is, if they are satisfied, it may be a “higher level” of satisfaction as you pulled out a rabbit out of a hat – almost!

For us therefore, both ends of the spectrum had their place in the sun in our portfolio – the “research and analytics” innovation stuff was the flagship service we would sell – its what gave us entry into clients and got the big names in (after all, for the largets spenders on research and analytics in the world, you had to show results out of the ordinary – only then would you acquire them as clients). And these innovative services were also then the loss leaders ☹ (which is a little counter intuitive but well what to do) The process services on the other hand were not only the bread and butter – ie, got us the bulk of our revenue, but also were the jam – ie provided us the profitability – we needed both therefore to make a good mix…

But I really worry about this – can you processize innovation? You can processize the process that leads to innovation maybe, but I really think the two are polar opposites. I know Gary Hamel and the like have attempted to devise enterprise processes to fuel innovation – even some 10 years ago, my company had undertaken a big exercise under his aegis (I actually think all that came out of it was “foreign jaunts” for many delighted managers) 3M is maybe one of few companies – oh yeah and Google I would say where this seems to have been done well. Any others?

To me, innovation – real innovation, atleast the IDEA – is about a smart brain spotting a clever idea – a gap/ a better way to do it/ a customer need – it’s about making connections that another brain/ other men have NOT made – it’s about that unusual lens you have applied to existing data and patterns to detect something unprecedented – THIS is difficult to processize/ train/ impart…..What you CAN do is like I said devise processes for generation of ideas/ to constantly make those ideas be visible/ to enable working on those ideas – and sure, in many cases, genius is 99% diligence/ dedication and 1% inspiration. But u can processize the diligence – u can’t the intelligence!

But wouldn’t it be nice if u cd undertake / implement the innovative stuff also ina processized/ profitable way – I guess too much to ask for?

In the meanwhile, if you agree that innovation and processes are oxymorons, and if u are the kind of person who likes interesting twists in language, here are a few lists. A few that tickled my fancy were:

“act naturally”
abundant poverty”
“crisp tender”
“buffalo wings”
intimate stranger”
and my new favorite – “ethical hacking” 🙂