Effort to Resolve
Who does the work?
There’s a minimum amount of effort that’s necessary to reach a given end. I’m calling this tension between two parties “effort to resolve”; I’ll use a business and its customers as an example, but it can just as easily be a product or service within a larger context. In any case, both sides need to work together to reach the desirable outcome*. Sometimes it’s a known quantity, sometimes not; sometimes it’s tangible & rational (e.g., money, time), sometimes not (e.g., emotional energy, “felt” effort). But oftentimes, both sides put in more work than is necessary.
I quickly drew the sketches above & below to communicate this during a conversation yesterday. In the interest of clarity & gross generalizations, I offer these three categories for how orgs manage effort to resolve:
- Immaturity
- Adolescence
- Maturity
Immaturity
This is what it looks like when the business is immature — yes, like a kid: requiring significant effort, but just enough value to make it worth it. Immature businesses have such an attractive (or necessary) outcome that customers are willing to overcome significant obstacles to reach their outcome, and companies can (for a while, at least) afford to keep those obstacles.
As designers, our primary task is often to protect our customers from this kind of organizational dysfunction. And yet, sometimes our attempts to “clarify” and misunderstandings of a “good user experience” add to the customer’s burden.
To be fair, this isn’t always the fault of the organization: sometimes it’s a matter of infrastructure or geography, for example. But it is their responsibility to do what they can to bring the customer over the barrier.
And some do.
Adolescence
Reasonably mature organizations, having realized the advent of the experience economy, take on much of this work themselves. They understand the direction they need to go and have made progress, but parts of them are catching up with that potential. Like teenagers, their coordination hasn’t caught up with their size.
This is actually a positive initial state for prototypes & pilot programs. For instance: before investing in a given technology, the organization wants to test the validity of a given approach and it’s worth it for them to take on a short-term manual effort to identify a longer-term approach/opportunity.
Maturity
Organizations that set, maintain, and re-set customer expectations are those that effectively reduce the overall amount of effort with skillful use of strategy, systems, and automation. The same resolution is attained with significantly less work from both parties.
Furthermore, because they’ve displaced the weight of maintaining onerous processes, these orgs are nimble enough to confront changing market & audience needs.
Note, too, that this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with an organization’s size. Larger orgs tend to be more immature, and the more modern startups have the luxury & advantage of starting out relatively mature (within the scope of this post) with technology like AWS, Bootstrap, etc. But plenty of startups create enormous technical debt and Fortune 50 multinationals have at least a pocket or two of maturity.
Growing up is hard work
While there are patterns, it’s different for everyone. Timing, priority, opportunity, everything. I say everything because this is a total body transformation. It may begin one group at a time, but maturity demands holistic results.
*Yes, I know this is basic economics.
