Tedde van Gelderen: Experienced Thinking

Transcript

[0:00:36] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today's episode is with Tedde van Gelderen, author of Experienced Thinking. People don't just buy products, they buy experiences. From the second they consider purchasing to the point when they're ready toss away an old model for a new one, every moment matters. So a business really needs to develop an experience with the entire life cycle in mind. A holistic approach that makes the customer say, “Wow” from beginning to end and that's what this episode is about. For the past two decades Tedde has worked as an experienced architect and in this conversation he'll be your guide to delivering remarkable experiences that delight people all along the way. And now, here is our conversation with Tedde van Gelderen.

[00:01:36] TVG: I came out of the airport and it was just sort of like two hour flight and we walked over across the road there to get to the parking mall and there was the rental place so we all walked in the rental place and as you know these things have like four or five rental places in a row. We sort of walk by we didn't really know which one to pick and we just go “Well this seems decent let us go with this one..” And so we joined a queue and as we turn a guy looked up next to me and buffled me because I was not used to this, he reached out and shook my hand and he says, “Hi I'm Matt, I'm going to help you today.” What struck of that is that – so he touched me, he shook my hand – it was not a unusual in a business setting but I was sort of taking a back because I couldn't remember a moment where when I was renting a car that the first, very first action of somebody, is to introduce themselves and shake my hand. That's the part where I said, “Okay this is different” and that made me really realize the kind of business I’m in, which is all about how people interact with each other, also on a personal level but also in a business level and also when they interact with information and with product and with things around them. And that really struck me because it broke the pattern, it broke what I felt was more of a business transactional moment, where it was just get in a car and fill in a bunch of forms and then off you go. They're professional, they're good, they're cheerful, they're polite but they usually don't connect with you in that way that early. That was really for me the moment where I thought “I need to capture this and help more companies understand this kind of level of interaction that you could have with your clients, or your customers, or your users, and help them understand that's it does make a difference.” Because it was notable, it was memorable, it was something that I in to this day clearly remember as a moment and it was really about something completely mundane as renting a car. It made a difference for me and I will remember this company forever now because I know there's this one guy that did it differently, that did it better.

[00:03:40] Charlie Hoehn: So, was it memorable because it was a pattern disrupt, it was just something you didn't expect, or did it make an impact on you because it was so personal and human?

[00:03:51] TVG: I think both and I think that's what a lot of companies start to lose is that I think the human side of things is more and more lost in professional interactions and also are lost in a lot of things we do now for each other and for making people have a better life in general – but also in a professional sense, to have a better business life. I think the human side is lost but also it's really, really hard, it's been increasingly harder for companies and individuals to create this differentiator. So how are you different than the next guy, how are you better than the next person that provides a product or service? Where is that differentiator? I think a lot of people grapple with debts and love people trying to find the answers to that. But they're not very creative in making stuff much cheaper. It’s how can we make stuff bigger, or we can make stuff shinier. But nobody thinks about the human aspect or the real – the exponential aspect of it to say, “Where can we change it there?” Because this could be a very mundane change in how everybody rents cars as the standard thing is you should introduce yourself. Think of it as for example if you put this in another context how old it would be if you work in to a restaurant and you get seated, the waiter or waitress does introduce themselves by shaking your hand first that will be odd. Why would you? That's way too formal, that's way too much. I don't need to know you really. I just need to get to my table. So there's always this implied level of interaction that is by large the same in different restaurants and that's what I encountered here this was different because it was beyond that but it actually felt okay it felt good, it felt “Hey this is different and this is better.” I think that's what companies need to pay more attention to in that sense – that human side but also work on a differentiator.

[00:05:32] Charlie Hoehn: So, you got back from this car rental experience. How did you start implementing experience thinking in to your day to day business or did you? Was it something that you brought to your clients or was it something you started practicing?

[00:05:47] TVG: Well most of the time the kind of work that I do involves already trying to get companies and teams and organizations to think more about introducing the customer and the user in their design process. When they think about creating new experiences, hardware, software, content, brand and all those things could be part of those experiences and so that's part of my job It's already part of my job. But what I did feel is that there was not a lot of real intentional thinking behind it, that people do their best to think about the user and the customer, but they are very hard sometimes in their solution. They don't really have a good approach to introducing these people throughout the design process and thinking about the kind of differentiates that they could identify, and they don't really see that always. So that's something that really made me think more and more and this book for me, I would say, between ten or twelve years old now, in terms of my thinking. Because I started to more and more think about this ideas of “How do I help companies create this differentiator that is more obvious and still fits within what they normally do?”

[00:06:55] Charlie Hoehn: Would you say that the big idea in your book is how do we create these experiences as companies that differentiate us from our competitors, is that the main take away?

[00:07:09] TVG: Yeah that and then “How do I start, where do I start?” Because that's a very good statement to have as a goal and a lot of people say, “We need to be better, we need to be best in class, or have an experience, or have this state of the art, or do something that really sticks out from the rest.” That's absolutely a fine statement to make as a goal statement. But then the next question is, “So now what? How do I start? Where do I begin? What is step one? What is step five? What is step 15?” I think that is really often missing in these conversations – that we don't really know how to structure and plan a basic strategize these kinds of changes that we need to do to make that differentiator really happen. That's what this book is about. This kind of a high-level step by step plan I would say, that is usually the best word for it, to help you understand that these are the things that you do without – I'm not trying to explain in great detail as to how you do it because there is literary dozens, and dozens and dozens of books that cover that part. I'm trying to stay one level above that to say, let's talk about what you should be doing. I will mention the words, I will mention the techniques, I will mention the process but first of all I'm going to tell you really an instruction way to get there and it's going work every single time.

[00:08:21] Charlie Hoehn: Awesome. So let's talk about what we should be doing then. What is the structure or the framework for experienced thinking, how do we need to be approaching this?

[00:08:31] TVG: Well the first level I try to go to, and it's no different from the things that the organizations try to achieve and deliver, is to look at the internal organization, our close structure and it's looking at the processes, looking at the people, it's looking at the way they do their business, how do they make money and the technology itself of course as well. All the while trying to make sure that your organization is in such a way where everyone supports this kind of thinking. It supports this kind of design that will help people sustain and make it better. That's the first level, so I started off with that.

[00:09:05] Charlie Hoehn: And, Tedde before you go on to the next level just to give some perspective, what is a company that does experience thinking extremely well, that we're all familiar with?

[00:09:16] TVG: A lot of companies do bits of it well and some companies do it rarely well. So when we look at product sides very often and the ones of course that we know very well that does well in proceed I got this company like Apple but that's really for me one example and it's a very stereotypical example in a way, not to knock them in anyway because they do great stuff obviously. But I would also for example look at government agencies. I say some parts of the government have really good worked out services of how to renew your driver's license, or even how to pay your taxes. How easy that is to have good ways and parts of those services really thought out very well. In a very exponential way, so very good, very smooth, very seamless for people that go through that.

[00:09:59] Charlie Hoehn: But wait you're Canadian, you're talking to an American so we might have different experiences here.

[00:10:04] TVG: I know, so I would never say across the board that this is wonderful, absolutely not. But take a museum for example, so taxes aside, take a museum. If you go to a museum or you can go to a company like Disney that they have this down to a tee. They know how to create an experience for you that you go “Wow, this is something else.” And you can’t always put your finger on it why is it so different but people go, “Wow this is amazing!” And you sort of stop at those words that you are saying “This is amazing I don't know how to articulate this any further than that, just to say that this is an awesome experience.” So these people and these companies obviously figured that out and we look at the outer layer of that experience and say, “This is amazing” but we don't really know how they did it. How do they do this? So that's another example. Another example of really good experiences, is this kind of a different way to think of it is in a movie. So, if we think of the whole cinema experience and of course there's a dark space and you sit on the chair but then you experience – you get through a movie and it is completely designed, completely.

[00:11:01] Charlie Hoehn: Totally.

[00:11:02] TVG: Because they like to tell you what to think, what to see, and what to hear and sometimes what to smell, and sometimes even what to feel – when your chair moves in the action movies. So, they really comprise the whole experience and have control over all of the experience through our five senses and so they create exactly the emotion and the feeling, and the perception that they want you to have. So, if you want to look at a good experience or an example of really good experience design if you will and movie is a really good example of that.

[00:11:31] Charlie Hoehn: That's great. So really, really good. Okay, so let's use Disney as our case study as we go through these levels as you're explaining them. So let's tie everything back to what Disney is doing just so the people have that in mind. So moving on to level two.

[00:11:48] TVG: Yeah so when you're looking at Disney as an example one of the things that they do – what I said earlier around the structure Disney is completely setup as an organization to deliver these experiences. Everybody that gets hired there, everybody who goes through the career path, they are all setup to be focused completely on the customer and on the people. I don't even think they call them “customer.” The people that go through that experience really are centered and they're the focus of everybody that works there. So, the whole structure of the organization and the Disney organization is focused on making these people happy and get them the experience they are basically paying for, but also what to expect now. Another expectation comes from the first level up from structure which is the brands. It's when I say Disney and also saying Apple when we say Disney immediately you get an emotional reaction. Immediately you know, “Oh yeah that's what these guys…” You get used to a very positive one and a very, very I'll say movie or imaginary feeling that really gives you this uplifting emotion. That's the brand, and that's the first step after structure, where you think about “So what does our brand promise, what do we promise our customers, our users, to people outside our audience outside, as a brand?” And so many companies who start to think about influencing experience thinking, that's what they have to do next to say “What do we promise really our people. What do we think we promise as a company?” Surprisingly, and as we know the products that some companies and organizations produce don't match the brand promise that they think they give. So, when you take for example a car manufacturer like Volvo, when we say “Volvo” people think “safety” because that's part of their brand and that's part of their ongoing marketing focus – that they have to make sure that people see Volvo and they think safety. That's that always like that, they have done this for decades. And so, to point out that people do think that now. So same for Disney, Disney is that emotional reaction but the brand is next step that you have to work on, “What is that brand, what does it look like, how do we define it, who are we, and how do we express ourselves through our brands and through positioning that we have so we can go to the step after?”

[00:14:55] Charlie Hoehn: And so is that the complete framework and would you just kind of sum up the different levels you hit there, just succinctly.

[00:15:02] TVG: Well those are the first two, there's more. So, once you've created a structure in the organization that will deliver the experience that you want to create, the brand is the first level so brand is one. Secondly, the brand is just not everything, the brand experience and the brand promise, of what I've talked about before, has to be defined. That usually needs to be defined first because typically companies have a certain a brand over the established and if it's new company they really have to think about what's their purpose, what's their goal in this universe if you will and that's what you capture in the brand. The second level is really so what do you do now, what are the experiences that people interact with when they actually get these with your products and services? So when we look at Disney. Disney has a lot of products out there, not just movies but of course physical things and the parks they have and all of those other things that are basically a combination of many, many services and many, many products. Things could be hardware, software, anything that people can try, as a product in that sense. So, we need to create and design the product. How do we do that? What do we do there to create a product that actually works for people? It comes back to what I mentioned earlier is about this user and customer involvement. So, when you create a product experience what was this next layer up? You're trying to make sure that you evolve as your customer throughout that whole process. And, that is a known thing, that process has been applied luckily for many people and for many companies that they are aware of that and they get better and better of that kind of thinking. Product is one, and so hardware and software that is one, services is another. And what I said earlier, services is you can think of being renewing driver's license or getting something done that is not tangible, like a restaurant which is yes there is food but there is also a service part where you go through the whole ritual of entering the restaurant and sitting down, getting the menu, eating, going away again, and the entourage setting up the environment that's there. So, that's service experience and the service experience is very much a similar kind of approach as a product experience, where in order for that to do that well you need to really make sure that you involve the customers who uses it, throughout that design process. That you make sure they’re aware of what happens next and you make sure that these people will tell you when something goes sideways, in terms of experience.

[00:17:25] Charlie Hoehn: If you had to say what the common mindset is for great experience thinking companies, the people who design these experiences, is it one of wanting to delight the customer, is it of wanting to express love for the customer? What is the core mindset in order to be a great experience thinker.

[00:17:50] TVG: Well, you end up thinking emotionally around the last stage of this approach which is what we'll call life cycle or an end to end experience. So, companies that do this really well and Apple is one of them and Disney is definitely one of them. They don't think about distinct products and services, they don't think about the service in isolation and say, “Oh we need a great website and if we do a great website we're all good.” Or “If we create this wonderful shoe and if we do that then we're all good and we're going to be fine as a company.” Good grade and excellent companies that figure this out, they understand that the use of the websites is embedded within a bigger journey if you will, a bigger stage where people will use the website. For example, we take a look at a sports franchise. If you look to any of these sports franchises out there, they have a website so you can buy a ticket. But everybody knows of course it's only a fraction of the experience. It's not about the website it's about getting to the game and when you get to the game you have to park, getting to the game means you have to buy tickets somewhere, or you get it online or what is the small app that helps you there? Getting to the game is also meeting the friendly stewards that gets you to your seats and then of course it's the game itself. Hopefully your team wins and then you go home again and hopefully you get there safely and then the website comes in to play again where you want to book another game or see if there is still availability still in the section in the stadium you want to be in. So, sports teams have all of this different experiences to deal with and they think, if they're smart, think about this end to end. Think about this from the very first beginning of when I think about going to a game, to the very last second when I actually come home again after a successful game and that whole experience in between – that's what successful companies think about and how they connect all of these products and services to work.

[00:19:41] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so it's really just thinking of end to end all of the emotional states that you want the customer to go through from to start to finish, everything that you want them to experience. It's really architecting this entire thing. It's a lot of work. So, I mean let's get in to that a little bit. How do you implement this stuff? Can somebody whose not traditionally practiced in this or experienced themselves, can they become a great experience thinker? What do you suggest?

[00:20:18] TVG: Well, first of all, you are completely absolutely right, this is a lot to take in and when you look at companies they have to think about this a while before they can successfully start a journey to change, journey to improvement and journey to optimization. I noticed that and it's something – that’s why I wrote the book. I wanted to at least give this umbrella view of how all these things go together because there are too many books that go into slices of this. Basically, take one chapter of my book and say, “This is all you have to deal with” and it's not. You don't just focus on the brands, don't just focus on the website or your online. Don't just focus on your physical space and make your branches good or make your stadium good. Think about all of these things because realistically people, we have to think about this as a holistic thing because that's what our company or our organization is about. Once you've recognized that and say, “Yes they are all part of this bigger whole,” then we can start to engage each other and to say “We need to work together better. We need to think like end to end. We need to think and connect all these dots better.” This is why the subtitle is Creating Connected Experiences because that's what all of these is about, is to create this connected experiences that you and I as end consumer as user go through and we go through this in a very sort of sequential fashion and then we'll judge the organization completely based on that. So, in order for us to organize ourselves around that we first have to recognize that this is the experience and secondly let's look internally now with the structure of the company to start seeing “So where do we line where do we do things together, where do we differ still, how do we make sure that…” Like with Disney, you’re focused on the same thing. That's a good thing to say out loud but then really seriously, “How do we organize ourselves in the structure of the company to make it all happen?”

[00:22:09] Charlie Hoehn: What else do we need to be thinking about to really engage in experience thinking to make it a part of our company?

[00:22:15] TVG: I think the most important part is to recognize each other. I think it's a lot of managements and processes that you see, this idolized thinking is still persuasive. Even though we say “We don't want to do it anymore,” you still see a lot of people just being concerned with their own parts. On the sales and marketing, engineering, contents, executives they're still working too much in isolation and for this to work freely we have to recognize that ultimately, we're like a Disney opening up a show, we're putting up an experience with people. Yes, we might be a bank but still it's an experience that people want to be happy with and successful in. So, let's see this as an experience that we all work towards and organize ourselves around and that is what this book will hopefully help people to make them realize that there is a way to structure yourself, there's a way to organize yourself so it can be done.

[00:23:06] Charlie Hoehn: So, to play a little devil’s advocate here, why does really matter for businesses? I mean if we're a company that's a little bit of a necessary evil, customers have to deal with us, why do we care about the experience for our customers, or even for our employees, if we're the only game in town. Why does it matter so much?

[00:23:28] TVG: Good question because partly I would say, well here you have to make that determination yourself first. So, there will be cases where you say “It really doesn't matter. We are the only one, so we don't have to differentiate.” But when you live in a world where there's five rental places side by side they all give you the same kind of cars for similar pricing, how do we differentiate now? You have the same counters, you have the same people, they all dress nicely, they have little name tags. Everything looks the same, how do you stand out in the sea of sameness? I think that's a reality for even more companies than the ones that can say, “I'm the only game in town.” So, for those companies who have to compete with four or five, ten, hundreds of competitors, they seriously have to look at this as a way to find quicker and more frequently the change they need to stay afloat and to make that difference really stand out for them, so they can survive as a company.

[00:24:23] Charlie Hoehn: So, tell us the people who have gotten the most out of the ideas presented in your book, who've implemented them. Tell us the before and after of companies who have gone on to be successful with Experience Thinking.

[00:24:38] TVG: Well, first of all most companies, like I said some reason this book is still a sort of new area and those words and then the structure and framework that I talked about just now is not pervasive in many companies yet. So, what I see is that a lot of companies are stumbling in to this and realizing it that they're doing something not right, not in an ultimate way, once they encounter it. So, one big one for example is brand. A lot companies and teams will see brand as a kind of “Wow, we need to create a logo somewhere. I need a tagline.” And that's about it but when they start to design services and products they kind of leave the brand behind. I've been in to many situations where the brand was not put before creating products and services but it was done kind of parallel and tackled every couple of years when people felt like it in a way. But irrespective of what they did with products and services. So when we read it on websites or read it in an app or read it in social space, the brand was not a factor. Well, really it shouldn't be a factor as we're trying to deliver that brand promise. So, they are so connected in time, that a lot of companies that we worked with didn't see that and has to revisit everything as a result.

[00:25:51] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, you know when we started talking this really immediately brought me to UX, the field of user experience in software. It is such a huge deal to have somebody who understands UX, the end to end experience of using software because there's a difference between sticking with it and being a lifelong customer abandoning it after it's very first use. So, in speaking to companies that have brands in the millions of dollars, it makes total sense to hire on somebody who can guide employees and customers through the best possible end to end brand experience possible. But I imagine most companies, like you said, it's not pervasive so now you're not even thinking about this. So, what I'm curious about is if I'm a business owner and I'm listening to this and I'm saying “Experience thinking, I'm on board totally, I just don't know where to start.” Who do I hire? Do I hire your company? Do I look for a specific type of contractor or consultant? Where do I begin in revamping my company, my products, my services, so that they are aligned with what you're talking about?

[00:27:10] TVG: It's a good question because the start of writing this book was very much to writing for management objectives, people aren't necessarily doing the work but needs to understand it sufficiently to guide and to plan for the work and that's the intent. So, this is very much about to say, if I need to start somewhere this is a recipe, this is the way to start, this is a way to look at it from the structure, the different types of experiences that are out there and the lifecycle and the end to end thinking that this is part of this. It's not meant to be a cookbook in the sense that we're going to tell you verbatim how to start and all the stuff number five, six, seven, eight are it's to say: These are the ingredients, these are the steps that you look at, these are the things that you can look at, this is the brand, the content, the product, the service, experiences that you're creating and you need to start to consider them more connectedly. So you can plan and you can make sure that your next project you're doing or next initiative, will take this content in to the right order. So, start with brand. If you're good with that, check you move on to the next thing. How you do that is really sort of step two because the team internally could very well be very good in user experience and design or in customer experience design, or you might have a very good branding team. There might be capabilities in house that are able to do 70% of these and you may only outsource 30% of that. Or you may decide to really bring this in house completely and vice versa completely outsource this. I don't say anything about this specifically because I don' think it's really about this. Because every company, like Disney, breaks it all in the house mostly because it's really, it's more they are, it's what they present and the same with Apple. There's another time of people that's and if they do whisper out or you don't hear them obviously, but they bring a lot of these capabilities in house because it's so accord to what they deliver to us as an organization. So, because of that variety, the book is not really about, so how you hire this person or that person to get you to that level but make sure that you have these guides. It’s to have this playbook in a way to say, “I know where to start now. I know what order these things should happen and I know roughly how they would work.”

[00:29:18] Charlie Hoehn: Got it. So, let's finish up here with a challenge for our listeners, what's one thing they can do from your book, Experience Thinking, that can change their life? Even if they're not a business owner, even if they're not thinking in terms of their company. What's one thing that they can do this week to apply experience thinking in to their life?

[00:29:39] TVG: The very first thing that they can start and what really will have a big impact is to start, what I talked about earlier, about end to end kind of thinking. Many teams and organizations are still grappling with this really tool box approach of how to fix things or how to provide experiences. To say, can we sit down, take two hours bring from different places, team members from different areas of the organization. Different content areas, different managements, sales marketing objectives. Bring them in to a room, spend a couple of hours and talk about – “So what is really that end to end experience that we all provide?” You will be amazed what people talk about and how they see it as what they provide and how they think they fit in to that overall picture. I want you to capture that, then the next steps become easier because then you can go split them up in to service experiences, product experiences, the brand, the content and then ultimately look at how you structure the organization to deliver all that. But that's the biggest challenge I would give free to the listeners to say, can you do that? Do you have a sense of that end to end, where your customer first encounters with you, a user first used things from you, or interacts with things that you have, to the very last moment when they leave. Do you have that mapped out, do you understand that? Do you have a view on that? Because if you don't have that then you are kind of going in with one eye and you don't really know where you're going because you’re optimizing maybe an insignificant part of the journey without us knowing it.

[00:31:10] Charlie Hoehn: Makes sense, excellent. So, how can our listeners connect with you, follow you, what's the best way to do it?

[00:31:17] TVG: I think the book is of course on Amazon right now. I can be found in LinkedIn, there's a blog in the company that I run where I regularly talk about these things as well. But in short I would say that my name is so distinct if you look at my name in Google you will find me, you'll find ways to connect with me.

[00:31:35] Charlie Hoehn: Perfect good enough, well this was great, thank you so much Tedde for being on the show.

[00:31:40] TVG: Yeah thank you.

[00:31:42] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Tedde van Gelderen for being on the show. You can buy his book Experienced Thinking on Amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.