Roundabouts

I've had the pleasure of working together with AI specialist Henrik Kongsbak at Resonans on several occasions. I'm so happy that he also writes articles that really make you think. About situations you have been in but most importantly about the ones you want to create in the future.

One article he published this summer was about traffic lights and roundabouts (lyskryds and rundkørsler in Danish). He used these metaphors to contrast how you can design your organisation to become more efficient so you can spend more time with your customers. by reducing complexity

One of his suggestions is to replace Key Performance Indicators with Key Performance Conversations. This is systematic conversations about how far I have come, challenges I've met, what obstacles I can take away to make things easier. It's a bit similar to the advice provided by another favourite of mine, Marcus Buckingham. If you ever want to change the way you do performance appraisal talks, your should definitely read his book "First Break All the Rules".

Another of Henrik's suggestions is to put yourself into your customer's shoes. He tells about one organisation that made videos with their key customers expressing their thoughts about the past en future. Although they had much data about the customers, they had not really taken the time to listen to them and to see them as individuals with jobs, pains and gains (as Alex Osterwalder puts it). After seeing the videos, they changed their strategies.