...It then struck me that whether one is in corporate or politics or general civic life, one needs to have a "keep at it" on "what one can know better?" and then "act from it"....basically "better understanding led better action"
In the last eight years of my revised journey on this planet, I have been fortunate to come across so so so many wonderful thinkers and seers...blending ancient wisdom with modern science. Some living and some living beyond.
Long back, i was listening to Swami Sukhobodananda ...and he was sharing his insights about Adi Shankaracharya...and somewhere in the middle of it, he mentioned ..."one who believes he knows does not know it...one who believes he doesn't know knows it".
This kept puzzling me for many many weeks and months. One of Harvard's courses (that i took online) on understanding Ancient Hindu texts also talked about all vedas being aparavidya (lower knowledge or proximate to the science or the inquiry of the day and the person)...while true deeper knowledge is paravidya (higher knowledge).
...It then struck me that whether one is in corporate or politics or general civic life, one needs to have a "keep at it" on "what one can know better?" and then "act from it"....basically "better understanding led better action". Because in the transactional world that we are drafted in, there is humongous opportunity to understand better and act from it.
Let me share a small story.
It was 8 pm on a day in November 2018.
And the crowd had thinned in this garden by then. May i say that various forms of loneliness-es or belongingness-es was now slowly crowding the homes.
Watching most people in the garden felt like their legs want to crash in the bed, while the "will" wants to make a dash towards preparing for a fitness pageant.
This young lady was switching between a walk and a small stop at the bench.
It was busyness as usual.
And then something jumped out of her for attention.
If you look at the types and names of various female hairdo, one could easily pardon majority of the population for being illiterate about it...the types and what they called !!!!
This young lady was sporting a high back bun with a slight messy finish.
But to hold the bun, she was using a paintbrush...
...what???!!! a paintbrush????!!!
I am pretty sure that the manufacturers of the paintbrush have the faintest idea that they could come up with cool business line of paintbrushes as cosmetic accessories.
How could a company into manufacturing of paintbrush develop frameworks to be able to understand this?
How could a company develop frameworks to understand customer?
The starting point is to have something called epistemic humility...that one's knowledge is limited and there could better ways to know things.
The second point is to understand the "why" of the customer purchase.
For long, these "why" were assumed or narrowly researched or conventionally ensconced. And the product development would jump to putting bells and whistles to product attributes, or characterizing the customers into conventional categories or looking at trends or simple looking at what competitors are doing.
But if one does some reading of the work on how humans make decisions, one would blown by the body of work that has happened and still continues to happen...decision science, behavioral science, cognitive psychology, moral foundations theories, motivations theories, evolutionary psychology theories, social physics or other forms of sociological theories, systemic thinking theories, game theories, identity theories, power structure theories, etc.
One is not saying that we stop making decisions and learn these disciplines and then come back. All one is saying is as prudent leaders, you could strategically allocate time and resources towards interdisciplinary understanding of your customers and employees.
When people buy product, they do not buy it out of context...they actually make a contextual purchase.
People buy/use a product for getting some job done to make progress given a circumstance. (Clayton Christensen, Harvard)
Do people buy products with the same reasons?
A nuanced view would reveal that there are tons of things involved in people's buying decision.
As the chart nearby
suggests,
Same/Different person can have same/different job to be done for which they hire or buy same/different product, and experience same/different emotions,
and desire same/different outcomes.
They do so in order to progress towards some goal (implicit/explicit, mono/multi, short term/long term, ...)....
In addition to this, the before-during-after of the buying decision has certain circumstance to it...(physical structure, social norms, etc). What Gerd Gigerenzer, German Psychologist, calls "ecological rationality"....meaning given the norms and rules and values one is in and also the physical structures around.
Or what B J Fogg (considered Guru by various tech giants in Silicon Valley) calls the ability map in his overall theory of human behavior (MAP...Motivation-Ability-Prompt). Ability would mean aspects of social deviance, props required to manifest the behavior, etc)
Many times the customers are not aware of these nuances that could be occurring owing to what Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 thinking....fast, reflexive, effortless. As we go through the calls, meetings, emails, notifications, to-do lists...hours and days and weeks...we actually rely a lot on our automata (habit factory).
So, let us sum up.
Customer's buying and use decisions are extremely complex.
Customers buy or hire product to get some job done.
These jobs are lined up towards some of their goal(s).
And these jobs occur under some circumstances.
Now, there is an added dimension this in our times.
In the last eight years of my revised journey on this planet, I have been fortunate to come across so so so many wonderful thinkers and seers...blending ancient wisdom with modern science. Some living and some living beyond.
Long back, i was listening to Swami Sukhobodananda ...and he was sharing his insights about Adi Shankaracharya...and somewhere in the middle of it, he mentioned ..."one who believes he knows does not know it...one who believes he doesn't know knows it".
This kept puzzling me for many many weeks and months. One of Harvard's courses (that i took online) on understanding Ancient Hindu texts also talked about all vedas being aparavidya (lower knowledge or proximate to the science or the inquiry of the day and the person)...while true deeper knowledge is paravidya (higher knowledge).
...It then struck me that whether one is in corporate or politics or general civic life, one needs to have a "keep at it" on "what one can know better?" and then "act from it"....basically "better understanding led better action". Because in the transactional world that we are drafted in, there is humongous opportunity to understand better and act from it.
Let me share a small story.
It was 8 pm on a day in November 2018.
And the crowd had thinned in this garden by then. May i say that various forms of loneliness-es or belongingness-es was now slowly crowding the homes.
Watching most people in the garden felt like their legs want to crash in the bed, while the "will" wants to make a dash towards preparing for a fitness pageant.
This young lady was switching between a walk and a small stop at the bench.
It was busyness as usual.
And then something jumped out of her for attention.
If you look at the types and names of various female hairdo, one could easily pardon majority of the population for being illiterate about it...the types and what they called !!!!
This young lady was sporting a high back bun with a slight messy finish.
But to hold the bun, she was using a paintbrush...
...what???!!! a paintbrush????!!!
I am pretty sure that the manufacturers of the paintbrush have the faintest idea that they could come up with cool business line of paintbrushes as cosmetic accessories.
How could a company into manufacturing of paintbrush develop frameworks to be able to understand this?
How could a company develop frameworks to understand customer?
The starting point is to have something called epistemic humility...that one's knowledge is limited and there could better ways to know things.
The second point is to understand the "why" of the customer purchase.
For long, these "why" were assumed or narrowly researched or conventionally ensconced. And the product development would jump to putting bells and whistles to product attributes, or characterizing the customers into conventional categories or looking at trends or simple looking at what competitors are doing.
But if one does some reading of the work on how humans make decisions, one would blown by the body of work that has happened and still continues to happen...decision science, behavioral science, cognitive psychology, moral foundations theories, motivations theories, evolutionary psychology theories, social physics or other forms of sociological theories, systemic thinking theories, game theories, identity theories, power structure theories, etc.
One is not saying that we stop making decisions and learn these disciplines and then come back. All one is saying is as prudent leaders, you could strategically allocate time and resources towards interdisciplinary understanding of your customers and employees.
When people buy product, they do not buy it out of context...they actually make a contextual purchase.
People buy/use a product for getting some job done to make progress given a circumstance. (Clayton Christensen, Harvard)
Do people buy products with the same reasons?
A nuanced view would reveal that there are tons of things involved in people's buying decision.
As the chart nearby
suggests,
Same/Different person can have same/different job to be done for which they hire or buy same/different product, and experience same/different emotions, and desire same/different outcomes.
They do so in order to progress towards some goal (implicit/explicit, mono/multi, short term/long term, ...)....
 |
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerd_Gigerenzer |
In addition to this, the before-during-after of the buying decision has certain circumstance to it...(physical structure, social norms, etc). What Gerd Gigerenzer, German Psychologist, calls "ecological rationality"....meaning given the norms and rules and values one is in and also the physical structures around.
Or what B J Fogg (considered Guru by various tech giants in Silicon Valley) calls the ability map in his overall theory of human behavior (MAP...Motivation-Ability-Prompt). Ability would mean aspects of social deviance, props required to manifest the behavior, etc)
So, let us sum up.
Customer's buying and use decisions are extremely complex.
Customers buy or hire product to get some job done.
These jobs are lined up towards some of their goal(s).
And these jobs occur under some circumstances.
Now, there is an added dimension this in our times.
I was reading Wharton Prof Kartik Hosanagar's book sometime back (A Human's Guide to Machine Intelligence). His book begins with the story of Tai (a senior at the University of Pennsylvania). The story opens with Tai waking up to an AI enabled morning alarm and goes through the next few minutes using various products or services that are power by algorithms. Prof Kartik makes the case for algorithms being the new strong structures (influencing rules, norms, values) in our lives. (((You can watch my conversation with Prof Kartik by clicking on the adjacent link))).
So, the circumstances around us are changing fast. And they are essentially the political-economic-social influences which are now being amplified in myriad ways by technology. These then are leading to VUCA world...Volatility Uncertainty Complexity Ambiguity.
The VUCA world isnt just for Pentagon or the Leaders. Everybody is experiencing the VUCA world. The buying-using-reflecting-liking-commmenting-sharing behavior of customer is changing fast.
Companies will need to keep compass on what are the jobs to be done for customer and the nuance (progress they want to make given a circumstance) around them on one side, and the various technologies that are emerging and figuring out ways to dovetail them into their product. While doing this, reinventing their organization to speak to the emoployees' own AMP (autonomy-mastery-purpose) while getting cusotmer's jobs done.
Happy Knowing!!! Happy Not Knowing !!! Wishing you to hold space for knowing and not knowing together. Performing duties with the knowing (karma yoga) and being in gyan yoga and bhakti yoga to be open to further knowing.
So, the circumstances around us are changing fast. And they are essentially the political-economic-social influences which are now being amplified in myriad ways by technology. These then are leading to VUCA world...Volatility Uncertainty Complexity Ambiguity.
The VUCA world isnt just for Pentagon or the Leaders. Everybody is experiencing the VUCA world. The buying-using-reflecting-liking-commmenting-sharing behavior of customer is changing fast.
Companies will need to keep compass on what are the jobs to be done for customer and the nuance (progress they want to make given a circumstance) around them on one side, and the various technologies that are emerging and figuring out ways to dovetail them into their product. While doing this, reinventing their organization to speak to the emoployees' own AMP (autonomy-mastery-purpose) while getting cusotmer's jobs done.
Happy Knowing!!! Happy Not Knowing !!! Wishing you to hold space for knowing and not knowing together. Performing duties with the knowing (karma yoga) and being in gyan yoga and bhakti yoga to be open to further knowing.
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