Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I am somewhat sporadic in my posts. I’ll go for weeks at a time without any posts, then one day I’ll wake up with five or six ideas. As you may have noticed, in the last couple of days, I’ve been on a roll. I did one post about the new paradigms of public education, then I did one about David Meerman Scott’s book on the Grateful Dead’s marketing, and I did one on Toyota lean as applied to health care.
So I have a rather grand summation here . . . stay with me, I think it’s worth it.
Today I was on facebook, and I saw a very cute little video. Before I place it in this post, a little introduction: you may not know (I certainly didn’t) that there are people in the world known as “usability experts.” These are people whose job is to look at how something is engineered, and then tell the engineers how to improve it so as to make it easier for people to use. Seems odd to think that engineers wouldn’t do that automatically, but they don’t. They tend to build things in a way that is convenient to them. If you’ve ever encountered a web site that was very hard to navigate, or perhaps a front door to a building that you didn’t know whether to pull or push in order to open it, or maybe you had a VCR that you didn’t know how to set the time on it and it blinked 12:00 for seven years… these are usability issues. We tend to assume that all things are designed well, and if we can’t figure it out it’s our own fault. Not so. Some things (many things) are just badly designed. So here is a video created by a usability expert to explain how he relates to his clients (i.e. middlemen who pay him) and his end-users:
When I watched this video, suddenly it hit me: all these recent blog posts I have done are all about the same thing. Usability is about consciousness of the end user. Toyota lean is about focusing on value to the end user. David Meerman Scott is always talking about being aware of the needs of the end user. The traditional educational paradigm is failing because it comes at things from its own point of view, and is not based on the needs of the end user. We all tend to think in terms of what we have to sell rather than what people want to buy. (When you look at the cat in the video, you can't help but think it has ADHD.)
Obviously I am simplifying a lot but I do see this as a common thread in all of this. So how did we get here?
For one thing, it’s easy to lose track of your end user. When I was a bass player, I saw the conductor or the personnel manager as my customer. The end user– the audience– was not considered. And in school, I always had a limited world view; I saw myself, and an immediate authority figure/teacher in authority over me, as the end users.
Here’s the thing, if you are a hospital orderly, it’s hard to see patients as “customers,” because they are not paying you. You get paid by your boss. You get hired and fired, not by the patient, but by your supervisor. So you can’t help but see THEM, not the patient, as the end user, i.e., the person to be served. And your boss has a boss that they see as the end user, and so on.
When I was an orchestra contractor, I endlessly saw how musicians were always trying to “make points” with me in order to hopefully get more work from me. I had to respond to this reflex by going out of my way to tell them that the end user was not me, but MY client. “Make him happy, and you’ll make me happy” was my mantra. Of course, even then, I was short sighted; he was not the end user. But I could not see the end user, and even if I did, MY future employment rested on pleasing this middleman, not the end user.
So here is our issue: At the root of all this, we have a system of education that reinforces the old way of not seeing beyond your boss to the end user. It has limited vision; it focuses on delivering value to self and immediate authority, and rarely if ever on making end users the priority. We always assume that someone else, or "the market," will do that for us.
The new paradigm is to proactively think about end users first. This means, not just changing the school system from the top down, but looking at the kids (the real end users of education) and building a whole new system based on what they, as end users, need and want, rather than designing our own utopia and getting them to go along by creating an arbitrary system of rewards and punishments. That is the paradigm shift we need to make. (Of course, this means the kids have to learn about the end users of whatever it is they want to offer the world.)
Outside of schools, in most business, we offer our services to the end users via a long chain of middlemen. All these middlemen may have a different theory as to what the end user is and what he/she wants, or worse, they may see themselves as the end user. Getting away from this seems so obvious, and yet it’s a brand new idea.
Again, this new paradigm is inevitable, and is manifesting itself in different forms here and there . . . but there is still massive resistance embedded everywhere, due to the military/plantation/factory management traditions that were the recent precursors to our era. There have been hundreds of years of end-user disregard or even abuse. Also the money is confusing, as the end user pays few of us directly. And there is a lot of capital still sitting around in endowments, supporting the old system.
The new paradigm is coming, though. From all different directions.
I like it when I solve the world’s problems in 900 words or less.
© Justin Locke
