Stubborn Details
Just ponder for moment how incredible it is that they have mastered a consistent cup of coffee across the vast differences in culture and infrastructure that span their many stores.
Anticipate, enter, engage, exit, reflect. What a delightful grouping of verbs! How could we harness the analytical discipline of Starbucks to improve our broader culture?
I had not yet started my blog when I wrote this nearly a year ago. I am posting this now as the last year has made it clear that the stubborn details are of greater consequence than ever.
April 27, 2020
Checking the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Tracker this morning I stumbled on the FAQ page. The questions surprised me. They all danced around the central notion of process. People seemed to want to understand the how & why, not just the what of the most popular tool for digesting the scope of the pandemic.
There were questions about: why the map was created, by whom, about how the data is graphically contextualized, data sources and more but one really stood out. Why are the country names designated as such on the map?
According to their FAQ, “Initially the map followed the naming scheme used by the World Health Organization. It then switched to names of nations designated by the U.S. State Department.”
Something as seemingly simple as naming the nations impacted has a back story, a swerve, and finally a choice was made to represent them based on the U.S. interpretation of nationhood. I may delve into that deeper later but for now what’s evident from this fact is the devil is in the detail, an adage that despite its lustrous, well-worn sheen, is still a reliable truism.
It’s never been truer than today in our deeply layered systems-oriented economy and culture. Systems are the intentional or passively unintentional process by which a goal is achieved.
"Starbucks coffee Manel" by Manel is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
There are systems embedded in actions that seem simple. Grab a cup of coffee at Starbucks and you’ve participated in a system that has been R&D’d by an army of engineers, marketers and grad students with millions invested in a cost-effective supply chain and customer experience that is predictable across 51 countries and 16,700 retail stores.
Just ponder for moment how incredible it is that they have mastered a consistent cup of coffee across the vast differences in culture and infrastructure that span their many stores. One aspect of their process is the Customer Journey Map.
Put simply, it’s a map of the touchpoints i.e. lived experience and steps of a customer from the moment an individual decides they need your product, let’s say a cup of coffee, until the coffee is in hand, consumed and finally disposed of.
Here’s a Customer Journey Map example from Starbucks.
Image: https://blog.podium.com/customer-journey-map/
Anticipate, enter, engage, exit, reflect. What a delightful grouping of verbs! How could we harness the analytical discipline of Starbucks to improve our broader culture?
One of the foundational systems of a Democracy is news dissemination. What is the Customer Journey Map for a news consumer? Or as I like to stubbornly refer to them, citizens.
Anecdotally, it’s confusion, uncertainty, quality concerns, too many products to choose from, not enough with the desired features, many differences in the user experience, user interface, expectations and satisfaction. A process for revolutionizing the news and thusly feeding democracy is hiding in plain sight waiting for a cartographer to map it.
And Democracy, yet another process, one by which our collective goals and resource expenditure are self-determined, is reliant on that effort. Winston Churchill famously commented in a nod to governmental systems, “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”
"Sir Winston Churchill, The Roaring Lion" by cstm-mstc is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Details are stubborn and the process or systems we use to aggregate them may result in a pumpkin spice latte, no whip with sprinkles that meets expectations no matter which Starbucks you visit or a society living in mutual trust with reliable information.
