Step 1

Organisational silos can contribute to a lack of alignment with the customer journey. When different departments operate in isolation with each prioritising its own goals, it can lead to fragmented experiences and missed opportunities for collaboration and innovation. The ‘silo mentality’ does not so much related to the existence of boundaries, but to a working behavioural pattern where groups, teams or departments do not want to share skills, knowledge or information with other areas in the same company and act as ‘one business’. This has a severe impact on customer outcomes, effectiveness, performance and creativity. In fact, this is a disease in strong and thriving organisations and not ones that have lower performance levels.

 

 

In addition, silos are tightly connected with management styles, especially if managers have a negative attitude towards other units and a lack of commitment to corporate goals or/and a lack of personal understanding of how to build cooperative working relationships. Similarly, the inability of teams to look outside of the box or take an overview perspective when handling issues, is a form of social silo. However, one of the most common silo cases is the data silo where departments are packed with massive data that keeps them from communicating with other teams effectively, or even process silos, where the company is focusing on projects and procedures but not on outcomes and products. Or, perhaps, there are more practical reasons, linked to organisational complexity and the inevitable difficulties in knowing who is doing what and who to engage inside a large business ecosystem with increasing rates of change. Whatever the causes, when a company is siloed, it is constantly in tension with its focus going inwards, at the expense of the customers, competitors and the wider environment. As a result, all these types of silos lead to the Silo Flue, affecting the customer experience and its curing starts with introspective management which is part of journey management.

 

 

The good news is that customer journeys are amazing to overcome such silos. The initial step is to map out a customer journey map which is a visual representation of what it actually means to be a customer, giving direction and clarity on what to do with the experiences. Then, this map becomes all the job that is done and needs to be done for the customers, and when it gets better, it evolves to an innovation management solution where the organisation is always a step forward in the market, as it knows how to bring incomparable value to its customers. Then, teams can focus on their relevant touchpoints while also learning to collaborate with other units and divisions within the organisation to achieve common goals. Collaboration is then a natural result when different departments meet and brainstorm over a common goal and experience, they want to achieve for the customers. The main focus should be: how can we add value to the customer’s life? This strategy is on par with streamlining data. No customer wants to repeat themselves to different departments and the data is gathered by multiple sources is not helping either this misalignment, where customer data tools could be leveraged to provide information in a centralised location and always retrievable from any department.

 

 

Overcoming silos ultimately comes down to expanding someone’s perspectives and motivations to cover company-wide efforts. Keeping things simple in customer’s experience is critical to foster satisfaction. That’s why it is so important for communication and proactivity between teams to be as open as possible. But, more importantly it is the leaders that can play a vital role in changing people’s mindsets, promote customer-centric goals and boost interdepartmental collaboration.

 

 

Increasing visibility can be achieved through open communication and external engagement. Leaders should encourage collaboration between diverse teams that may have previously operated in isolation and share the knowledge, resources and tools to achieve common goals. Sharing an idea’s or projects’ value proposition outside of the unit can also lead to potential partnerships and collaboration with external actors in a journey and potentially extending an innovations’ reach and impact. Sharing both success is failure to gain lessons learned is a transformative strategy to break down silos. This approach promotes transparency and boosts a more efficient problem-solving as it teaches how mistakes can be used as a great lesson to do things better. It is also a great way to manage risks when working on innovations, as it opens discussions of what is working well and what it doesn’t for customers, therefore, fostering internal alignment and a constant nurturing a learning and improvement culture. As Albert Einstein wisely put it, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Sharing both success and failure serves as a reminder to avoid the trap of repeating the same mistakes, thereby promoting a culture of adaptability and growth’.

 

 

Finally, because leaders are the company’s bridge connection, the are expected to be intentional about changes and prepare teams about how all aspects of the change work together alongside their business potential along the journey. Their role is to ensure that all team members understand the big picture journey and be ready to adjust touchpoints, innovations, and projects to embrace agile methods to improve experiences. They have also their own connections with clients, suppliers, employees and other actors in the journey, so they are heavily invested in the relational capital of the organisation.

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Unlocking innovative solutions through the process of reframing

 

 

Brainstorming can also be a way to reframe experiences, opening new questions rather than just encouraging new ideas. In surveys of 106 C-Suite Executives representing 91 private and public-sector companies from 17 counties, a full of 85% agreed that their organisations were bad at problem diagnosis, and 87% agreed that this flaw causes significant costs. The point of reframing an issue is to find the ‘real problem’ rather than see if there is a better problem to solve.

 

 

How good is our company to solve real problems? Are we overengineering the diagnostic process or are we hit the centre of it? Even if we apply the best diagnostic frameworks, such as root cause analysis and the 5 related Whys questioning approach, can end up digging deeper in a problem, yet creative solutions always come from an alternative understanding of this problem. Let’s take an example of a problem’s reframing process. Most people identify some solutions by falling into to a solution space that shares assumptions about what the problem is.

 

 

However, another alternative approach is to get a different understanding of the problem. Although the initial framing is not necessarily wrong and installing a new software would probably work to make this operation faster, the reframing concept is to discover whether there is a better solution to solve it. In any case, there are many solutions to a problem; the belief that a single root cause exists may be misleading, as problems are typically multicausal, complicated and can be addressed in many ways. The payroll processing issue may arise from a surge in client demand; too many new clients get onboard, and they all need to be processed at the same time. This demand can quickly overwhelm existing systems and resources, leading to bottlenecks in processing times. Moreover, this surge continues to grow exponentially, and simply implementing a new payroll software would invariably require ongoing adjustments, tedious calibrations and frequent upgrades to keep pace with the expanding workload, leading to prolonged periods of system downtime and operations disruptions.

 

 

Therefore, a new payroll software won’t make the processing faster, simply because it is not a solution to the stated problem. Identifying other aspects of the problem can deliver radical improvements that can eventually relate to critical touchpoints in a customer journey. By reframing the challenge of payroll processing from a focus solely on speed to one that considers the subjective experience, provides a refined approach to addressing client needs. This approach helps us understand that clients not only seek efficient payroll but also a valuable, stress-free experience. If we understand the payroll journey from client onboarding, to payroll processing and reporting, reframing is very easy to achieve. Each touchpoint represents an opportunity to enhance the customer experience and reduce the perceived duration of the process. Proactive communications and personalised support are only few aspects of the journey, but critical to shape the client’s perception of the payroll process.

 

 

 

Seven Practices for Effective Reframing

After understanding the entire journey, you can apply the reframing method through the following seven practices:

 

1.     Establish legitimacy

Although it is difficult to use reframing if you are the only person who understands the reframing method and because you may deal with various stakeholders who may shut you down before you even get started, create the best possible conversational space and introduce this new method.

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2.     Bring outsiders into the discussion

The most useful input comes from people who understand but are not fully part of your world. Here, you can take leverage from people who are great journey designers or have already experienced your journey’s touchpoints as customers, front end teams or other collaborators. These teams can be close enough to the front lines of the company to know who customers really feel, but also close the management to understand business priorities. In addition, do not forget to include CEX and CJ that will be very excited to assist you in reframing problems in a customer journey. Remember, expect input not ready solutions. Observations are strong enough to make you rethink a problem form a different perspective. Outsiders are not experts of your operations and thus will rarely be able to solve the issue. That’s not their function. There are there to stimulate the problem owners to think differently. So, when you bring them on a brainstorming meeting, ask them for their input rather than solutions.

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3.     Get people’s definitions in writing

Never leave a brainstorming meeting without its recorded agenda items completed. It is not unusual for teams to leave a meeting thinking they all agree on what the problem when all described orally, only to discover weeks or months later that they had different views of the issue. For example, a management team may agree that the company’s problem is a lack of innovation, but if you ask each member to describe what an innovation is or what it means to be lacking of innovations, some will present different aspects of the same problem. ‘Our employees don’t have the right skills to innovate’, or ‘The teams aren’t motivated enough to innovate’. Pay close attention to the wording when people frame a problem and record everything. Even when if the selected definitions seem inconsequential, can surface a new perspective of the problem.

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4.     Ask what is missing

People tend to delve into details when describing a problem, paying less attention to what the problem really is. It requires to zoom out and consider what is missing from problem definitions. Sometimes better definitions can be provided by other actors or by other journeys.

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5.     Include multiple categories

Transformative change can come by taking into consideration various aspects of a problem. Is it an attitude pattern? Is it an expectations problem? Is a technical malfunction? Let’s take the example of the portal/application development project. Clients get excited with our enhanced engagement product but when it comes to actually activating the app not all employees have found it easy to register and always the Engagement Managers get on hands by training new users and get them familiarise them with all the application’s features, as according to the feedback they receive it is a real challenge to navigate. This could be an indication of poor usability analytics that include other parameters such as emotion. Although the majority of app development teams monitor and report the number of clicks and their route navigation, they don’t explore who users are feeling when they click on. By explicitly highlighting how people feel about a product, it is a proactive way to manage the entire user interaction from sign up process to usage. This approach does not suggest to eliminate the critical role of Engagement Managers as trainers, as they are the only actors that currently gather customer feedback regarding the services and the application. However, by adding advanced emotional analytics, we may empower their role in this journey while also having adequately addressed the recurring issue of not 100% instant registration and product adoption.

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6.     Analyse positive exceptions

There might be hidden factors whose influence has not been considered during the framing process. To find additional problem framings we may have to look to cases when the problem doesn’t occur and by asking ‘What was different about that situation’? Exploring such positive exceptions can uncover alternative opportunities to solve a problem. Let’s take an HR project. Most of the companies face with high employee turnover rates, leading to increased recruitment costs, loss of corporate knowledge and decrease employee morale. The common solutions space that the majority of HR professionals resort to is to implement employee benefits and improving the workplace culture to address the factors contributing to churn rate. However, a reframing process would explore some positive exceptions, meaning where employee turnover is low or non-existent. For example, after a department breakdown analysis, the found that x department had the lowest turnover rate, because, compared to other departments, this team has regular brainstorming meetings and their team leader is very inclusive, active listener and with strong empathy skills, making team members feel safe even when things get out of hand. Therefore, a reframed approach would be to replicate this positive environment in all departments by offering professional leadership development with emphasis on emotional intelligence for all leaders and team members. This method doesn’t suggest that employee benefits don’t work to reduce employee turnover, but by reframing the issue the HR can identify alternative effective strategies to improve retention rates and make people feel safe at work.

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7.     Question the objective

This approach can best work with dualities or binary issues. By paying attention to the objectives of all parties, firstly clarifying and then challenging them, helps us to find a different objective and therefore preventing the involved actors to oppose to each other. Other perspectives are beneficial as they can shift perceptions and achieve cohesion.

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Tapping into the Brainstorming skills

 

 

Brainstorming is a the most common method to bring teams together to share ideas, solve problems and generate innovation. It is a creative, inclusive activity where issues are addressed, new opportunities are discovered, and action plans are established. However, teams and leaders today don’t know how to brainstorm effectively, as individuals tend to think in isolation, lacking the skill of actively listening to peoples’ ideas. During a brainstorming session, only one participant speaks at a time while others are either listen to the speaker or attempt to generate ideas while distracted. The phenomenon is called ‘production blocking’ which is prevalent in groups with strong personalities. In this case, the dominant speaker may be actively suppressing alternative point of views, hampering creative output. There is also a neurological aspect to why brainstorm sessions often fail to generate creative ideas. Because a person doesn’t have a lot of time to think the situation, their Fast Brain quickly makes sense of the problem and guides immediate response. The Fast Brain is largely subconscious, automatic, emotional and stereotypic, while the Slow Brain is capable of complex analysis, imagination and critical thinking. It is actually this system that someone must be engaged to generate a truly original ideal. To harness the capabilities of the Slow Brain, participants should be allowed sufficient time to engage and to be offered the freedom to express ideas, even if it means challenging the status quo.

 

The rules of brainstorming are simple; come up with many ideas as possible and refrain from criticizing them, allowing creativity to thrive. Brainstorm dogma is the worst enemy of the Slow Brain. There are no bad ideas in brainstorming, or perhaps there are plenty of them. The essence lies not in attributing value to any idea but in dispelling the notion that bad ideas are invariably a bad thing. In fact, bad ideas are an indication that your brain is trying to solve a problem in a creative way. On the contrary, they often signal the brain’s effort to approach problems from unconventional angels which is an indication of opening up creativity. Chances are that most of these ideas may evolve into valuable opportunities. In any case, we don’t criticise someone’s idea or try to standardise only viable concepts for consideration. Such practices don’t promote a culture of open innovation wherein every participant can contribute through their creative minds.

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Questions to consider during brainstorm meetings regarding innovation goals:

 

-What are the key short-term and long-term objectives for the customer and the business?

-How does this innovation align with the organisations/department’s goals and objectives (6 Elements of Development)?

-What are the primary pain points the customer faces (or other actors)?

-What are the anticipated benefits and outcomes of achieving this innovation goal?

-How will this innovation will affect the customers, stakeholders, other actors in the journey?

-What are the potential risks and challenges associated with implementing this innovation?

-Are there any regulatory or compliance considerations that need to be addressed for this innovation?

-What resources, tools, procedures are currently in place to implement this idea?

-What is the estimated timeline and budget required to achieve this innovation goal? 

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What it takes to be so innovative? 

(Innovation Leadership Skills)

 

 

Innovative teams usually share some common characteristics, values, traits and skills that modern leadership can learn from and apply a similar model to build and nurture an environment conducive to innovation:

 

Open-mindedness: being receptive to new ideas and viewpoints, embracing diverse perspectives and open to exploring unconventional ways to solve problems

 

Curiosity: demonstrating a natural inclination to ask questions and seek out new knowledge

 

Collaboration: working together to exchange ideas, building upon each other’s input to develop creative solutions

 

Risk-taking: willing to take calculated risks, understanding that failure is part of the learning process, and viewing setbacks as growth opportunities

 

Adaptability: the ability to be flexible in the face of change and adjust their strategies as circumstances evolve

 

Creativity: thinking out of the box, experimenting with different approaches and generating novel ideas

 

Empathy: wearing the customer’s shoes and see things from their perspective, deeply understanding customer needs, pain points and preferences

 

Constructive Discontent: actively seeking ways to improve and innovate, even when things are going well

 

Experimentation: encouraging the testing, prototyping, and iteration of ideas to identify what works best

 

Inclusive Environment: nurturing all members to contribute regardless of their role or background, fostering an atmosphere of respect and collaboration

 

Time for Reflection: allocating time for introspection to analyse successes, failures and lessons learned to inform future endeavours

 

Continuous Learning: committing to ongoing learning, seeking out opportunities to acquire new skills, stay updated on trends, expanding knowledge base

 

Constructive Conflict: welcoming healthy debates leading to better ideas and solutions

 

Autonomy: empowering team members to make decisions and take ownership of projects, fostering proactivity and resourcefulness

 

Results-Oriented: striving to achieve tangible outcomes and measuring success based on the impact of innovations

 

Continuous Refinement: refining and evolving ideas over time based on feedback and real-world insights

 

Cross-Disciplinary Expertise: utilising diverse skills to approach challenges from multiple angles

 

Resilience: the ability to bounce back from setbacks and stay committed to goals

 

External Engagement: engaging with external networks, attending industry events, collaborating with experts outside the organisation to gain fresh insights

 

Long-term Vision: balancing immediate (short-term) challenges with long-term vision, anticipating future trends, and positioning for sustained innovations

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