{"id":1065,"date":"2012-04-13T09:13:19","date_gmt":"2012-04-13T13:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/enterprisestrategies.com\/?p=1065"},"modified":"2015-07-27T04:35:26","modified_gmt":"2015-07-27T04:35:26","slug":"avoiding-the-biggest-mistake-in-understanding-your-customer-nobody-wants-a-drill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/enterprisestrategies.com\/2012\/04\/13\/avoiding-the-biggest-mistake-in-understanding-your-customer-nobody-wants-a-drill\/","title":{"rendered":"Avoiding the Biggest Mistake in Understanding your Customer; Nobody Wants a Drill"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AdamJBurton_Small-300x300\"<\/a>Imagine that you work at a local hardware store – one of those big box stores with the fashionable aprons. A customer comes in and tells you he \u201cwants a drill.\u201d Since you are a great employee, focused on the customer, you take him to the aisle full of drills. You may even go further and discuss price range, cord options, and something about a keyless chuck. (Which was invented by a guy named Jacob Chuck, who was a well-liked man about town. His brother, Up, did not fare as well.)<\/p>\n

You have already lost your customer.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Notice I didn\u2019t say lose the sale, because they may still buy a drill, but you have no understanding of the actual customer. Why? Because nobody wants a drill. Ever<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Repeat after me, “Nobody wants a drill.” Unless you are trying to start the International Museum of Drills (I\u2019m looking at you Kickstarter!) or unless you are the curator for the Drill wing of the Smithsonian Institute – nobody wants a drill. What they want is a hole.<\/strong> That\u2019s what they are really after. The “drill” is their mechanism for conveying what they think they really want. More importantly – and more problematic – is the “drill” is actually their metaphor for understanding the problem itself. You need to understand the problem to understand the customers needs which will give them a better experience of the business. PR services like NGP Integrated Marketing Communications<\/a> are also a good way of relating to your customers.<\/p>\n

Now this could easily go into a requirements discussion, but I want to take it another direction (Besides the best take on requirements was done in the famous tree-swing cartoon<\/a>). I don\u2019t want to talk about requirements, I want to talk about language.<\/em><\/p>\n

When I say the customer wants a hole<\/em>, I mean they have an end in mind, some specific goal they are trying to achieve. By asking for a drill, they believe they are conveying that information. That has the distinct disadvantage of being wrong. They really aren’t conveying any information. They have already conceptualized the problem using a drill metaphor and are intending to realize that vision using a tool known as a drill. I submit to you that as soon as they started thinking about the “drill,” they were off-track.<\/strong> Why? Because they were thinking of the problem in terms of the tool.<\/p>\n

Frankly, this is why many organizations fail when they “introduce” technology. Even the wording shows you part of the problem. They are introducing a technology, not solving a problem! Furthermore, because technology is ingrained so deep into our culture, life, music, child-rearing, even religion…we now think about technology as the solution instead of a social <\/strong>tool<\/strong> to address some underlying problem.<\/p>\n

So why not dig deeper and get better requirements from customers or employees? This is reminiscent of the 5 Whys method<\/a> where you continually ask why. (I once mistakenly thought it was the 55<\/em><\/strong> Whys method. So I spent 3 hours asking why before I knew something was amiss.)<\/p>\n

Clarifying the “requirements” doesn\u2019t really help when the “requirement” is just the metaphor for understanding the problem itself. Linguists have come to realize that metaphors are NOT<\/em> purely a language construct; they are the way in which humans actually build conceptual models. This is a pretty fundamental shift. Steve Pinker<\/a> in The Stuff of Thought<\/em><\/a> says “a sentence can frame an event, affecting the way people construe it, in addition to simple conveying…” George Lakoff<\/a> expanded this notion into politics when he discussed framing in Moral Politics<\/em><\/a>. He provides an overview of how idea framing and metaphors contribute to shaping the way we think in the video below.<\/p>\n