ProcessImprov.ing

'If I would have listened to the customer I would have made a faster horse!' A famous quote that has (falsely) been attributed to Henry Ford. But even if we ignore the attribution we can still think of the expression as a beautifull example of misinterpreting the voice of the customer. Because the customer is king but the customer is not god. The customer knows what it likes but not what it looks like. Rather than asking the customer the simple question: 'What would you like?' and then doing every detail that they mention, we should actually listen to the wishes that are underneath their statements. By doing that you might just figure out what would be critical to quality and which drivers are necessary for a good product. The actual product is up to your own imagination and testing it on the audience.

Let's go back to the horse example, if you would have asked a random person in 1890 how he would like to get from A to B. Chances are they would have said on a fast horse. So speed is something that is important to this hypothetical customer. We might proceed by asking how fast he wants the horse to be, or similarly how fast would you want to get from point A to point B. They might give you a vague indication which is sufficient for now. But we are not done asking. So we would continue by saying: 'Imagine that you have a fast horse, what other factors would you like about your horse'. He might say that he does not like all the manure that comes out of his fast horse, so he would like to have as little excrements as possible. Then we obviously continue to deepen and broaden these questions so we get a nice tree of factors that are important to the customer. When we have drawn the tree we remove the image of the horse and only look at the factors that are mentioned. Now its time to be creative, how can we come up with something that is fast, has little to no excrements, is comfortable to sit on, etc. Ofcourse it still takes a slight genius and couragous entrepreneur to add this all up and come up with the idea of an automobile but it just goes to show you that it is not about the product but actually about the desires of the customer.

So if Ford would have listened to the customer in the right way (which he did), he would still have made the automobile.