Service Design

Mean What You Say, Say What You Mean

Increasingly we are seeing clients purporting to be this, that, and the other; all entwined in highly crafted/litigated value and corporate mission statements. The reality of gaining consensus from the populous for such things means ending up with generic statements that can be applied the world over: like ‘People focussed…’ or ‘Trusted…’ or ‘Integrity…’. Excuse me, but aren’t these baseline requirements of doing business today? Worse still are those that are bandying around words like ‘innovative…’, ‘responsive…’ or ‘genuine…’. By golly, you start putting these up, you’d better be prepared to be that. So, the danger is in being too vanilla in one sense, or over-promising in another. Finding an organisation’s true character, one that is expressed uniquely with a healthy dose of reality is a much harder game. You can run all the group sessions you want, but you’ve got to dig deep for the golden grains; the nuggets of irrefutable truth. They generally won’t come from the mouth of the CEO (or his wife), but from someone who’s doing the hard yards, like the call centre operator doing the graveyard shift. Time to tune into a bit of old-fashioned, fine-tuned listening.