Forbes Magazine has a current article that gets a 'big DUH' award from me: "Have It Your Way". Playing off of the old Burger King promotional tag, it's their inane claim "companies are tapping consumers as never before" that really caused great gall.

Aside from the fact that the article is celebrating something that people would clearly EXPECT companies to do, they are making it sound as if this were a 'new' thing. Did they totally miss the cottage-industry era? Are we saying that the industrial revolution has finally come full circle?

The article continues "they have concluded that instant feedback is one way to cope with the pressure for shorter product cycles and with the high failure rate of new products". Can we offer another big round of "DUH"s? Did they miss the memo on scientific models which have proven this theory has existed forEVER, we just weren't smart enough to see it? Or that feedback loops are the means by which, on a path of free energy, that we can increase momentum (see item #6)?

Ok, so they did admit, "Feedback-influenced design is scarcely new". But then they go on to talk about their own experiences of 'approaching' their readers, in this case, to pick a cover design. While it is not inherently wrong to approach customers (employees or suppliers either, for that matter), it is a bad approach if it is not done in conjunction with things to be learned from what people are already saying to you -- or, as they even point out in their own article, you bother individuals to the point of invoking "feedback fatigue".

There is a distinct difference (as they refer to in the sidebar, "Snowboarding Secrets") between 'gathering' information and 'coercing' information. If you have to 'ask', rather than 'listen', then you've introduced an economic exchange, for which you have to offer some value to offset the cost of the exchange to the individual. Or, if you 'coerce' without an exchange, you leave a negative balance in the relationship equity -- leaving the individual primed for finding another relationship.

Too often, companies ignore all the relevant information they are receiving for free. Or worse, are already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on.

Case in point: the struggling AOL. Cry for AOL if you will, but the laws of 'natural order' will bring them down if they don't start relying on their own natural mechanisms. I spent a couple of days inside AOL, interviewing various people (as part of my own interviews for an internal position). It didn't take very long to find one glaring point of hemmorage: feedback loops.

The role I would have filled was a Director of UI Design. If I want to improve an interaction, the first place I'm going to go looking for important clues is to seek out current 'problems' with the existing interactions. AOL had a 'ton' of information. They had a whole department focused on just this effort, which prepared/published numerous reports of findings they had both observed and had then researched more in-depth. Their findings were so valuable that I would have purported that they could have sold their research in the open market and competed head-to-head with major research houses (so much for expanding business models). But...no, this was a capital "BUT"...there was absolutely no connection between product development and all of this research.

So listen carefully all of you AOL'ers. If you call in with a complaint about the design of AOL, do not expect to see any changes as a result (better yet, don't bother to call/write), because there is absolutely no connection between your call and the results.

So where does the Big High come in? Those of us who have experienced it can tell you, it's when we can make those connections come to bear. There is such tremendous natural energy in the effective workings of an entity, that when pent-up energy potential is suddenly released, and we help facilitiate it, it flows through us and we absorb a lot of it. That's why, as we struggle for words to help define what we do, one that comes to mind is 'ombudsman'. We facilitate connections.

I've experienced it each time I've been in a situation where I've been allowed to 'do' what I actually 'do'. I got that jolt of energy surging through me just this past week when a call center representative remarked, "Why can't they just let you 'fix' the other part of the system?" (referring to a related system that they have to interact with that is being developed/implemented by another contracting group). Comments like that are the real ROI of our work -- but you'll never see them be taken seriously by executives as a metric. The difference is, I've developed a relationship with these people; they feel empathy. But businesses don't value relationships...they don't invest in them. It's too yin for their yang-based world. But there will never be optimal balance (and surprisingly enough, optimally sustainable revenue), until they do.

But back to the Forbes article. The focus was on product alone. Is the business industry that immune to reality to recognize that for most of them, their product is services (or services related to products) -- which rely on processes? When was the last time you saw an article from Forbes on businesses using their customers to redesign their processes?

That will be the day the 'Big Duh' award moves on.

[I might have notified Forbes of this post, so that they could respond, but there was no convenient feedback loop to do so. Sure, there is a 'comments' link at the top of the article, but does it prefill with the page I was on? No. Can I write directly to the author from the article? No. That's not convenient. The economic exchange is too high. I bail.]