What Do We Owe To Each Other?

Saturday, 7.36am

Sheffield, U.K.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse’s good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment. – Ludwig Wittgenstein

I realised recently that I need to do some more reading.

So I’m going to do a post series where I work through John Bicheno’s “The lean toolbox for service systems”.

I’m trying to understand the core elements that help us create better services for those we work with.

I’m also watching, for the nth time, “The Good Place”, which is where the title for the post comes from.

I want to explore this idea of service as something we do for others, something valuable rather than extractive.

What does good service look like?

In Bicheno’s book, we start with the big picture, zooming out and taking a systems level look at what is going on.

But what does that mean?

When trying to understand anything – an entity, a service, we start by asking “What is its purpose?”.

This is a surprisingly hard question to answer because it depends on who answers the question.

Let’s say you run a business offering consulting services, how might the members of your team answer this question?

With my technical head on, the purpose might be to carry out a series of complicated activities quickly and efficiently.

From my customer’s perspective, the purpose of the service might be to meet the requirements set out by the board.

From my boss’s perspective, the purpose might be to maintain a gross margin of 60%.

Narrow points of view lead to narrow definitions.

But what really matters in a service model is the customer.

Bicheno says that “the common purpose of everyone, top to bottom, is to improve the experience of the customer.”

That’s what the rest of the book is about.

See you in the next post.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh