1 post tagged “sharing”

Well, I have been silent for a few days primarily because I am busy attending the Voice of the Customer conference here in San Diego. The weather is nice in the upper 60s, it is sunny during the day. But the conference is really good that I have not had the chance to go outside other than for dinners when it is dark.

There have been some great presentations and some bad ones as well. There was a very good presentation by Heather Crothers from Intuit on how they immerse themselves in the life of the customer. Intuit seems to get it and no wonder they are so successful in selling a product that we all have used - TurboTax.

But one thing I learnt from the conference is the concept of shared interpretation vs. sharing data. We live in a world where most of the communication happens over email. We share data that we have gathered from customer visits, experiments that we have done with others in the organization and our conclusions. All this is good, but not sufficient. If you want to make a change based on what you have learnt, then you need your organization to have a shared interpretation. Sharing data alone will not cut it. It will be interpreted in multiple ways. You need to make sure everyone is interpreting the data in the same way - hence the name, Shared Interpretation. Sounds common sense, but hey who was it that had said "Common sense is not that common"