On January 23, we lost one of our finest innovation thinkers and scholars, and an icon whom I have revered and admired deeply. I’m referring to the passing away of Prof. Clayton M. Christensen, 67, Harvard Business School professor and the father of the theory of “disruptive innovation” from complications of leukemia. The closest that I’d come to associate myself with the legendary business consultant was during my rather prolonged tenure at Tata Consultancy Services he was serving as an Independent Director enabling the company to achieve greater success globally 1, a position which he held from January 2006 until September 2018. It’s a terrible loss no doubt, but I wanted to personally pay a tribute to “Clay” and remember him through one of his famous theories on “Jobs to be Done” which not only has roots in innovation but also consists of insights for customer experience strategy.
To begin with, in 2007, Christensen popularized the phrase “Jobs to be Done”. In an MIT-Sloan Management Review article, he summarized the peculiar nature of innovation that is steeped in demographical data in the following words:
Most companies segment their markets by customer demographics or product characteristics and differentiate their offerings by adding features and functions. But the consumer has a different view of the marketplace. He simply has a job to be done and is seeking to “hire” the best product or service to do it. Marketers must adopt that perspective. 2
It won’t come as a surprise for a generic world-class electronics company to squirm at the mere motion of discontinuing any present-day technology that is evidently in rampant use with its current user-base, including peripherals or hardware systems. Imagine the plight of several million loyal customers when they hear how their favourite features and functions have been impertinently withdrawn with immediate effect from the brand’s high-end product line. But of course, we aren’t talking about Apple.
Here’s what everybody, including most designers, gets it completely wrong about Apple whenever the discussion surrounding its deeply intricate ‘design philosophy’ happens. There will be an unequivocal and optimistic pronouncement that Apple’s success is due to its “user-first” mindset. It’s not and it never was. On the contrary, Apple’s innovation strategy is ingrained in making its products future-proof by pursuing a ‘design-first’ framework in a valiant effort to promote and invest in technologies, which in Steve Jobs’ prophetic words, are having an upwards swing. That pursuit of integrating innovative technology is partly the reason why some of their design decisions seem impractical and in complete contradiction to current technical norms. The unpopular decision behind the removal of the headphone jacks from the iPhone 7, for instance, was necessary to make the device thinner and add space for larger batteries in a world that is hankering for more juice. That single design change has virtually turned the tide towards wireless Bluetooth headset manufacturers and prompted iPhone buyers to shop for them (read, ‘AirPods’) and has sparked a wave of innovation in the industry.
[…]Apple is a company that doesn’t have the resources that everyone else has. We choose what tech horses to ride, we look for tech that has a future and is headed up. Different pieces of tech go in cycles… they have their springs, and summers and autumns, and…then they go to their graveyard of technology. And..so we try to pick things that are in their ‘springs’ and if you choose wisely you can save yourself enormous amount of work versus trying to do everything, and you can really put energy into making those new emerging technologies be great on your platform rather than just ‘ok’ because you’re spreading yourself too thin. […] So we have got rid of things..we were one of the first to get rid of the optical drives with the MacBook Air, and I think things are moving in that direction as well. And sometimes when we get rid of things like the floppy disk drive on the original iMac people call us crazy. But sometimes you just have to pick the things that look like they’re gonna be the right horses to ride going forward.
Steve Jobs – D8 conference, 2010.
So, where modern PC brands were feverishly banking on the ubiquitous USB Type-A on the basis of its adoption rate and the competition Apple boldly moved forward to replace them with USB type-Cs on their Mac devices. It’s a debate for another day that Apple’s ‘design-first’ decision on the 2015 MacBook also prompted an extravagant usage of physical adapters to attach almost any 3rd-party Type-A peripheral on almost every major device launch.
I am involved in an engaging organizational innovation exercise with a team comprising business consultants and senior leadership of one of the top healthcare companies in Canada that own and operate over a 1000 pharmacy locations across the country. Apart from several themes one of the aims of this 3-month long exercise is to understand the barriers in the delivery of timely services to patients and finding an innovative solution to wait-times. So, what exactly is a ‘wait-time’ in the context of a pharmacy? In simple terms, it is typically that period in a given service parameter in which a pharmacy customer (patient or caregiver) has to wait before he/she is dispensed the prescribed medication and depending upon the traffic of a specific pharmacy location that period could sometimes run into hours. The current demographic of pharmacy patients consists largely of ‘baby boomers’ who were born in the 40s-60s but that won’t be the case forever because more millennials, the cohort of people generally born in the 80s-90s, have begun to emerge as an influential group not just for healthcare but the retail industry at large. This segment is most prominent for its early adoption of digital apps and automation but the ‘boomers’ aren’t laggards either with adopting a digital lifestyle. As we gather around in focusing on and exploring various options I wanted to present some of my views on tackling wait times (WT) in the incumbent age of digitization. Additionally, I also wanted to share some of my observation and learning on wait times with other brands, in particular, IKEA.
Basics of Wait Times
I would continue with my comprehension of WTs in the context of pharmacies. So, to begin with, what is a wait time and why is it important? In technical terms, a ‘wait-time’ is a crucial factor from the perspective of implementing the prioritization order in a customer queue to ensure that one person’s isolated need/demand does not gain precedence over the others waiting in the line. If managed efficiently on a consistent basis, WTs also play a major role in managing the working time of the pharmacy staff and also helps bring productivity and efficiency into the work culture, such as preparing the medication while the patient waits in anticipation. From a pharmacy standpoint, despite all the clear advantages, there are prevailing challenges which prevents pharmacists from meeting their stated goals. Some of those challenges include lack of team coordination and overlapping (or the lack of) of responsibilities. Then from unskilled staff to complicated digital systems and sometimes even the unavailability of medications at pharmacy locations can not only affect wait-times considerably but could also drastically lower a brand’s value over a period of time. On the other hand, it might be harder to realize but customer wait times are not just limited to pharmacies alone. In fact, in Canada, it’s common for patrons to wait for their turn while availing any form of service just that and experience levels of anxiety and anticipation. Services which have lower levels of expectation generally escape the customers’ ire from bad service experience, whereas others like IKEA have developed a robust & orderly mechanism for addressing wait time challenges using a combination of digitization and environmental factors (store). I have described my experience in IKEA in the post a little later.
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