Ordinary or Awesome?

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Have you ever wondered how much influence we have over the experiences we enjoy? For example, in your daily interactions with people, what level of response do you get – ordinary or awesome?

Of course, in theory, we would all choose awesome. Reality is sometimes different. While awesome would be…well, awesome…it could take a little longer to deliver. Are we prepared to wait? Is ordinary all we wish to spare the time for, so we grab that and run?

If awesome means stating our demands and creating a bit of a fuss – a very unBritish thing to do – are we predisposed to avoid making a scene? In how many cases do we opt for a quietly dissatisfied existence?

A picture of what is awesome and what is OK is firstly conveyed and then established partly by the customer – you and me. Do we encourage better than average and a tendency to awesome by the praise, thanks and recognition we bestow? Or do we grunt and go when the goods and services obtained for our hard-earned money reach a barely acceptable level?

The service and attention given to customers in major retail outlets provides a useful case study. The move to pre-packaged and self-service has been inexorable ever since I was lad growing up in London.

Now, we can shop in most major chains without ever having to react face-to-face with any of their staff. Not only do we search out the items on the shelves, we even take the goods through an automatic checkout, pay through a slot-machine arrangement, bag all our purchases and take them to the car ourselves.

Oh, and please put the trolley back where you found it, our employees are too busy to be bothered with serving our customers. And our customers are so dazed and distracted by the mindless, windowless warehouses they now shop in, that don’t hardly complain.

A quick aside: have you ever noticed a clock in a supermarket? Thought not. Would you like to guess why?

How did it ever come to this?

If we want awesome and we keep getting ordinary we have to accept part of the blame. We have allowed conditioning and habituation to establish mediocrity as somehow normal. It doesn’t have to be, but nothing will change unless we do so first. If we keep allowing what we’ve always allowed, delight will decline as it’s always declined.

We can actively consent to being offered something more. And companies prepared to offer more will be well placed to capture the market. We observed this phenomenon with the advent of The Japanese TV. The TVs being made here and in the USA at the time were prone to breakdown. That was normal. A whole industry was founded on the need to repair them.

Then the famed reliability and quality of the Japanese offering became available. People voted with their wallets. They wanted awesome as soon as it became available. The TV repair industry was all but wiped out.

The same happened with motorcycles. Much the same has happened with cars.

If we know that accepting awesome is so much better than ordinary, then we need to expand the paradigm to other areas of our lives. Every interaction is an opportunity. The chance for change is never gone; we can begin whenever we wish.

We have a huge influence over the experiences we enjoy – often much more than we realise. Give someone else the opportunity, the room and the permission to be awesome. You may be surprised by the result.

And we can choose to be awesome too.

Mining Facts and Missing the Point

Despite appearances bad decisions are rarely made because people don’t have all the facts. In the political sphere the Treasury will have been fully aware of the impact on taxpayers of abandoning the 10% tax band. The Treasury may even have alerted Ministers. Nevertheless, although the facts were noted, plainly they were not given sufficient weight.

In the run-up to the present ‘Credit Crunch’ the financial institutions were fully aware of what they were doing and, one hopes, so were the regulators. But merely knowing the facts proved insufficient. Clearly, they did not understand the facts and the whole unstable structure was allowed to plough on into the crash barriers.

The Burmese Government will be well informed about the consequences of Cyclone Nargis and how badly their population has been affected. However, here facts are equally useless because they are being ignored.

Business is subject to the same purblindness when it comes to facts. Too often when plans go awry Governments call for Royal Commissions or Parliamentary Committees; business calls for internal audits or additional research. More facts will not help them regain the perspective they have lost.

When facts have failed to register, the continued pursuit of yet more facts painfully echoes Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind in ‘Hard Times’. Gradgrind worships facts and figures. He puts his faith in abstract theories rather than direct observation of real people and real needs. The asymmetrical approach to human life of early industrial England, the denial of some of the basic needs of human beings, is being repeated in what some are pleased to call our post-industrial age. The structure of the economy may have changed. Too many of the attitudes live on. The cost in human happiness is great.

In Dickens’ Coketown, the needs of the factories dominate everything else. The factory hands work long hours in oppressive conditions, and they live in cramped houses. Their lives are monotonous; every day is exactly like every other day, just as all the houses and streets look alike. In Coketown, there is a strict uniformity in everything. The workers have little time off to relax and enjoy themselves. Does that sound familiar?

Employees and those running their own businesses will recognise the close parallels. Today we still struggle with long hours, astronomic housing costs, poor diets and an existence where evenings and weekends are nothing more than the exercise yard of our own imprisonment.

Each business, each day, has the opportunity to step back and take a clear-eyed view of the workplace we have built for ourselves. If it is not as we would wish it, then we can change. If you think it isn’t as easy as that then you will be setting yourself up to fail as a self-fulfilling outcome. Give real change a try. Take action. You may surprise yourself.