The Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences to Solve Your Toughest Business Problems Author: Visit Amazon's Christian Madsbjerg Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1422191907 | Format: PDF
The Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences to Solve Your Toughest Business Problems Description
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The authors describe the experience as a fog, a time when the business and its executives know something’s wrong but can’t quite define it. Consultants Madsbjerg and Rasmussen are proponents of “sensemaking,” a nonlinear process derived from the human sciences (like anthropology and ethnography) in which judgment and intuition help drive answers. Their statements of assumptions will have every head nodding: among others, that people are rational and fully informed, that tomorrow will look like today, and that hypotheses are objective and unbiased. Yet what they do is so innately smart and practical that it’s a real surprise more corporations haven’t adopted it. Look at LEGO, one of their four detailed case histories. In the early 2000s, sales slipping, the company turned to a new CEO and new thinking about the role of play in kids’ lives. Adidas, too, turned to sensemaking, realizing that its core appeal was no longer to athletes or wannabes but rather as an inclusive brand inviting all of us to join a movement of living a healthier and better life. Strong, seductive arguments that hopefully will sway the logic and process makers among us. --Barbara Jacobs
Review
ADVANCE PRAISE for The Moment of Clarity:
Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO and President, LEGO—
“The Moment of Clarity demonstrates the significant impact and value that businesses create when they actively build strategies around the complexity of human behavior. This book is essential reading for any leader struggling to find a solid path forward in a rocky and uncertain environment.”
Michael Canning, CEO, Duke Corporate Education—
“Madsbjerg and Rasmussen bring fresh perspective by applying a human lens to solve business challenges. Drawing on the social sciences, they uncover elusive insights needed for navigating our increasingly complex world. A great read—I highly recommend it.”
Sheila Heen, coauthor, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most—
“Buried under spreadsheets, market analyses, and big data lies the essence of the human experience that your product or service is built on. The Moment of Clarity shows us how easily this gets lost amid the hubbub of today’s business “wisdom,” and how stopping to deeply understand the humanity at the heart of it all has brought some of the world’s biggest companies back from the brink. Ignore Madsbjerg and Rasmussen’s groundbreaking insight at your peril.”
Taylor Carman, Professor of Philosophy, Barnard College—
“The Moment of Clarity offers a brilliant and much-needed critique of the disastrous consequences of trading embodied intuitive understanding for abstract technical manipulation, especially for companies whose success depends on their sensitivity and responsiveness to the experiences, the concerns, the lives—in short, the worlds—of their customers. Madsbjerg and Rasmussen shine a light on the persistent but stultifying habits of corporate thinking that stand in the way of genuine imagination and insight into what it means to be human.”
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- Hardcover: 224 pages
- Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press (February 11, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1422191907
- ISBN-13: 978-1422191903
- Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
The Moment of Clarity is really a book about a new and different method for understanding your customers - one that cuts through the wilderness of 'innovative' ideas to arrive at the problems that really matter to people, and hence to the bottom line of the company. As such, it is the best and most cohesive introduction I've read to the emerging field of ethnographic research - the authors call it 'sensemaking' - mixing practical advice with a much-needed high-level perspective on what is going on in businesses today.
The book has two parts - 'Getting people wrong' and 'Getting people right'. In the first part, the authors explain why a lot of existing methods fail. Not all of the arguments are new, but here, they are expertly and precisely analyzed - and in the case of the chapter on brainstorming, hilariously skewered in what is surely the funniest chapter ever published in a Harvard Business Press book. They also offer a much-needed analysis of the weaknesses of several recent trends, not least the whole Big Data movement which is currently dominating the discussion on customer intimacy. While I am not personally as skeptical of Big Data as the authors, the points they raise are certainly relevant.
The second part has a pragmatic focus and introduces the idea of sensemaking - that is, using a mix of participant observation, qualitative data gathering and holistic analysis to arrive at new insights about what really matters to customers. The core point of the book is that success comes from getting a truly immersive understanding of your customers, not through focus groups or numerical analysis, but through forgetting your own business objectives and really observing - and making sense of - what is going on in their everyday lives.
The Moment of Clarity offers a truly novel perspective on what’s missing in strategy discussions in corporate boardrooms around the world. At a fundamental level, traditional consumer research and business strategy are getting people wrong. The objectives of this book should relevant to any leader – illuminate how and why businesses are misunderstanding their consumers, help leaders detect and correct errors in their strategy, and present the foundations for a developing strategies that will work.
For me, a powerful part of the book was the critique of widely practiced strategy tools and processes. First, too many corporations today suffer from the “quantitative obsession”. The Moment of Clarity convincingly argues that something is not important just because it is measurable. The richest insights about human and consumer behavior can typically not be represented in an excel spreadsheet, and an overemphasis on the numbers can often obscure the most relevant information. Second, “brainstorming” in its current form is not a panacea. We have over systematized brainstorming with charts and post its and we assume that creativity is simply a matter of having the right processes and steps. The book gives ample evidence that creativity is not merely a matter of process and it’s also not necessarily about radical newness. Creativity can’t be forced during a one-hour meeting and doesn’t spring from fad-ish exercises – it can require a long gestation period and springs from real insights about why people act in the way they do.
What really makes this book powerful is that it starts from the very foundation of human interaction and consumer behavior. The default way of thinking in the business world is insufficient to understand and make sense of this behavior.
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