Secret 2

GROUNDING

Partner on Purpose

Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement.

—W. CLEMENT STONE

I was staying at a hotel in Richmond and arrived very early for their breakfast buffet, before it was completely arranged. The employee in charge of setup picked up on my happy-go-lucky, “take your time” attitude and took a risk. “Are you a get-involved kinda guy or are you more of a wait and watch type?” I indicated I was the former.

“Okay, would you like some early morning amusement?” she asked with an impish tone. “You bet!” I replied. “Then grab that cereal dispenser and waffle maker over there and set ’em up next to the juice machines like this was gonna be an awesome breakfast party.” Within a few minutes the buffet was ready. I felt as if I owned the place. But wait, there’s more.

As I was enjoying my first cup of coffee while waiting for a colleague to join me to go through the buffet line, the hotel employee sat down at my table. “I see you in here every few months. What do you do?” I explained I was a customer loyalty consultant and ran a training program for a Richmond client headquartered nearby. “Amazing,” she said, seeming genuinely impressed. “I don’t get a guest service expert in here very often, at least that I am aware of. How would you describe our breakfast buffet?”

“It is plain vanilla,” I said, sensing she was looking for direct candor, not an easy compliment. “I completely agree,” she said, “and our mission is to pursue memorable excellence. So, what would you do to make this buffet better?” She pulled her chair up closer.

“Kumquats,” I said. “Why do you say that?” she asked, sensing my answer was more metaphor than a specific recommendation. I continued, “What can you do that would make the breakfast experience unique and unusual, with something people would mention at work after their meal here? The usual fare might be fine, but if it is not memorable, there is less of a reason for customers to come back, other than sheer convenience.”

My next trip to the hotel two months later had a pleasant surprise. In addition to the usual strawberries, honeydew, and cantaloupe on the buffet line, there was mango and papaya. And here is the best part. Right beside the juice bar was a whimsical container full of little bright-colored umbrellas you could add to your juice glass. Now I not only felt as if I owned the place, I felt as if I helped create it. When the meeting planner mentioned that the company was looking at a different hotel for their training program, I quarreled like a kid having to give up a favorite toy.

The pursuit of innovation with customers starts with the “why.” It is the raison d’être that lends meaning to focus and relevance to the union. The relationship must have a grounding focus—a collaborative quest to solve a customer problem or improve or create a service or product your customer values. In our hotel example, the hotel buffet person had a mission—“pursue memorable excellence.” She knew memorable excellence was in the eyes of her guests. She created an interpersonal welcome mat for my imagination to be applied to her hotel brand and my hotel loyalty. And she took even further what we had discovered together on our imagination path by adding tiny, colorful umbrellas.

The innovation quest also requires intentional toil and focused energy. Again, the subtitle of this secret has a double meaning, on purpose—meaning grounded in a mission, vision, or purpose—and on purpose—meaning deliberate, intentional, and planned. One interpretation suggests a solid foundation with roots in a customer hope and aspiration. The other interpretation means a serious and thoughtful commitment to making something happen that has meaning.

Let’s recap. The imagination of your customer is something he or she owns and defends. Under the right circumstances, your customer is willing to share this special treasure. Again, your customer also has an itch that needs to be scratched, so to speak, and needs your help in scratching it. “Scratching itches” is merely a metaphor for meeting a customer’s need and/or solving a customer’s problem in a novel way. Scratching itches requires the blending of your imagination with theirs.

You gain access to your customer’s imagination in two ways: by invitation or by attraction. Invitation is a welcome, a polite urging through your interpersonal manners—the listening, understanding, and inquiring covered in Secret 1. Attraction, on the other hand, is an alluring call or stimulating interest. You are invited to a party; you are attracted to a circus. In the pages ahead, we will unearth how grounding performs this attracting function. Grounding (whether it is labeled mission, vision, goal, or focus) is present in every innovation culture. Productive innovation is not chaotic creativity; it is purposeful imagination in action.

Some may suggest a customer-provider relationship start with purpose or grounding—beginning with the end in mind. However, the focus, vision, or mission becomes clearer if the partnership is first crafted and fortified through curiosity. Love at first sight might have triggered your private vision of a long-term personal relationship (“Someday I am going to marry this person”), but you likely did not pop the nuptial question on your first date.

Grounding has three parts. A focus (or target) on which the energies of the partnership are directed, guardrails that help keep the union on course in an effective manner, and a warranty that bolsters full accountability for ensuring the relationship achieves its goal (figure 4).

FIGURE 4. Components of grounding

Grounding represents the core need or aspiration of your customer. If that core need is clearly defined, deeply sourced, and purely presented, it can be as attractive as an adventure, as enchanting as an artistic or athletic display, and as compelling as a contest. The collective process of defining, clarifying, and staging an imagination adventure helps bond and benefit all involved as well as all impacted. While curiosity greases the skids of enticement so your customer’s imagination is exported, grounding draws your customer’s imagination through its irresistible pull. Think of grounding as having a magnetic force rather than a purely invitational one.

Grounding is the basic foundation for an innovative outcome. As such, it functions as the groundwater of purpose and thus the source of psychic energy for the innovation process. However, there must be guardrails to help the partnership retain focus, while informing the relationship’s “rules of engagement.” Even the most familiar creativity tool on the planet—brainstorming—has guidelines that help make it effective.

The purposeful (full of purpose) components of grounding require a meeting of the minds on a shared focus. But if you are to work with customers to attract the gifts of their imagination, you need more than simply a target. There must be some interpersonal boundaries to your working togetherness. Rules are typically the antithesis of the freedom-loving innovation process; guardrails are needed to ensure there are clear boundaries and agreements on the interpersonal etiquette that ensures effective collaboration. Done well, all parties view themselves as the architects of their union and the inventors of its results.

Guardrails need a loose-tight feature that provides discipline without being an unwelcome governor on imagination and inventiveness. They provide relationship protocols as well as value-based fences to keep the alliance out of weeds and rabbit holes.

Grounding also means all parties assume the full warranty for the health and longevity of the partnership. Co-creation partnerships that prosper reject selfishness; they are all about “How can I serve you?” What sidetracks too many provider-customer relationships is the one-sidedness of one party’s personal investment in the partnership’s sustainability. But when all parties assume full and complete responsibility for making their relationship work, it will always succeed. This “the-buck-stops-with-me” assertion mandates a steadfast commitment to the process of partnering. It is this feature that cultivates resilience, robustness, and tenacity.

Grounding is the sentinel of relationship security. It acts as a shepherd—out front running interference on all things that could threaten the coalition. More than simply protection, the goal of grounding is to retain clarity of focus, maintain mutual commitment to results, and foster undivided attention (as in resisting distraction). If the co-creation partnership were a vehicle of ingenuity, grounding would be the dashboard in front of its drivers.