As business owners, we make a lot of decisions based on our assumptions. Many of them turn out to be true however many times we do not have enough information to make a good decision. This is especially true when it comes to the way that we expect our customers will react to our product or service.
Sometimes the curse of knowledge makes us very confident in our ability to anticipate how our customers will react and blind to other facts that are relevant. We often tell ourselves that there is no need to verify a particular assumption as any logical person will understand our value proposition. The problem is that most consumers are not always logical or they respond to other things we never anticipated. As a result, customers rarely act the way we think they will.
Moreover, we all to often make our decisions based on what is easier for us and assume that the customer will just accept our solution.
Many years ago I read a story that made this concept very tangible to me. The story involved an architect who built a bunch of office buildings around a central green space. When the landscaping crew asked him where he wanted to put the walkways, the architect said, “Just sod the entire green.” At first, this seemed like a crazy idea but the architect knew there were a lot of intangibles he didn’t know and rather than force a decision he knew time would reveal the answers.
After several months people had worn paths across the lawn connecting the various building to each other. Without a pre-designed pathway system, the pedestrians created curved pathways that were the most efficient way to transit between the buildings. In fact, the pathways were even sized according to the traffic volume.
Perhaps the pathways were formed to take advantage of the shade offered by some trees or the buildings themselves during particularly hot and sunny days. Or perhaps they were formed to avoid particularly gusty areas as the building funneled the prevailing breezes through the central green space. Many of these elements would have been hard or even impossible to predict how the pedestrians would react.
Often we try to cross every “t” and dot every “i” before we have all the data we need to make a good decision. In the end, sometimes it is better to just delay action and wait to see how your customers will interact with our solution before implementing a final and more permanent solution.
Are you forcing a solution when you can afford to wait?
