Key Concepts

Think of the troubles we would have if managers and employees of our enterprise had different answers to the question, "What is 2 plus 3?" We take it for granted that everyone would give exactly the same answer: 5. To achieve this phenomenal consensus, we have all had extensive education and drill on basic math over many years. Sadly, we do not have this same level of agreement on the meaning of basic terms critical to organizational success.

Ask any dozen people in the organization who they think "our customers" refers to. If your organization is like most, you will get about a dozen different answers. If you don't think this ambiguity matters, read no further. Your transformation efforts are doomed to failure. No only does this matter, it is often a principal obstacle to all purposeful endeavors. But most folks can't see it, like the iceberg below the surface.

No significant organizational improvement or transformation can be sustained without a broadly shared language. There are several objectives for identifying and describing a few key concepts here:

• Impose a discipline on our language that is equal in precision to a simple mathematical formula.
• Remove the confusion inherent in basic terms we assume everyone understands.(e.g., service, customers, outcome).
• Demonstrate how you can test for common understanding.
• Accelerate your C3 transformation process.

-- Key Concepts --

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Benchmarking
Benchmarking can help break the convergent thinking paradigm by identifying others who are already doing things we may think are impossible: it can defeat vital lies. A strong virtue of benchmarking is that it can lead to very rapid improvement. This can be essential for success (if not survival) in a fast changing environment.

Broker
A broker is the customer who acts as an agent for the end–user and/or the producer.

Change Strategies
Effective change strategies enable these questions to be answered by design, rather than through default or trial and error. Click here to see questions.

Customer Priorities
The objective of C3 is to enable you to determine who your customers are, what they want and how to proactively satisfy them.

Customer-Centered Thinking
The customer-centered organization begins the transformation process by understanding the outcomes expected by customers with uniquely distinct roles. The organization measures and translates those outcomes into product design characteristics that are wanted by each type of customer. The process for creating those products is then redesigned to enable short cycle time, reduced cost, high variety and low error. This is called the “growing a business” approach.

End-User
This customer will personally use the product to achieve a desired outcome.

Expectations
Customer expectations are considered the basis for determining what “quality” means. Simply put, quality is the degree to which customers get what they want. Quality is product-focused.

Fixer
A fixer is any customer who will have to make repairs, corrections, modifications, or adjustments to the product at any point in its life cycle for the benefit of the end-user.

Innovation
Quality initiatives have traditionally focused on product and process improvement, influenced by industry (producer) standards, current practices and existing technology. Improvements tend to be made incrementally, using convergent thinking. The traditional questions encouraging improvement in quality include: (1) How many defects or “things gone wrong” can we count? (2) Does this product meet measurable specifications? (3) Are we in compliance? And (4) How can we apply continuous improvement to our process or product?

Measures
Click here to find out what we fear about measures and what good measures are.

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