From the category archives:

design thinking

Staring at Acoustic Ceiling Tiles

by Pete Abilla January 25, 2010
This entry is part 5 of 28 in the series queueing theory

There is a Design Thinking opportunity to Emergency Room care.  In my previous post, I discussed the time involved in waiting to receive care -queueing properties of ER care.  What I didn’t discuss is the feeling and experience of the patient during care.  That’s the topic for this post today. We know that ER Wait [...]

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Dichotomous Thinking at IDEO No More

by Pete Abilla November 11, 2009

Recently, Tim  Brown, the CEO at IDEO came to a realization that Design Thinking can coexist with Six Sigma and Lean.  For a while, his stance was really of black-and-white thinking: it’s either Design Thinking or Lean Thinking.  This position is akin to a student who believes that if he doesn’t earn an “A” in [...]

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Goodbye Customer: Loyalty, Costs, Complexity, and Recovery

by Pete Abilla August 22, 2009

Goodbye Customer. That is sometimes what we say, without knowing the full costs and burden that proposition means on the business.  Ironically, businesses are often unaware that their actions are pushing the customer away while at the same time trying to recover and retain them through expensive customer retention programs.  Metaphorically, this is like pushing [...]

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Elegance and Encapsulation

by Pete Abilla June 19, 2009

Hiding unnecessary information from a customer is good business. Have you ever had an interaction with a business, where your goal was to get served, but instead the business shares their problems with you? Were you left thinking “I’ve got problems of my own, I don’t need or care to know yours. Just give me [...]

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Purposeful Simplicity, Unthoughtful Complexity

by Pete Abilla April 15, 2009

Most people or organizations do not, by design, create a product or service with the goal of “making the most complex product that nobody can use”.  In other words, rarely do we see purposeful complexity but instead we see much unthoughtful complexity. i am going to create the most complex product or service and nobody [...]

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On Queueing, Oil Change, and Customer Experience

by Pete Abilla April 2, 2009
This entry is part 2 of 28 in the series queueing theory

Earlier this week, I went to Jiffy Lube to get my oil change. I once worked for a person responsible for the redesign of many waiting rooms in various industries, so I went with an observant eye, looking for the items that he taught me about in his ethnographic work.   It was a very [...]

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How To Be A Human

by Pete Abilla January 29, 2009

I had an experience recently where I spoke with a group of friends and acquaintances about the economy and the existential despair that is all around us.  Then, a friend said something that shocked me: . . . it’s terrible that (company x) went through such a huge delayering What?  “Delayering” as a euphemism for [...]

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Not Accountable, Not Responsible

by Pete Abilla August 9, 2008

Team size can make a big difference in the success of your service or product. What is counterintuitive for most people is that the larger the team size, the lower the likelihood of success for your service or product.  Why? Entropy can set in and large teams are inherently bad vehicles for communication. More insipid, [...]

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Maintain Forward Tension

by Pete Abilla July 20, 2008

One principle in Wing Chun is the maintaining of forward tension.  To explain, I’ll draw the distinction between Tension and Energy and show how this principle in Wing Chun can be applied to Change Management. Tension is a type of Energy A Wing Chun maxim goes as follows: soft and relaxed strength will put your [...]

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