Theatrical Tools in Service Design

On Camera

We've posted videos of our working methods before, but in German.

For those of you without German skills, here we are in English giving a (super-accelerated) sample at the Service Design Network Conference in Berlin this summer.

Beyond Roleplay - Theatrical Tools in Service Design from Snook on Vimeo.

Thanks to Snook for filming!

Theatrical tools for service experience - an overview

Top practical tips
Theater can give you powerful - and long proven - tools for service design and experience work. Our customers at Work•Play•Experience love them, and I've written about them over the years on this blog. Here are links to some of the best...

Rehearsal and service prototyping
Setting up a safe space (forget this, and you can forget the whole thing)
Running the session (why it's important to break the rules)

Powerful rehearsal/prototyping tools
The director's chair
Subtext (top tip!)

Experience structure and timing
Perfect story structure (top tip!)
Starting badly on purpose
Working with contrast
Thinking about timing

Entrances and moving people through them
Stage design lessons for entrances (important for retailers & UX)
When the backstage intrudes

How to guarantee a hit
The Big Three (just for fun?)

Tool pic by Svadilfari at flickr

How to rehearse (or not) a presentation

Best of both worlds

How a stand-up comedian rehearses for both flexibility and confidence.

An over-rehearsed presentation - like an over-rehearsed show - can really stink. It can be so automatic that it loses touch with the audience. It becomes a polished set of actions and words and ceases to be two-way communication, a persuasive dialogue.

On stage, we know that the comic aside - the gag improvised when the scenery collapses or a cellphone in the audience rings - is usually the biggest laugh of the evening. It's because the audience knows it was one-off, one-time, authentic creativity. So should we always improvise?

Usually, no. Bluffing your way through Shakespeare (or a complex presentation) on a wing and a teleprompter will not get you far. You need the confidence to know what happens next, the experience to get you through the technically challenging parts. And that only comes from practice. Lots of practice.

Hmm. So - we are in a quandary. Authentic, spontaneous flexibility, or calm rehearsed confidence? What to do?

The answer is this: you should not rehearse your presentation, you should rehearse your presentations. Plural.

When I'm developing a stand-up routine. I have many of my gag ideas on little index cards which I can add notes to, reshuffle, tear in half, or even eat in frustration. I will stand in a room away from the world (this is embarrassing) and rant my way through the cards. I'll try every line ten different ways. I'll try ten different orders. I'll throw cards away, and dig them out of the bin. I'll try missing out this part, and go off on a stream-of-consciousness tangent expanding that section. I'll even try running the cards backwards - seriously, it can teach you a lot.

After a while, I don't need the cards much, and I can play with my material while jogging, driving, or screaming at the top of my lungs while zooming down the Autobahn on my motorcycle. (If you've ever seen a lunatic doing this, now you know it was me. It feels as mad as a brush, but it's very effective.)*

At the end, I have not just rehearsed one routine - I have rehearsed dozens of routines based on basically the same material.

This stand-up rehearsal technique works for presentations too. Play with the pieces and bang them together until you know every angle.

After a while, you will know what the best order is. You can use it for your test audience. But you will not be tied to that order...

You will have all the confidence you need, because you will have mastered your material. But you will also have the flexibility you need. You will know that there is more than one path through the presentation, and that you can cope with anything.

Most importantly, you will be able to adjust your presentation with confidence to genuinely respond to the audiences signals - making it a real two-way exchange, not some polished performance that could have been done by DVD.

Have fun!

*Actually, a shouted rehearsal is a great technique. I know classical actors who rehearse monologues by shouting them from the beach into the ocean waves. Of course, this works best if you have a Victorian greatcoat and rather wild hair.

Photo of some of my index cards by me.

(This post is based on a comment I made last year on TJ Walker's blog)

!!! More great showbiz tips for presenters here.

A Stand-Up's guide to presentation technique

My personal top ten

Business people love my presentation coaching. I'm an actor and stand-up comedian, so they find my approach refreshing as well as highly effective. Here, in a nutshell, is what I teach them:

10 Close the laptop
Do not plan your presentation by opening PowerPoint and typing your first bullet! Instead, spend time thinking about your audience. Who are they? What do they want? What do they already believe?

9 Throw out your material
It’s a huge mistake to start by collecting material. Don’t ask yourself what you have, ask yourself what your audience will need. Avoid facts and figures - choose powerful images, human stories and genuine emotion instead. These “soft” options are proven to be more effective than any hard numbers. And cut every word that is not truly useful to your audience.

8 Take what’s left and cut it in half
Yes, in half, at least. You should never speak more than five minutes - three is better - unless the people are coming just to hear you speak or you are a paid professional speaker. (And if you think your presentation is “just five minutes”, it is probably about 12. Time it, you’ll see. ) Finish early - they will love you.

7 Don’t start at the beginning
Comedians, rock musicians and James Bond start their shows with a huge bang, and finish with a bigger one. In between, they present a sequence of highlights, getting more impressive all the time. This “Boom!-wow-wow-wow-BOOM!!” sequence is ideal for your presentation (and for any service process). So start with a really strong point - your second best one - then drop down and build up towards your very best “BOOM!” point at the end. Take questions at the bar.

6 Burn the beamer
Look, people’s eyes are attracted to light - it’s why we stare at the fire, the telly, the ocean - so if you use PowerPoint you are distracting from the real presentation - which is not your ruddy slides, it is you. Ask yourself: would Martin Luther King or JFK have benefited from bullet points? (Er.. no pun intended. Well spotted, Ms Pollard!)
(If you have a huge room, you might need a beamer. But use it to project live video of yourself, or for powerful images. Avoid wordy slides and lists - if your slide has more than seven words on it, you are in big trouble. And switch it off as often as you can. Hey, try the “B” key!)

5 Set yourself on fire
This is incredibly important - we look at light, so the brightest object in the room must be you. Get a spotlight on you, and get every other light in the room dimmed or switched off - including the beamer. Insist on this.

4 Don’t read
Never, ever, ever read your presentation. It sounds unnatural, and people need to see your eyes to trust you. Keyword cards are ok, but you won’t need to look at them because you have rehearsed so well. You were planning to rehearse (with a test audience) weren’t you? How much is the time of all the people in the audience worth?

-13 Do something crazy
Do something to surprise your audience. Give them a reason to remember you. For example - don’t hand out business cards, but print your number on bundles of €5 notes and throw them at the audience.

2 Get carried away
This is the big one. I don’t care how you slouch, how you stutter, how badly you dress and how much you fidget with your hands - if you truly, utterly believe what you say, you will convince people. Be yourself and let your passion show. (And if you don’t feel passionate about what you are presenting, please go home and stop wasting our time.)

1 Cancel the presentation
Presentations are there to persuade - not inform. Use them to move emotions, and sway decisions. If you just want to inform, then e-mails, articles, web based training, workshops or personal discussions are proven to be better. Too many presentations are information orgies. So cancel them, and do some work instead.

Magic lantern shot from Magic Lantern Show at flickr.
Article previously published in German in the FrankenPower magazine.

Book your own presentation coaching here.
You should follow me on Twitter here.

One customer at a time

Easy, practical, effective

I enjoyed the slides for Jane McGonigal's talk on the future of game development. (Note to self: we will be seeing increasing influence of the gaming industry on customer experience thinking. Watch this space).

My favourite slide said:

THE DESIGN CHALLENGE: If you could make one person measurably happier, who would it be, and what game would you make for them?

Let's turn Ms McGonigal's words into an experience design statement:

THE EXPERIENCE DESIGN CHALLENGE: If you could make one customer measurably happier, who would it be, and what change would you make for them?

Important: we are taking here about a permanent change to the customer experience, not a random gift.

Go on, think of a customer, a real one, and start improving your experience one customer at a time....

Potentially happier customer pic by andreas photography at flickr

Managing a creative environment

Playstorming your customer experience

The best ideas to improve your customer experience are already floating around in your team's heads. To get them into to the real world with the minimum of digging, you need to foster a special kind of working environment.

In theater, we talk about the rehearsal room as a "safe space". It's a place where experiment and failure are explicitly allowed and welcomed. It is a place where distractions are held to a minimum, and where tools are kept simple to encourage flights of fantasy. And it's a place where the person in charge knows that their job is to help the cast do something that they (the director) cannot do.

It's a difficult task for many managers, because it feels like chaos and (oh horror!) play. Famously upside-down-guitarist Karl Wallinger describes a similar experience:

"(It's) simultaneously doing opposite things — you want to give the sessions control and direction while trying to do the opposite, to create an anarchic space where people can add their piece with as little affectation as possible. That's a fine line to tread, between too much authority and letting people go. It's like being a mini local government — making sure there's roads and bridges."

This kind of enabling, gentle, inspirational management is already important in fields that rely on fast, cheap, iterative innovation - like software development houses. And it is ideal for talking about your customer experience, playing around with it to generate valuable insights and truly fresh ideas.

You can build a safe space almost anywhere - just do all you can to prevent outside distractions, and make it clear to your people that they are safe, that mistakes made here remain here. Don't do this after a hard day's work - this is hard work in itself and should be rewarded as such. You can help release the creativity monkey by throwing in a big heap of toys. You might give them some items of clothing, coloured cloths, cardboard boxes, fat marker pens, and a bunch of crazy objects that have nothing to do with your work but which can represent a wide variety of real world items - or items that do not exist yet. Break the tension by getting them laughing - one good idea it to get them talking about their "worst ever..." experiences.

At some point in the early part of your session, you should expect some heavy venom. You have given your people freedom and - if they believe your offer - a lot of frustration will come out. (Often, this important catharis will eat up the first first half-day). Listen, welcome the honesty, and then offer the group the opportunity to work on solutions to their frustrations.

Now start working on your own customer experiences. But wait - it's effective to start outside your own company with best cases from elsewhere, then start applying those principles. Act out encounters. Switch roles. Try other ways to do the same thing. Try something crazy. Figure out what you are thinking at every step, and why you chose those words. Encourage your team to stay on their feet (even if you normally work sitting down) and always remember "don't tell me, show me". Interruptions are good, but sometimes you should specify a director to mould an interaction (as described here).

Your target is not to create a fixed script, but to generate as many ideas as possible, and perhaps narrow them down to a generous list of strategies and tips that every member of the team can draw on.

Here's the pitch - my team is incredibly good at this. So, if you need help, tips, or ideas, just call me. Talk is free. :)

Safe space pic by thornj at flickr.

An experiment...

Look here --->

This is how it works: if this post got more of your attention than usual, simply post a comment by clicking on the word "comments" in orange below. Or mail me.

That's it. Thanks!

Adam

The Gods' View - an exercise in perspective

Can you hear me at the back?

I think I like Garth Brooks, though I've never really heard his music. As the story goes, he liked to personally check out the worst seats in his venues just before the show, seeing if the seats way up in the "Gods'" were worth his fan's hard earned cash*. It's a technique we can all use - and not just when we are on stage.

How does your customer experience work from the metaphorical back row?

Imagine you are the very last passenger to check in, the diner who gets the very last portion of soup, the very last caller to dial the hotline today. Imagine you are the absolute latest adopter, the most allergic guest, or you wear the most outsiziest size. Or perhaps you have a dicky back, terrible hearing, low bandwidth or fifty-five year old eyes? Does the experience still work for you?

It's crucial to put ourselves in the shoes of all our customers - not just the ones that look like our "typical customer" personas. This is not (only) because we want to please as many as possible, but because these end-of-the-bell-curve viewpoints and needs can tell us something about the way our experience works for everyone.

A great example from WorkPlayExperience colleague Markus Hormess: I was typing up our Book of Shenanigans, and Markus peered over my shoulder.

"Look at it at 25% zoom," he suggested. "Does the layout still make sense?"

Take a step back. Book late. Get down on your knees. Sit in the cheapest seat. Squint at your packaging.

I bet you will learn something.

Experience Monitor readers click HERE for more...

Binocular pic by Operators Are Standing By at Flickr.

* If the seats were no good, Garth would give away front-row tickets to those back-row fans, or dash up there for a close-up song during the concert. And this from one of the most successful recording artists of all time. Respect.

Fake smiles are dangerous

Take the test

I've written before on the dangers of fake smiles in customer experience design. Customers spot them - can you?

The BBC's psychology crew offer this test.

The best way to avoid fake smiles (and uneasy customers) is to make sure that your team are having a blast at work. That's not just a hunch - the Sunday Times Great Places to Work Survey showed that companies whose staff were enjoying their daily grin(d) grew four times faster than average.*

More on what to do about fake smiles here and here.

Plastic smile pic by colodio by at flickr.

* Over the past five years, companies rated as “a good place to work” have shown 25 per cent growth in share and dividend returns, compared to an average return of only 6.3 per cent.
(Source: Sunday Times Great Places To Work Survey, 2002)

Tools for finding meaning

What's it all about, then?

In theatre rehearsals (and in service design workshops), we spend a lot of thought on our message . We ask ourselves what we are trying to say with our play or customer experience.

Hang on! Don't exit stage left pursued by a groan!

This is not wishy-washy heart searching, tree-hugging or vibrating crystals, it's cold hard business. If our offering does not reflect who we truly are, our audience (or customers) will rapidly smell the inauthenticity, and will stay away in droves.

To the surprise of many (and at the cost of much initial eye-rolling) one of the more powerful tools we use to find out what we are talking about is the collage. Remember the heady smell of paper glue in fourth grade art class? That's the one. A table gets filled with ripped-out pictures, Post-its, sections of underlined texts, snapshots, sketches, even small props. When you sit back and look, you can see connections you never saw before. And - very often - the dominant themes are staring you in the face.

The Intarweb offers some tremendous (and addictive) tools for doing much the same thing, without the Copydex headache. One of my favourites is Wordle, which produces word clouds based on any text. Often, the meaning hits you right in the eye - along with a couple of surprises.
Here, for example, is Churchill's famous "fight them on the beaches" speech:



Obviously, the repeated fight refrain dominates - but so do defend, confidence, island, British, and strength. Just the sort of positive, rousing words that master orator Churchill wanted to be heard.

And here - in dangerous proximity - the word cloud for the five most popular posts on this blog:



Hmm. Stage. Audience. People. Wow. Customer. Experience....

I think it about sums it up, but I would have expected another order - so a valuable lesson for me there. Perhaps I should spend more words on the more theatrical side of my thinking...

Go on, go crazy. Stick your website, handbook and ads through a few of these visualisation tools, and see what message you are really leaving with your customers.

PS Thanks for the Wordle heads-up to ConversationAgent.

Collage tools pic by VaguelyArtistic at flickr.

Subtext in customer contact - try this!

A practical exercise to understand customers better

Luvvies (that's us theatrical types) tend to drone on about one or two subjects pretty much constantly. Besides fourth walls, the indisputable fashion merits of roll-necked pullovers and how awful the audience is, one of our favourite themes is "subtext".

Subtext is what is left over when you take the written lines away from a role. In other words, it is what the character is thinking. The same piece of text can have different subtexts depending on the context, character and interpretation of the role.

"I love you!", for example, could have a bunch of different possible subtexts, including...

"I want to sleep with you!" "Don't leave me!" "I'm sorry!"
"I'm leaving you!" "Help me!" "Goodbye!" "You have to die!"
"Don't hurt me!" "Mmh. Please do that again!"

Get the idea?

Here's an exercise that generates lots of insight: set up a couple of your team to simulate a customer encounter (yes, the dreaded roleplay). Try to be as real as possible. Now go through the encounter again, and for each statement, think about the subtext - what the customer or team member really means.

(A fun and practical way to do this to have someone stand behind each speaker, perhaps with their hand on the speaker's shoulder. Just tell them to "say out loud what you think he is thinking". This impro game will give you the rough idea.)

For example, when the customer says "Do you have anything simpler?", his subtext speaker might "This has more features than I need". But they could equally say "I don't understand this, I must be stupid.", or just "I cannot afford this, I need to get out of here."

This is a powerful exercise for two reasons. Firstly, it can sensitise team members to see the customers' point of view better.

Secondly, you can use the subtext of the customer's words to think about replies that truly address the customer's needs - or at least pin them down more precisely. (The three versions above would all need very different answers, and two of those answers must be delicately phrased to avoid making the customer feel awkward).

Remember, it is only by deeply understanding your customer's needs and expectations that you can hope to exceed them. And exceeding expectations is what creates the emotions that bring customers back again and again.

Script pic by kevinthoule at Flickr

In the chair

A simple exercise to absolutely revolutionise your customer experience

You need:

- your team, or at least three of them.
- one chair (preferably of the folding canvas variety with DIRECTOR written on the back - but a normal office chair will do at a pinch)
- (optional: one megaphone, one beret, one monocle, one riding whip, one amusing central European accent)

This is what you do:

1. Sit one of your people in the chair. This is the Director (and you can give them the fun props and accent if you like - I know I would). Remember, the Director's word is Law.
2. Get two or more of the team to act out a typical customer service situation. One is the customer, one is the team member.
3. The person playing the customer should be as honest as they can.
4. The director can stop, start, modify, re-run and generally reshape the behaviour, manner, words, posture, actions, choices and facial expression of the team member (not the customer) at any time. They should do this as often as they want until they think the customer contact is just perfect.
5. Discuss
6. Switch jobs.


7. If you are really brave (and want some really telling results) use a real customer. No, don't ask them to play the customer, use them as the Director.

Chair pic by cathycracks at flickr

Another point of view...

Stealing an idea from Hollywood

I was working with some first-time movie directors recently, and noticed that they soon figure out not to watch the actors directly. Instead, they learn watch their monitor. It shows the point of view that the film-goer will have in the cinema.

Crucially, the view through the lens is often very different to what we expect to see. That "focussed" view blocks out distractions and really tells the truth - warts and all!

So, next time you walk through your location, looking for little problems and potential improvements to the experience, try this:

1. Get a video camera and walk through, filming. Scan from side to side, up and down. Don't forget the toilets and the carpark. A day or more later, watch the film (preferably in slow motion) and see how many potential improvements you spot. Pause the film now and then. I bet you see stains on the paintwork you had forgotten you had. I bet you can tell now if that sign really is prominent enough... (Interestingly, if you have a way to reverse the film, you will notice even more details.)

2. Repeat the exercise on your knees, or in a wheelchair. This is the visual experience a child, smaller person or wheelchair user will have. (Behaviour guru Temple Grandin uses this technique when checking out abbatoirs for animal welfare approval. It gives her the "animal-eye-view", and she spots lots of potentially spooky stuff other inspectors miss).

3. If you haven't got a video camera, use a still camera, or even an old viewfinder. You needn't even take pictures - just walk slowly.

4. If you haven't got a normal camera, cut a hole in a piece of cardboard and stare at parts of your location through it. Don't laugh - this works!

5. Try it blindfold - with a guide - and pick up the auditory and olfactory experience far more sharply than usual. Where is it too loud? Stinky? Too echo-ey and cold?

Try it. You will be amazed. But don't trip.

Viewfinder pic by Rutty at flickr.
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Microphone technique for speeches and presentations

Don't point that thing at me

When I'm doing stand-up or a capella at commerical gigs, somebody important often wants to "say a few words".

(First off - this is always a bad idea. Everybody hates speeches; and your guests know why they are there and who is paying - so why torture them?)

So anyway, some guy (it's almost always a guy) in a dark suit (sigh...) comes up and asks to use one of our microphones. Of course we have to say yes, because he is paying for the evening. So he grabs the mike, gives a big smile, and proceeds to make himself look like a complete klutz in front of his important guests because he has no idea how to use the dang thing.

This is what he should have known:

1. Never bang on a mike to see if it is switched on. Nobody likes to hear "K'THUMP!" at 90 dB. Assume it is live - if not, you will know as soon as you try to speak. (You probably shouldn't say "wuhn, two" either, unless you are wearing bright white sneakers and a Spinal Tap or Iron Maiden t-shirt. If you are, then such behaviour is perfectly acceptable, and even encouraged.)

2. Hold the mike about a handsbreadth from your mouth. Further away, and you will have to be turned up (which means there will be more interference), any closer and you will sound like the Voice of GOD. This is fun, but probably not the effect we are going for.

3. Speak into the mike, not over it. We often see TV hosts and journalists holding mikes casually in front of their chest, with the mike pointed straight up (like the gameshow host left). It looks great, but those lucky chaps have specialist equipment or overhanging maxillas.

The million dollar tip: imagine the mike is a flashlight and try to shine it at the roof of your mouth. The guy on the right has it just right.



4. THE KILLER: Keep the mike still, relative to your mouth. The smallest change in the position of the mike relative to your mouth can change the volume enormously. A quick physics lesson - the energy of the sound decreases with the square of the distance from the source. That means, if your mike started three inches from your mouth and you move it to six inches away, you just got four times quieter. Congratulations. Move it to a foot away, and you are sixteen times quieter... And of course, if you turn your head to the side, you must follow with the mike or you will have the same dramatic loss in volume.

5. Don't yell, just speak normally. If you are too quiet or too loud, move the mike slightly to adjust, or just keep talking and look at the technician. He will understand. If you are some kind of charismatic and absolutely need to yell for dramatic effect, move the mike to an easy arm's length or your audience will lose their eardrums.

6. If you get a horrible screeching noise, put your hand over the mike or stick it in your armpit, and wait a second*. You have probably moved too close to the speaker. Move away or give the technician time to adjust. It is traditional to give the sound man a forgiving smile at this point - unfair, but it makes you look good, and he is used to the abuse.

7. When you have finished, don't put the mike down on a hard surface. It will go "KCHTT'THUMP" (as you put it down...), "rrrrrrrrrrrr" (as it rolls off the piano...), "wheeeeeee" (as it plunges to the floor) and "BOOM!!!" (as it hits). This is a Bad Thing. Instead, hand it to someone or - if you know how - switch it off and clip it into its stand.

Right, all you rich industry bosses. Now you know - so no more excuses.

* VIP reader David recommends against this - see the Comments.

Gameshow photo by Lars Hammar at flikr.
Good positioning photo from englishpen at flickr.