When everyone is right and somehow the experience is still wrong

Large organisations are full of smart people making sensible decisions for perfectly rational reasons, which is occasionally how they end up creating experiences no sensible person would ever design.

So how on earth do we keep ending up here? Well, it becomes rather obvious when you try to connect thousands of those decisions around one continuous customer relationship and discover that everyone has evidence that they're right and strangely little confirming that they're wrong, the data is abundant but somehow never quite useful enough, the desire for customer-centricity starts colliding with power, budgets, and the very real incentives that shape people's careers. While somewhere in the middle of all that there is the possibility that you've unintentionally handed accountability to a machine one too many times, becoming efficient at finding, optimising and reproducing the obvious rather than imagining what isn't.

Across industries and markets, we have encountered these tensions, and plenty of others, enough times that you know they’re coming. You get better at spotting them earlier, smoothing out what you can, and more deftly navigating the bits that remain inconveniently, irrationally human and, let's be honest, isn't that where the fun is?