Author Archives: petersironwood

Five Habits of Highly Creative Teachers.

08 Tuesday Jul 2014

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Teaching. Creativity. Teaching + Creativity –> Skepticism. And yet, I had to admit that I had tried to use creativity myself in teaching. For example, I had taught a required course for RN’s in statistics — a course that they typically had no real desire for. So, I had tried to make it fun, understandable, and provide a way for them to see how it actually was important in their career and their life. For example, I made cartoons to explain the F-test and to help them remember the steps.

And, even among my teachers, there had been those who were creative and encouraged creativity. For example, in my high school English class, I complained that we were underlining verbs and nouns in meaningless and random sentences and that we *recalled* some of this random and meaningless material. Hence, it would be better to use material that had some meaning to it. My teacher encouraged me to run an experiment and indeed, I showed that people in my class really were remembering these meaningless sentences.

Okay. So, maybe teaching and creativity could be positively related and not antithetical. I thought I would give it a try any way. Perhaps I could learn some techniques for additional creativity. That could prove useful.

The course did not seem to carry a warning label however, that the course material was not just “out there” but “in here”! This course required an internaljourney not just learning about “stuff.” Instead of “easy” assignments such as “write a Shakespearean Sonnet about alligators” —which I could probably do in a half hour, it had assignments such as “write something about a topic that is central to your life.” What? How long? What topic? What is central to my life?!

So…such open ended assignments cause me to go in circles. Of course, I can think of *many* things which are central, but which is the most central? Or, are all these things equally important? And, how much of an effort is it worth writing about it? And, do I write about it now, or do I think about it more first? And, will writing about it cause me to “freeze” my ideas when I may want to change what is most central tomorrow? Yikes.

Despite the difficulties, the course was very worthwhile and I recommend it to anyone who has the chance to take this in the future. A few of the habits in particular were things I had fallen out of and been reminded of. For example, the course introduced the notions of curation and remixing. I had long ago discovered that becoming immersed in a field allowed me to be creative in that field; indeed, it forced creativity. But along the way, by being constantly busy at work and required to do things too quickly I had fallen into the habit of relying completely on what I already knew.

The second thing I needed to be reminded of was the importance of tribe. I have always been most productive and had the most fun when working with a group. Yet, it was always easy to find these and now I am in a position where I need to create one or more.

And, finally, one of the reasons open ended assignments are so difficult for me is that it is very hard to know whether I “won” or “finished” or was “successful.” So thinking more deeply about the concept of “failure” was also really useful.

Starting your Customer Experience with a Lie

13 Monday Jan 2014

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I really need someone to explain this strategy behind the following kinds of communications to me.  I get things in email and in snail mail and they start out with something like, “In response to your recent enquiry…”, or “Here is the information you requested.” or “Congratulations!  Your application was approved!”  And…they are all LIES!  I understand that sometimes people lie.  And I understand that companies are sometimes greedy.  But I do not understand how it can possibly be in their interest to start their communications with a potential customer with a complete and easily discovered lie.  What is up with that?  So far, the only explanation I can gather is that they only want a very small number of very very gullible (perhaps even impaired) customers that they can soak every penny out of so the initial contact is a kind of screening device.  ??  Any other suggestions?

Newsflash: MUSAK does not compensate for bad customer experience

09 Thursday Jan 2014

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Newsflash: Playing really low quality musak while the customer is on hold for 40 minutes DOES NOT improve the customer experience.  Nor, does ALWAYS playing the message that you are experiencing “unusually heavy volumes” right now improve your credibility. Now, I admit that someone in marketing who thought about for about 15 seconds *might* think that playing really bad music would be a good thing.  After all, people do pay money to listen to music.  Not everyone is a pirate.  And, people spend a lot of time listening to music.  Here’s the thing that will come to you if you think about for 20 or 30 seconds though.  People play to listen to the music they choose. They do not pay to hear the music you choose.  Furthermore, people pay to listen to music that is high quality. Granted, sometimes, when nothing else is available some of the people some of the time would prefer low quality music to no music at all. But NO-ONE chooses absurdly bad quality music over silence.  One more thing: unless you are a love-struck pre-teen, you do not listen to the same short sequence of music over and over and over and over for an hour at a time.  No.  You listen to a piece of music.  Then, you listen to a DIFFERENT piece of music.  Then, you listen to a DIFFERENT piece of music.

Now, I do grant that it is somewhat useful if you are going to put your customers on hold for 40 minutes that you give some sort of signal other than complete silence to show that you are still there and haven’t had the system “hang up” on them (which happens all too often but is another topic). But playing loud, obnoxious, very low fidelity music is not the answer.

Back to credibility.  If you are really monitoring the call volume and the customer calls at a time of really unusual high call volume, you may want to tell them that they would have better luck another time.  But if you *always* play this message, what do you think it does to your credibility? I am amazed to find that my credit union, an otherwise fine institution, *always* plays this message.  And every single time, it makes me think twice about whether I can really trust my funds to an organization that clearly lies every single day.

The word “simply” should be banned.

02 Thursday Jan 2014

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So, in 2013, I changed from four medical plans to four different medical plans to six plans for 2014.  Thank goodness we don’t have a “single payer” system because there is nothing I love more than pouring through a hundred pages of text for each plan which is mainly garbage but occasionally has important information.  There is nothing more fun than ping-ponging among doctors every time your plan changes.  Oh, wait!  I forgot that in addition to the plans I *actually* had, IBM also sent me huge packets of information on plans that were no longer relevant.  In the midst of all this, I was heartened to find a concise 72 page document from my dental plan which also informs me: “Please note: if you are a previous user of MyBenefits, you can still enjoy all the same features under the new plan. Simply visit (our website) and re-register with an updated username and password for access to your new plan.”  It is the word, “simply” that I object to. Indeed, in some parallel universe, there is probably a time and place for the word “simply” but in has no legitimate place in actually 21st century America.  It *invariably* signals this message: “We are going to make this difficult for you.  But we don’t want to come out and say that so we will preface our instructions with the word simply so when you have trouble you won’t blame us but yourself.”  

(Why do I need a different userid and password?).   Anyway, you know the drill.  You go to the website and the first six userids that bear any resemblance to my name are taken.  But they don’t typically tell you that till you also enter a password.  And, of course, there are the typical “security questions” such as “What sized underwear did you wear in the fourth grade?”  “What was your second grade teacher’s maiden name?”  “What was the name of the company you bought your first ant farm from?”  And so on.  

This ironic use of “simply” is not confined to websites.  It also applies to packaging as in, “SIMPLY remove the plastic overwrap.” Yeah. But, what if you left your chain saw in the garage?  “Simply, tear the plastic along the indicated line.”  In the rare case, when it is physically possible to tear, it never tears evenly.  More typically it is some semi-metalic plastic that requires an industrial laser cutter. the most recent example involved two different kinds of dry cat food.  These were nearly impossible for me to “simply” open.  I left the bags for a few minutes to get an exacto knife and when I returned two minutes later, my CATS had indeed simply opened the packages and spread the contents around the hallway.  For all I know, they might have actually ingested a piece of cat food but it was clear that their main intent was simply to cause a mess.  The reason they could open the packages simply is that they have cat claws!  I don’t!   Not sure what genius came up with the idea that packages of cat food should be opened simply by cats but complexly by humans.  

Since the word “simply” has simply gone out of fashion in its true meaning, I think we should simply ban its use.   Period.

I made a mistake; here’s what you can do to fix it!

18 Wednesday Dec 2013

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Having recently moved across the country, fixing up our new house, dealing with a huge moving van fire, health and family issues, I found myself with 45 seconds of uncommitted time, so I was **thrilled** to get a wonderful form letter from American Express informing me that a credit card I had cancelled about five years ago nonetheless had been compromised and it was up to me to take a series of time-consuming steps.  At last!! Something to do!! How thoughtful!   If all goes well, this would not only eat up the 45 seconds of free time but about 45 additional days.  Of course, all of these steps require either going on-line or calling an 800 number so we KNOW that all will NOT go well.  Going to a website generally means getting an account with a user name and email address.  These may be the  same or different depending on the site.  You can pretty much bet PeterSIronwood and Peter Ironwood and PIronwood are already taken so I will end up with some completely impossible to recall username like IPeterIWoodIS437.  Of course, I can regenerate my username by merely answering three simple security questions such as, “What is your favorite movie star?”  I don’t know.  Or, worse, it changes from day to day.  Maybe the people who made up these security questions have a favorite movie star that they keep constant for their entire 23 year lives.  But I don’t. “Where did you grow up?”  What makes you think I grew up?  And, what makes you sure it was in one place?  And, even if it was in one place, which is the exact spelling I used last time: “SanDiego”, “San Diego”, “San_Diego”, “San Diego, CA”, “San Diego, California”, “California”, “SoCal”, etc. etc. Of course, I could take the OTHER route and call an 800 number.  “We’re sorry.  All of our agents are helping other customers.  Due to unusual call volumes, your call may take longer to answer than usual.  Your estimated wait time is 5.5 centuries.  But meanwhile, you can listen to really loud, really repetitious, soul-sucking low-fidelity music.  This century’s selection is entitled, “The Dementor’s Theme Song.” You know what? If YOU screw up YOU fix it!  Don’t impose on ME to fix it.

The Opportunity of Disaster

30 Saturday Nov 2013

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After moving from Westchester County New York to the San Diego area, we were asleep (again) on an air mattress awaiting almost all of our material possessions to arrive the next day.  We were awakened by a call from our moving company that our things would not be arriving tomorrow morning as promised.  Or ever.  Indeed, our furniture, clothes, electronics, papers, photographs, paintings, kitchenware, bedding, etc. had all been destroyed in a truck fire near Albuquerque, New Mexico.  This was something of a disaster for us, and, from a positive “customer experience” standpoint, a disaster for the moving company.

But the point of this post is to point out that in this disaster, there is an opportunity for the moving company to be proactive and excellent and greatly ameliorate or even turn around this customer service disaster. They could, for example, send us a personal apology.  They could be in constant contact about the status of any remains.   They could arrange for us to visit the site of the fire at their expense.  They could arrange to quickly reimburse us at least for the full amount of our insurance with the moving company so that we could get on with our lives as best we could.  Obviously, photo albums, the drawings of my children, letters from friends, my grandfather’s paintings, and souvenirs from a lifetime of travel could not really be replaced.  But what *could* be replaced needed to be so quickly.  And, given that we were in a somewhat vulnerable state, this disaster really offered an opportunity for the company to provide the very best customer service they possibly could under the circumstances. 

That was the opportunity.  What did they do instead?  They basically refused to communicate with us.  At every opportunity, they balked; did not answer emails; did not answer phone calls; did not offer reimbursement.  As we found out later, they did not even pay the towing company who moved their van off the Interstate.  Instead, they focused on how to limit their potential liability by withholding as much information as humanly possible.  They refused to let us even come to the site and examine our stuff.  We found out the day before, thanks to our insurance company, that we would be able to see our stuff on Friday if we flew to Albuquerque and rented a car to drive to Continental Divide.  There we discovered the charred remains of our things.  And, we discovered that nothing had been done for an entire month to protect our things (or those of the other two ex-patrons who shared the misfortune of choosing this moving company).  What was left of our clothes, photos, furniture, etc. was all open to rain, wind, and passersby for over a month.  

Continental Divide is a fitting metaphor for the choice that a company faces when they make a BIG mistake.  They can admit the mistake and do everything in their power to make it right to the customer.  Or, they can do everything in their power to continue to screw the customer in order to save costs, face, and limit liability.  

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Where is the door?

30 Saturday Nov 2013

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Symmetry is often a really nice thing.  I like snowflakes as much as anyone.  So long as no more than three gather at any one time.

And, I suppose that making a building with four identical sides probably saves marginally on costs.  Maybe.  

But if you really care about the “customer experience” wouldn’t it be nice if the customer can figure out how to enter your building? I mean, enter it without walking the perimeter a few times.  Especially if it is raining, or sleeting, or boiling hot, or dark.  There is a variant on this which is popular with convention centers.  They are required by law I guess to have approximately 480 doors or more.  However, typically, all but one or two of these are locked.   

Perhaps an argument could be made that making the entrance to a building difficult to detect adds to security.  I seriously doubt it.  A determined burglar could find out by trial and error or observation where the door is.   That burglar has plenty of time because you see, being a burglar is how they make their living.  But not so your customer.  Much as you would love to *think* that your customer has nothing better to do than circle your establishment trying to find a way in, they do, in reality, have better things to do.  

Recently, I had occasion to visit Paris.  Do you have any trouble finding the doors in the building shown?  Last year was the 850th birthday for Notre Dame.  So, having an entrance which is distinctly visible from a distance as an entrance, we would have to say is a *solved problem*, n’est pas?  Check out Pattern 110, Main Entrance, in Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.

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Customer Experience does not equal Website Design

25 Monday Nov 2013

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Website design is important.  Let there be no mistake about that.  That is an interesting and fascinating topic in its own right.  What I am talking about though is much broader.  You can have a very cool looking website; you can make it easy to navigate within that web site, but still make your overall customer experience totally SUCK!   In fact, that seems to be pretty much the norm.

I am a customer.  Let’s say I want to buy a pen on-line.  Is it really necessary for me to create an account?  Do I have to give you my e-mail and make up a user name?  I can just about guarantee that the first N names I choose will already be taken.  So I end up with some impossible to recall username like, PTERESWOODIRON465.   Sure, I will write it down.  Along with 43,235,309 OTHER user names I have.  Then, of course, I need a password.  Of course, I could make up something simple and easy to remember like PEN or even PENPASSWORD.  How secure is that?  Or, I could pick a password that I use on other sites.  Even worse.  Or, I can make up something really hard to crack and marginally hard to remember like trumpetpalmcandle.  But I’ll probably still have to write it down because it will be YEARS before I go your site to buy another pen.  Meanwhile, if you really suck, you are going to ask for demographic information as well.

Now, before we get stuck in the details of what the screen looks like that asks me for this information and whether to use a scroll down list for the state name, can we go back and ask WHY I really need an “account” to order a frigging pen?  Of course, the dream of the site owners is that once I have an account and keep getting unsolicited email from them about all the wonderful deals they have on pens, I will be unable to control myself and buy another pen several times a day.  NOT LIKELY!  Extremely Unlikely, in fact.  Here is my overwhelmingly normal pen buying behavior.  I DON’T.  I go stay at the Motel Six where they leave the light on for me and I take their pen.  It doesn’t bother me in the least that it says MOTEL SIX on it.  If it writes, I use it.  This is not going to change because of your wonderful website design even if it is relatively simple to put in my username and password and then give the details of my upbringing.  What I AM going to do is get so PO’d at the idea of yet another web account that I am not going to buy a pen at your site at all.   I am going to go to Amazon where I already have an account and buy it there.   If I’m really PO’d, I may even tell my friends what an idiotic company PEN INC (fictional name, I think) is for forcing me to create an account just to buy a pen for my nephew’s birthday.  Even sadder is the fact that no-one in PEN INC will ever have the slightest idea that they not only lost a sale but created a really bad customer experience.  — !PSI

Update addendum on Saturday, Sept. 20th, 2025.

As bad as is the customer experience outlined above, the Democratic Party has seemed to view that as a challenge goal: can we make something even worse. And–yes, they have succeeded! Don’t get me wrong; I generally do vote Democrat and I definitely don’t vote Nazi and I continue to contribute money, but certainly not because of the view that their “contributions consultants” apparently have of me. First, there is the sheer volume of requests which come through every conceivable crack in my electronic armor. Second, there is the degree of stupidity which they assign to me. E-mails are typically headlined with world-shattering news and any set of three e-mails will have at least five contradictions: “John Roberts destroys Trump!” “John Roberts is in Trump’s pocket!” “John Roberts resigns!” “John Roberts becomes POTUS!” etc. None of these headlines are true. It’s click-bait pure and simple. What they really want is money. Okay. Campaigns do take money. But don’t treat your users like idiots who will believe that all it takes is a five dollar contribution to take down the Trumputin Misadministration. It will take money but it will also take planning, coordination, and mutual trust. None of these is enhanced by scattershot e-mail, overblown rhetoric, and bad logic. If I wanted that, I’d be contributing to the Not-See Party (formerly known as the GOP).

Political parties may be the worst offenders, but they are not the only ones. On-line so-called news services are often nearly as bad. When I learned the very little I know about journalism, a headline was supposed to be constructed to inform the reader and the first paragraph of the article was supposed to fill in the most important facts. The rest of the article was meant to include more information in case the reader was particularly interested in that article. Instead, my so-called news feeds are filled with click bait headlines such as: Scientists confirm Life on Mars…; Gerontologists prove that immortality is simply…; Every Billionaire in America knows this simple trick…. And that’s it. That’s all you learn from the headline. If you pay to go behind the firewall and wade through the slog of pop-up ads and read the entire article, you will discover that the headlines should have been: Scientists confirm Life on Mars may be hard to find evidence of; Gerontologists prove that immortality is simply not feasible at this time; Every Billionaire in America knows this simple trick–don’t waste your time with on-line click bait.  

Of course, the details of an e-mail or a website or a message make a difference to customer experience, but if everything you do is geared toward milking as much money from your user right now with no regard to what it means to your longer term relationship or credibility, your customer experience will suck  even if you have a nice font and a good layout.

The Self-Made Man

Essays on America: The Game

You Bet Your Life

Where does your loyalty lie?

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

Dance of Billions

Roar, Ocean, Roar

Introducing Peter S Ironwood

24 Sunday Nov 2013

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I’m not the kind of guy who likes to talk much about me.  That’s not the point.  It doesn’t matter much that when I was five, both my parents abandoned me or why.   Doesn’t matter I spent most of my childhood in the San Diego area being gawked at for my tall skinny frame and unruly blond hair and steel grey eyes. What does matter is that know I am on the lookout.  For what? For things that are WRONG in this world.  We need to get another thing straight. I do this for ME, not for you, though you can certainly benefit. And, when I say “wrong” I don’t mean things that are evil, though God knows there is plenty of that too.  No, what I am talking about is plain simple stupidity.  People make a product or sell you some so-called “service” and it sucks.  And why does it suck?  Because they are not satisfied to make a billion dollars by selling a shipload of vacuum cleaners or cameras or software systems that actually work.  No.  Instead, they want to make 1,000,020,000 bucks by not spending 20K to bring me in and see whether their blasted microwave or or digital watch or whatever actually works for human beings.  And, do you want to know what’s *really* frigging stupid?  They don’t make their stupid billion dollars anyway?  Why?  Because they end up spending millions of dollars on help lines and millions more on TV ads that show some sexy, tight-skirted, plump-lipped open mouth girl seeming to have a big O just from using their vacuum cleaner.  At least those ads I like even though it isn’t going to get me to buy their vacuum cleaner.  But what is with these ads showing people being completely idiotic and pointless.  If the girl air-brushed into that desperate anorexic twitch isn’t going to make me buy their machine, why is some bumble-headed fat guy walking into a wall going to do the trick?  

Case in point: Telephone menu systems that have no obvious option for talking with a human being.  Have you ever run into one of those?  “Please listen to the following menu items and choose the one that describes your car.  Press 1 for black car.  Press 2 for a convertible.  Press 3 for a hummer.  Press four to hear these options again.” WHAT???!!   I own a white BMW sedan.  The Greeks had an interesting word: “hubris” to describe self-defeating pride.  First of all, nobody thinks of all the possible things you might want from this “service” number ahead of time.  Nobody.  So, there should ALWAYS be a choice for talking with an operator.  Do you really need a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford to know this?  Wouldn’t just living on the planet for six or seven years do the trick?  More later.  I have to go try to glue the fragments of my phone back together before Aunt Rennie gets here.  She gets freaked out by my temper.