Tag Archives: Customer experience

Ban Open Loops: Part Two – Sports

30 Tuesday Sep 2025

Posted by in management, psychology, sports

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Sports and open loops.

Sports offers a joy that many jobs and occupations do not. A golfer putts the ball and it sinks into the cup — or not. A basket-baller springs up for a three pointer and —- swish — within seconds, the shooter knows whether he or she was successful. A baseball hitter slashes the bat through the air and send the ball over the fence —- or hears the ball smack into the catcher’s mitt behind. What sports offers then is the opportunity to find out results quickly and hence offers an excellent opportunity for learning. In the previousiPhoneDownloadJan152013 593 entry in this blog, I gave examples of situations in life which should include feedback loops for learning, but, alas, do not. I called those open loops.

Sports seem to be designed for closed loop learning. They seem to be. Yet, reality complicates matters even here. There are three main reasons why what appears to be obvious opportunities for learning in sports is not so obvious after all. Attributional complexity provides the first complication. If you miss a putt to the left, it is obvious that you have missed the putt to the left. But why you missed that putt left and what to do about it are not necessarily obvious at all. You might have aimed left. You might not have noticed how much the green sloped left (or over read the slant to the right). You may not have noticed the grain. You might not have hit the ball in the center of the putter. You might not have swung straight through your target. So, while putting provides nice unambiguous feedback about results, it does not diagnose your problem or tell you how to fix it. To continue with the golf example, you might be kicking yourself for missing half of your six foot putts and therefore three-putting many greens. Guess what? The pros on tour miss half of their six foot putts too! But they do not often three-putt greens. You might be able to improve your putting, but your underlying problems may be that your approach shots leave you too far from the pin and that your lag putts leave you too far from the hole. You should be within three feet of the hole, not six feet, when you hit your second putt.

A second issue with learning in sports is that changes tend to cascade. A change in one area tends to produce other changes in other areas. Your tennis instructor tells you that you are need to play more aggressively and charge the net after your serve. You try this, but find that you miss many volleys, especially those from mid-court. So, you spend a lot of time practicing volleys. Eventually, your volleys do improve. Then, they improve still more. But you find that, despite this, you are losing the majority of your service games whereas you used to win most of them. You decide to revert to your old style of hanging out at the baseline and only approaching the net when the opponent lands the ball short. Unfortunately, while you were spending all that time practicing volleys, you were not practicing your ground strokes. Now, what used to work for you, no longer works very well. This isn’t the fault of your instructor; nor is it your fault. It is just that changing one thing has ripple effects that cannot always be anticipated.

The third and most insidious reason why change is difficult in sports springs from the first two. Because it is hard to know how to change and every change has side-effects, many people fail to learn from their experience at all. There is opportunity for learning at every turn, but they turn a blind eye to it. They make the same mistakes over and over as though sports did not offer instant feedback. I think you will agree that this is really a very close cousin of what people in business do when they refuse to institute systems for gathering and analyzing useful feedback.

If learning is tricky —- and it is —- is there anything for it? Yes. There is. There is no way to make learning in sports —- or in business —- trivial. But there are steps you can take to enhance your learning process. First, be open-minded. Do not shut down and imagine that you are already playing your sport as well as can be expected for a forty year old, or a fifty year old, or someone slightly overweight or someone with a bad ankle. Take an experimental approach and don’t be afraid to try new things. Second, forget ego. Making mistakes provides opportunities to learn, not proof that you are no good. Third, get professional help. A good coach can help you understand attributional complexity and they can help you anticipate the side-effects of making a change.

Soon, I suspect that the shrinking size and cost and weight of computational and sensing devices will mean that training aids will help people with attributional complexity. I see big data analytics and modeling helping people foresee what the ramifications of changes are likely to be. There are already useful mechanical training aids for various sports. For example, the trade-marked Medicus club enables golfers to get immediate feedback during their full swings.as to whether they are jerking the club. Dave Pelz developed a number of useful devices for helping people understand how they may be messing up their putting stroke.

It may take somewhat longer before there are small tracking devices that help you with your mental attitude and approach. We are still a long way from understanding how the human brain works in detail. But it is completely within the realm of possibility to sense and discover your optimal level of stress. If you are too stressed, you could be prompted to relax through self-talk, breathing exercises, visualization, etc. You do not need technology for that, but it could help. You may already notice that some of the top tennis players seem to turn their backs from play for a moment and talk to an “invisible friend” when they need to calm down. And why not? Nowhere is it law that only kids are allowed to have invisible friends.

“The mental game” and which kinds of adaptations to make over what time scales are dealt with in more detail in The Winning Weekend Warrior How to Succeed at Golf, Tennis, Baseball, Football, Basketball, Hockey, Volleyball, Business, Life, Etc. available at Amazon Kindle.

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Author Page on Amazon

US Open Closed

The Day From Hell: Why should anyone Care?

Wordless Perfection

Sports Fans Only

The Agony of the Feet

Frank Friend or Fawning Foe?

Business Re-engineering

Tennis Upside Down

Donnie Gets his Name on a Tennis Trophy!

Indian Wells Tennis Tournament

Small Things

An Amazing Feet of Athleticism

The Fault is in Defaults

27 Saturday Sep 2025

Posted by in America, HCI, management, politics, Uncategorized, user experience

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“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Photo by egil sju00f8holt on Pexels.com

So Cassius says to Brutus in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. Cassius was trying to convince Brutus to join the plot to assassinate Caesar. As I recall, things did not turn out well for Julius Caesar. Or for Brutus. Or for Cassius. Or, ultimately, for Mark Anthony either, but that’s another story.

The point is that an interesting tension arises when we imagine that we ourselves are the masters of our fate. We like to imagine that it is our ability, or attitude, or grit that determines how much money or happiness or health we have. On the other hand, we also realize that many things are pretty much beyond our conscious control and due largely to our heredity, our environment, our upbringing, etc. Both views are partly true and both have their place.

If you are a user of a product and you want to get something accomplished, blaming the stupid product will not help you accomplish your goals. On the other hand, if you are a product developer, it will not help you to blame your user. You need to design thoughtfully.

I was reminded of this debate by trying to scan a document. In general, I am amazed how excellent scanners and printers are today, not to mention cheap! I was born in an era of expensive, heavy, noisy, dot matrix printers or teletypes. You’ve come a long way, baby! But the software that actually lets us use these marvelous machines? Here, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Today, I repeatedly tried to scan a one page document to no avail. I think I finally diagnosed what the problem was. The scan screen came up with a default that said “custom size” and the defaulted “custom dimensions” were 0 by 0. Because, obviously, the development team had done a thorough study of users and found, I suppose somewhat surprisingly, that the most common size of image people wanted to scan was 0 by 0. I suppose such images have the advantage that you can store many more of them on your hard drive than images that are 8.5 by 11 inches or 3 inches by 5 inches, say.

This absurd default is not an isolated example. Often there seem to be “defaults” are rather odd, to say the least. My google map application, for no discernible reason, decided that a good default location for me is the geographical center of the continental United States. It was not “born” with this default but somewhere along the line “developed” it. Why? I have never travelled (knowingly) to the geographical center of the United States. I have never wanted to “find” the geographical center of the United States. Yet, for some mysterious reason, whenever I do try to find a route to say, the dentist who is ten miles away, the map app tries to send me from Southern California to the geographic center of the US and then back again. I can eventually get around this, but next time I open up the app, there we are again.

Of course, I am tempted every time to just to see the place (near the corners of Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri. And, “with no traffic”, it only takes a little over 22 hours to get there. The phrase, “with no traffic” in Southern California is equivalent to “when pigs fly.” So, tempting as it is to drive 22 hours to the geographical center of the US and then 22 hours back (provided the sky if filled with flying pigs) in order to go to the dentist who is a few minutes away, I haven’t yet actually taken that particular trip.

I am tempted to rant about the absolute ludicrosity of “sponsored links” (which cheeringly informs me that I could take a side trip to a gynecologist on the way to the dentist) but I’ll try to stay on topic. Where do these defaults come from? Is this just a nerd’s nerd free choice as a perk of the job? Do they seriously conceptualize size in terms of a two dimensional grid with an origin at zero zero and therefore this is a “logical” default for paper size? Are they trying to do the user a favor by saving space?

I am hoping there is a product manager out there who can answer these questions. I am hoping things will turn out better than they did for Caesar and Brutus and Cassius.

Now, a more serious impact of “defaults” have insinuated their way into my daily life. That would be bad enough, but this insinuation has also found its way into the lives of my relatives, my friends, my neighbors, my countrymen, and even my fellow humans throughout the world.

For about 250 years, America had a default that different political parties would play by the same set of rules. Of course, parties sometimes pushed at these rules or interpreted them somewhat differently. They argued and debated about which criteria were most important for various offices. But the default for both parties was that we lived in a democracy; that the citizens choose their leaders; that the truth matters; that we keep our agreements; that our leaders don’t simply use their position of power to line their own pockets and settle their private grudges.

Those defaults are now out the window. All of them. The result will soon be inefficient and ineffective government but it won’t stop there. When government officials are open to bribery, then private businesses will tend to be led by people with lower standards of ethics. They, in turn, will tend to hire people with lower standards of ethics. They, in turn, will treat their customers more cavalierly, more contemptuously. Customers, in turn, will care less about being civil to the people whom they interact with. And so it goes.

Sometimes, there’s a good reason for defaults.

D4

Dick-taters

The Truth Train

The First Ring of Empathy

Pattern Language for Collaboration and Cooperation

Tools of Thought: What Comes Next?

Tools of Thought

Travels with Sadie 1

The Walkabout Diaries: Bee Wise

Starting your Customer Experience with a Lie

26 Friday Sep 2025

Posted by in America, essay, management, Uncategorized, user experience

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I really need someone to explain to me the strategy behind the following types of communications.  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!”  More recently, I’ve gotten text messages giving my “secret code” (which I shouldn’t share with anyone) which will allow me to access my account with unexplained riches of cryptocurrency.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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?

In the eleven years since I first published this post, the level of lying and misdirection has only increased. It has spread like a cancer to every segment of American society. Perhaps that is not surprising given that the we have a convicted felon (for fraud) in the “Whites Only House.” Many politicians of the past have bent the truth (encouraged a certain “spin” on the facts).  But typically, this has done in a way that’s hard to trace or hard to prove or is targeted to specific issues. The lie of “trickle down economics” is one that has transcended Republican and even many Democratic administrations for decades. 

In essence, trickle down economics is the lie that by giving special breaks to the very wealthiest individuals and corporations in the country, it will increase their wealth but that increased wealth will actually benefit everyone because the very richest people will spend that extra money and stimulate demand and everyone will get richer. In case you’ve been asleep for the last fifty years, that’s a lie. 

 

Increased wealth in America happened largely because of increased productivity. People invented tools and processes that were more efficient. Some of these innovations and improvements were due to inventions. Many of these inventions were driven by breakthroughs in science and technology. Other improvements were simply because workers learned how to do things better from experience and we as a people got better at sharing those improved ways of doing things. Increased productivity led to increased wealth which was shared by owners and workers. Profits went up faster than costs but so did wages. Nice. 

Until about the mid 1970’s. Since then, productivity has continued to increase, but nearly all of the increased wealth has gone to the greediest people on the planet. Along with the lie of “trickle-down economics” several ancillary lies have been told over and over. One is the myth of the “Self-Made Man” which suggests that billionaires shouldn’t have to pay taxes because, after all, they earned their money by working 100,000 times harder and smarter than everyone else. Bunk. See link below. 

Another ancillary lie is that we must pay CEO’s and people who own stuff lots and lots of money because otherwise they won’t invest their money in America or work for American companies. Again, balderdash. It’s been studied. 

 

Another ancillary lie is that lowering taxes on poor people will only be bad for them because they will waste the extra money on drugs and cigarettes and alcohol and pornography while lowering taxes on rich people is good because they will spend their money on the fine arts and supporting charities and science. Nonsense. Of course, sometimes poor people will spend their money on “vices” and sometimes rich people are very charitable. However, there’s no general such phenomenon that characterizes all of these groups. Generally, rich people actually are less generous in their giving than poor people and the studies of Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational) show that they typically cheat more than poor people. 

Politicians have been “spinning” or downright lying about the impact of their economic policies for quite some time now. Recently, however, the scope of lying has extended to everything. Putin’s Puppet doesn’t just lie about the impact of his economic policies (“foreign countries pay us for the tariffs I’m imposing). The Trumputin Misadministration lies about science, medicine, history, crime, geography, technology and everything else. It is a war on truth itself. Not only does the Misadministration itself lie; it wants to censor anyone who tells the truth. 

Make no mistake. This is not simply a difference of opinion about how to govern. Fascism is a philosophy that replaces governing with absolute control. In effect, everyone in a fascist state is a slave. It destroys humanity and life itself. 

To ignore the truth and refuse to admit to your mistakes is not just “anti-democratic” — it is anti-life. Life only exists and persists when it is able to sense what is happening in the environment and make adjustments based on that input. Logically, the only possible ultimate outcome of complete fascism is complete death. 

But we don’t have to rely on logic alone. We have historical examples. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao sought absolute power and ended up killing millions of their own people. A dictatorship is a liarship and as such, it necessarily destroys everyone. If you think you’re safe because you’re male, or straight, or white, or “conservative” or rich, you’re deluding yourself. Nearly all of Stalin’s closest associates were destroyed by Stalin. The record of the Felon is the same. He’s betrayed his contractors, his business partners, his wives, his own VP, and even his decade-long rape buddy. 

In such an ocean of lies as we now find ourselves, it may seem even more tempting for businesses and organizations and individuals to lie as well. “After all, everyone’s doing it!” No. The opposite. It’s more important than ever for individuals, organizations, and businesses to uphold the highest ethical standards; to be honest about and to learn from mistakes; to champion the truth and not to encourage the growth of cancer. 

If you and your organization or team cave in to the current trend of lies, you will ruin your organization and your team — as well as your own personal integrity — for the long term. If lying for profit is the spirit you follow, you will hire dishonest people and honest people will quit. Your policies, your allies, your suppliers, your customers will not be conducive to having a productive and thriving organization. Of course, your reputation will suffer, but the disease is much deeper and more lasting than that. Now is the time to be more determined than ever to show honesty and integrity in your hiring, your management, your policies, and your choice of business partners. 

 

 

 

 

 

 



————

Cancer Always Loses in the End

A Little is not a Lot

Try the Truth

You Bet Your Life

Where Does Your Loyalty Lie?

As Gold as it Gets

The Orange Man

At Least he’s Our Monster

The Three Blind Mice

The Con Man’s Con Man

Absolute is not Just a Vodka

The Opportunity of Disaster

22 Monday Sep 2025

Posted by in essay, management, psychology, Uncategorized

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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 my kids made, 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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Of course, the same choice also faces government. Any government will make mistakes. But then what? Do they admit those mistakes and try to ameliorate the damage? Or, do they deny, minimize, lie, obfuscate, point fingers elsewhere?

————

Try the Truth

The Truth Train

D4

Dick-Taters

The Last Gleam of Twilight

Come to the Light Side

Cancer Always Loses in the End

Dance of Billions

You Bet Your Life

Wednesday

Where is the door?

21 Sunday Sep 2025

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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.

Image

A Context-setting entrance

Roar, Ocean, Roar

The Dance of Billions

Peace

The First Ring of Empathy

Travels with Sadie 1

The Walkabout Diaries: Bee Wise

Imagine All the People

Customer Experience does not equal Website Design

20 Saturday Sep 2025

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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

Ban Open Loops: Part Two – Sports

14 Friday Aug 2015

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Sports and open loops.

Sports offers a joy that many jobs and occupations do not. A golfer putts the ball and it sinks into the cup — or not. A basket-baller springs up for a three pointer and —- swish — within seconds, the shooter knows whether he or she was successful. A baseball hitter slashes the bat through the air and send the ball over the fence —- or hears the ball smack into the catcher’s mitt behind. What sports offers then is the opportunity to find out results quickly and hence offers an excellent opportunity for learning. In the previousiPhoneDownloadJan152013 593 entry in this blog, I gave examples of situations in life which should include feedback loops for learning, but, alas, do not. I called those open loops.

Sports seem to be designed for closed loop learning. They seem to be. Yet, reality complicates matters even here. There are three main reasons why what appears to be obvious opportunities for learning in sports is not so obvious after all. Attributional complexity provides the first complication. If you miss a putt to the left, it is obvious that you have missed the putt to the left. But why you missed that putt left and what to do about it are not necessarily obvious at all. You might have aimed left. You might not have noticed how much the green sloped left (or over read the slant to the right). You may not have noticed the grain. You might not have hit the ball in the center of the putter. You might not have swung straight through your target. So, while putting provides nice unambiguous feedback about results, it does not diagnose your problem or tell you how to fix it. To continue with the golf example, you might be kicking yourself for missing half of your six foot putts and therefore three-putting many greens. Guess what? The pros on tour miss half of their six foot putts too! But they do not often three-putt greens. You might be able to improve your putting, but your underlying problems may be that your approach shots leave you too far from the pin and that your lag putts leave you too far from the hole. You should be within three feet of the hole, not six feet, when you hit your second putt.

A second issue with learning in sports is that changes tend to cascade. A change in one area tends to produce other changes in other areas. Your tennis instructor tells you that you are need to play more aggressively and charge the net after your serve. You try this, but find that you miss many volleys, especially those from mid-court. So, you spend a lot of time practicing volleys. Eventually, your volleys do improve. Then, they improve still more. But you find that, despite this, you are losing the majority of your service games whereas you used to win most of them. You decide to revert to your old style of hanging out at the baseline and only approaching the net when the opponent lands the ball short. Unfortunately, while you were spending all that time practicing volleys, you were not practicing your ground strokes. Now, what used to work for you, no longer works very well. This isn’t the fault of your instructor; nor is it your fault. It is just that changing one thing has ripple effects that cannot always be anticipated.

The third and most insidious reason why change is difficult in sports springs from the first two. Because it is hard to know how to change and every change has side-effects, many people fail to learn from their experience at all. There is opportunity for learning at every turn, but they turn a blind eye to it. They make the same mistakes over and over as though sports did not offer instant feedback. I think you will agree that this is really a very close cousin of what people in business do when they refuse to institute systems for gathering and analyzing useful feedback.

If learning is tricky —- and it is —- is there anything for it? Yes. There is. There is no way to make learning in sports —- or in business —- trivial. But there are steps you can take to enhance your learning process. First, be open-minded. Do not shut down and imagine that you are already playing your sport as well as can be expected for a forty year old, or a fifty year old, or someone slightly overweight or someone with a bad ankle. Take an experimental approach and don’t be afraid to try new things. Second, forget ego. Making mistakes are opportunities to learn, not proof that you are no good. Third, get professional help. A good coach can help you understand attributional complexity and they can help you anticipate the side-effects of making a change.

Soon, I suspect that the shrinking size and cost and weight of computational and sensing devices will mean that training aids will help people with attributional complexity. I see big data analytics and modeling helping people foresee what the ramifications of changes are likely to be. There are already useful mechanical training aids for various sports. For example, the trade-marked Medicus club enables golfers to get immediate feedback during their full swings.as to whether they are jerking the club. Dave Pelz developed a number of useful devices for helping people understand how they may be messing up their putting stroke.

It may take somewhat longer before there are small tracking devices that help you with your mental attitude and approach. We are still a long way from understanding how the human brain works in detail. But it is completely within the realm of possibility to sense and discover your optimal level of stress. If you are too stressed, you could be prompted to relax through self-talk, breathing exercises, visualization, etc. You do not need technology for that, but it could help. You may already notice that some of the top tennis players seem to turn their backs from play for a moment and talk to an “invisible friend” when they need to calm down. And why not? Nowhere is it law that only kids are allowed to have invisible friends.

“The mental game” and which kinds of adaptations to make over what time scales are dealt with in more detail in The Winning Weekend Warrior How to Succeed at Golf, Tennis, Baseball, Football, Basketball, Hockey, Volleyball, Business, Life, Etc. available at Amazon Kindle.

The Fault is in Defaults

25 Friday Jul 2014

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“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

So Cassius says to Brutus in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar Cassius was trying to convince Brutus to join the plot to assassinate Caesar. As I recall, things did not turn out well for Julius Caesar. Or for Brutus. Or for Cassius. Or, ultimately, for Mark Anthony either, but that’s another story. The point is that there is always an interesting tension between imagining that we ourselves are the masters of our fate. It is our ability, or attitude, or grit, or whatever that determines how much money or happiness or health we have. Or, on the other hand, there is the view that things are pretty much beyond our conscious control and due to our heredity, our environment, our upbringing, etc. Both views are partly true and both have their place. If you are a user of a product and you want to get something accomplished, blaming the stupid product will not help you accomplish your goals. On the other hand, if you are a product developer, it will not help you to blame your user. You need to design thoughtfully.

I was reminded of this debate today by trying to scan a document. In general, I am amazed how excellentscanners and printers are today, not to mention CHEAP! I was born in an era of expensive, heavy, noisy, dot matrix printers or teletypes. You’ve come a long way, baby! But the software that actually lets us use these marvelous machines. Hmmm. Here there is a lot of room for improvement. Today, I repeatedly tried to scan a one page document to no avail. I thinkI finally diagnosed what the problem was. The scan screen came up with a default that said “custom size” and the defaulted “custom dimensions” were 0 by 0. Because, obviously, the development team had done a thorough study of users and found, I suppose somewhat surprisingly, that the most common size of image people wanted to scan was 0 by 0. I suppose such images have the advantage that you can store many more of them on your hard drive than images that are 8.5 by 11 inches or 3 inches by 5 inches, say.

But this is not an isolated example. Often there are “defaults” which seem to me to be rather odd, to say the least. Right now, my google map application, for no discernible reason, has decided that a good default location for me is the geographical center of the continental United States. It was not “born” with this default but somewhere along the line “developed” it. Why? I have never travelled (knowingly) to the geographical center of the United States. I have never wanted to “find” the geographical center of the United States. Yet, for some mysterious reason, whenever I do try to find a route to say, the dentist who is ten miles away, the map app tries to send me from Southern California to the geographic center of the US and then back again. I can eventually get around this, but next time I open up the app, there we are again. Of course, I am tempted every time to just to see the place (near the corners of Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri. And, “with no traffic”, it only takes a little over 22 hours to get there. The phrase, “with no traffic” in Southern California is equivalent to “when pigs fly.” So, tempting as it is to drive 22 hours to the geographical center of the US and then 22 hours back (provided the sky if filled with flying pigs) in order to go to the dentist who is a few minutes away, I haven’t yet actually taken the trip.

I am tempted to rant about the absolute ludicrosity of “sponsored links” (which cheeringly informs me that I could take a side trip to a gynecologist on the way to the dentist) but I’ll try to stay on topic. Where do these defaults come from? Is this just a nerd’s nerd free choice as a perk of the job? Do they seriously conceptualize size in terms of a two dimensional grid with an origin at zero zero and therefore this is a “logical” default for paper size? Are they trying to do the user a favor by saving space?

I am hoping there is a product manager out there who can answer these questions. I am hoping things will turn out better than they did for Caesar and Brutus and Cassius.

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?

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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