Past Experience sometimes is the biggest hurdle. It CONDITIONS our mind. Previous patterns determine our future actions. Life is an explorations and conditioned mind cant explore but just follow the trend. This applies to individuals and enterprises equally.
Therefore to unCONDITION our mind we need to be alert of our thoughts & actions. Out of the Box or Lateral Thinking is all about this. Everyone be it individual or company becomes prisoner of this "following the pattern" habit. This is how we become stale after sometime.
Challenge is to get out of this and rejuvenate our thoughts on an ongoing basis:
5) Do something non routine daily.(take new route to office or home, buy non regular magazine, go to movie with not so good review, watch channel not viewed regularly, offer peak season discount on products and services, pay yr supplier early and thank them for the support, celebrate achievement of family members of employees, ask back office team to front end the customers, respond to call center queries in 48 minutes instead of 48 hours, offer no question asked goods return for a day, call customer after a day of his purchase to know whether he is happy with product or service
4) Challenge Obvious Idea / Action / Interpretation. (Get feedback from suppliers, service providers, go to different restaurant, take no reason leave from the job and be with the family, have without appointments day for all patients, go and play cricket with children on Sunday, )
3) Think , apply your mind and look at the things in different perspective.(Talk to grieving customers or employees by calling him and giving full attention to know his perspectives)
2) For the sake of change do something differently. (Offer Lassi or lemon juice in place of routine Tea/Coffee to your customers /employees)
1) Check Business Processes more often for better customer experiences. Its a dynamic world, processes must be reviewed to achieve speed & convenience to customers.(Remove or merge processes, add delight factor in the process)
Many more such actions can be taken up routinely to un( Condition + Routine ) our mind. Daily Targets ,Quarterly Results and Annual Bonus will make it difficult to think anything other than routine but believe me thinking unroutine will improve all the three targets.
This is BRANDing in ACTION. Atrophy (Regular CONDITIONed) or Rejuvenate (Regular UNCONDITIONing). Choice of actions r clear.
