Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously

by Jeff Gothelf

We can bring this idea back to organizational work with the idea of a sandbox: a safe place with clear borders within which teams may operate. A sandbox creates positive effects for leaders as well as subordinates. For leaders, there is a legitimate fear that their people will get creative in some way that will cause trouble, and for which a leader will be held responsible. Creating clear guidelines within which people can operate can ease this fear. For subordinates, the fear is about crossing some unstated line. If leaders make the lines clear, it creates space for creativity. Here’s an example: at one large firm we spoke to, managers were free to put up experimental websites without asking permission, but they couldn’t mention the company’s name or use the brand elements anywhere on these pages. These teams were also not permitted to collect any personally identifiable information, or PII, without going through a review of their plans with a security team. At another firm we spoke to, a consumer business with millions of customers, teams were free to reach out to customers to try out experimental services, as long as no experiment reached out to more than one hundred customers at a time. Teams that wanted to reach out to more customers had to get approval for their plans. At this organization, there was no prohibition against collecting PII, as long as it was handled within company guidelines. There was a restriction on collecting payments. As with many things in the se...