The Power of Provocation

A provocation may ask: Is there another way to provide that customer experience? Why does our organization exist? Too often, asking questions about purpose invariably addresses the what. This is what we do. Not so much the why. 

Consider the example of a professional membership organization that might run conferences, publish newsletters and provide information to its membership. When examining its function and purpose, the objective should be to not only unlock what the organization does, but why it does it. Is this still what people value—showing up at conferences, receiving newsletters, receiving information? It would require asking, “Is this what your membership cares about?”   

After probing deeper, we might uncover that maybe the organization doesn’t exist to run conferences, publish newsletters or provide information. Maybe it exists to support and serve its members in a more profound and meaningful way. 

Brad Zabroski, Senior Director of Design at Expedia, says we should ask questions to understand how we’ll exist in a future defined by the transition of technology and the pervasiveness of internet access. “How do we start to question that future and then start looking at near-term to understand what’s our role in that future?

When you challenge conventional mindsets, you have to bring with it some form of insight and data to support it. Without that, most organizations won’t believe the challenge. This means accessing trend data, demographics and other insights to unlock creative thinking about the future.  

Again, there are no reliable predictions of what the future will be. But we have trend data. We know demographics. Take, for example, insights from the health and aging space. We will know how many people will be eligible for Medicare in 20 years. We will know how much that would cost with the current model. We also know that one of the most important things that anybody who’s aging is thinking of is losing their independence. With this in mind, there’s plenty of opportunity to provoke new ideas that can unlock a whole wealth of creativity and thinking about the future. 

Panelist Nate Zager, Director of Design Operations and Program Management at AT&T, affirms that business metrics have shown us that “when you start with design in your DNA, and by building things customers actually want, the business can win and the customer can win.” 

By concrete, we’re talking about telling a story—something you can visualize, saying, “Here’s what this will actually look and feel like.” This is in contrast to a vague ambition, such as “We’re going to be a partner in healthcare.” That’s nice. But what does it mean? It’s not concrete.  

When individuals look at the future, they need to see themselves in that future, and the organization needs to see that, too. That’s the accessibility. That’s the future we can be a part of—the future we want to be a part of. Without that accessibility, the future becomes scary and out of our control because we don’t see our role in it. Fundamentally, the right provocation for the future needs to be one that everyone says, “I want to be a part of making that future happen.”  

So, if an organization aims to serve the profession, it has to always know exactly what the profession values and cares about. This exploration can start small. As a member of the organization, you can start performing and executing in a manner that is provocative, to get your organizations to think differently. Heather Carroll Cox, Chief Digital Health & Analytics Officer at Humana, said it best: “Provocation opens the horizon.”