What does it mean to orient a company toward human needs? Obsessing about customers and long-term investor outcomes is a great start (as I’ve written about before). But beyond product design and watching the behaviors of customers to tailor experiences to solving problems, business leaders and members might benefit from taking a deeper look at needs in planning, operations, and interactions. Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC) provided inspiration for the needs-orientation, though I’ve apprehended that Dr. Rosenberg’s work may yet need additional translation to be applied in companies. I’ll discuss the characters whose needs-meeting businesses might be oriented around, how to produce and enact needs-oriented strategy, and how to build self-reinforcing needs-meeting systems into the business’s operation.
Whose needs must businesses meet? In the article linked above, I mentioned investors, customers, employees, community members, and the government. This is the cast of characters, though one might benefit from being quite specific in defining each of these characters for a given company. For example, if you’re running (and the sole owner of) a Madison, WI-based bakery, you’re might orient about the needs of bread-eaters in Madison and the surrounding communities, the municipal and county food & retail regulators & legislators, neighboring homes and businesses to your location, all the delivery drivers, baristas, accountants (hopefully not too many of these), and bakers you employ, and your own needs and expectations as owner. You might consider how to design your bakery business in a way that meets the needs of each of these characters (and the specific humans represented by the characterizations). You might run experiments and test the reactions of each stakeholder, based on the needs you hypothesize they have related to your bakery. For example and perhaps most fundamentally, your customers presumably need food (using “need” in Dr. Rosenberg’s sense of one of the universal human needs, rather than in the sense of “you will die imminently without this”). Customers may also come to your bakery to meet their needs for connection, harmony, order, peace, community, learning, or participation (the NVC needs list may be worth taking a look at for more inspiration). Each customer has an expectation for a need they might like to have met when entering or thinking about your bakery. These expectations might be met, exceeded, or not met in the course of an interaction with your bakery (customers could also have other need unexpectedly met or unmet in the course of an interaction with your bakery; for example, if there is a robbery at the moment the customer comes into the store, the customers need for security may suddenly be tragically unmet). If you can develop an understanding of what customers expect and regularly meet those expectations, loyalty and repeat buying may occur. If, from time to time, you can exceed needs-expectations while avoiding needs-failures (unexpected unmet needs), you may have yourself a bakery people fall in love with and love in the long-run. The above analysis can be applied to each of the characters described above. Consider asking regularly, how can my business effectively and systematically meet (and avoid not meeting) the needs of employees/the government/investors/yourself in addition to customers.
The bottom-up needs analysis may seem interesting, but one might ask, “how is this going to become part of the lifeblood of the company?” This is where strategy might come in handy. Strategy has been defined so many ways and may remain vague; I’ve observed it as a matter of prioritization, of design, of purpose, and of consistent execution (Prof. Henry Mintzberg’s Strategy Bites Back is a wonderful dive into the preceding, if you can find it). It could be context-based or general. For your bakery purposes and otherwise, it might be useful to think of strategy in the following order:
- What’s most important for the entire life of the business (meaning + mission)
- What’s most important for the next 3-5 years
- What’s most important this year
- What’s most important this month
- What’s most important this week
- What’s most important today
Next, consider answering each of these questions by identifying the most important need your business will meet for each of the relevant characters in your business’s orbit. For example, for you the owner-leader of this bakery, you might identify the following top needs you expect the business to meet (and it may be worth checking out the full NVC list again, circling the ones that resonate instinctively, and whittling your list down to find the top need):
- Lifetime: self-expression
- The next 3-5 years: stability
- The next year: cooperation
- The next month: effectiveness
- The next week: joy
- Today: authenticity
After building your “strategy” (priority by time scale) for each of the characters (customers, employees, investors, government, community), we can start to talk mechanisms (I’ve written about The Tragic Insufficiency of Good Intentions, going into a bit more depth about mechanisms and why they might be useful).
Operations is the practice of developing & refining systems that efficiently get a job done. For each of the needs on each time scale, I’ve observed that you have a job to be done. For example, if you need authenticity today, the job you may need to do is have a transparent conversations about how you’re feeling with a one or two of your employees & customers. It’s important to build continuously operating mechanisms that ensure the top three time scales are being met, and important to take immediate action to address the most immediate time scales of strategic priority (so you may not need to build a mechanism to get your authenticity need met). For your self-expression lifetime priority, it may be critical to build mechanisms if you’re going to achieve this priority over the life of the business (such as regular time set aside with goals/expectations for writing on the bakery blog or experimenting with your own recipes and offering the results to customers or employees).
Identifying needs, managing needs risks, meeting needs, creating a needs strategy, building needs-mechanisms. Might seem like a lot of work. However, when you develop the needs-lens and look through from the different characters’ perspectives regularly, you and the people you work with may find that it feels more natural and delightful than running a business by the profit and losses alone (the needs of the financial statements, probably not to be entirely discarded).
Roman Ryan 