Big Head Energy

First there were artisans: craftspeople who knew how to make a class of items by hand. Then there were factories: places where people were employed to make vast quantities of items, with the help of machines. Then came the Taylorist revolution, which redesigned the act of making an item as a set of atomic tasks. With one guy (or immigrant woman, or tween) turning the same screw for 8 to 14 hours a day, a veritable tsunami of crap could be made. The modern factory job was born, not with a bang, but with an endless series of little thwacks stretching on to eternity.

They tried the same trick with knowledge work. The lawyers got offshore formatting and printing shops to make sense of their scribbles. The software developers got Agile, where it’s one person’s job to design the thing, one to build it, and one to run the meeting where they all talk about it. Medicine is the most obviously Taylorized domain. Every possible task, clinical and otherwise, is taken off the doctor’s plate so they can focus on what only they can do: provide your diagnosis and write up your bill.

Yet despite the best efforts of management consultants and value-crazed private equity firms, these efforts have not yielded the platonic Knowledge Factory. Professional self-promotion outlets roll the highlight reel, spotlighting places where it works, some of the time. But show me a supposedly repeatable, turnkey, fully autonomous business process, and I’ll bet I can show you the secret ingredient: a Big Head.

The Hebrew expression ראש גדול (big head) refers to someone who sees the big picture, including impending problems, AND takes responsibility to make things better. The Big Heads are problem solvers, but they are not purely analytical beings. Their quintessential skill is courageous communication. They raise uncomfortable issues in an optimistic spirit, and with a willingness to work toward solutions.

Why can’t these wrinkles be designed out of business processes, obviating the need for a Big Head? Some likely reasons include: our volatile world, the inexplicable behavior of humans, and the need for creativity which fuels competitive advantage. (Some less likely reasons: corporate espionage, you’re in the show Jury Duty, this is fun!) The likeliest reason is that the complexity of the world and the necessity of responsive behavior from organizations, makes it impossible to plan, down to the person, exactly who should do what, in every situation.

I see this firsthand, as a strategic designer working on service blueprints: visual maps of customer experiences and the enabling business processes and policies behind them. This might sound like a snooze, but in my line of work, the service blueprint is the means of turning lofty visions into real life experiences. It’s actually pretty rad!

One of the biggest challenges is to translate a service blueprint into training for staff members, especially those who engage with customers directly. Service blueprints can be 10 rows deep and print out at the scale of a protest banner. They are the blue whales of strategy artifacts. This level of detailed information lures people into a false sense of security, as if every possibility were reflected on the map, to be referenced in the hour of need. The truth is that the way customers use a service, and the problems they face, can’t be fully anticipated. No matter how much research you’ve done to understand their needs and behaviors, they are guaranteed to surprise you. Therefore, the right course of action for staff members can’t be fully prescribed. 

As a designer of experiences and recovering control freak, this is the best approach I’ve found:

1- Define the principles of a good experiences. Not just the nuts and bolts, but the big picture. What do you want the customer to walk away thinking, feeling, or doing?

2- Game out the scenarios. Improv and role play won’t insulate you against every snafu. But they’re great for identifying broad categories of mishaps, from left field questions to technical glitches. And an excellent way to build camaraderie, which leads to…

3- Empower people to do what’s best to deliver on the experience principles. Don’t try to script and dictate every move they make. That will only leave them overly dependent on an irrelevant rule book and, even worse, put a damper on any Big Head impulses they might have. Which leads at last to…

4- Hire, cultivate, and retain Big Heads. When the service blueprint fails and the customer’s experience is on the rocks, a Big Head will take responsibility and do what it takes to right the ship. That’s an irreplaceable quality.

We’ve all met a Big Head. Most of us have been a Big Head, when it mattered enough to us. Some of us even have regrets at the unhealthy dependency our Big Headedness inspired in our organizations/teams/families.

But in an AI era where people are running like - wait for it - chickens without HEADS (🥁), Big Head Energy is the most valuable quality that only a human can manifest.