As truly amazing as the human brain is, it’s not able to re-process everything we see anew every time we see it. So, our brains take some shortcuts by basically ignoring things we are very familiar with, and that can cause us trouble any time we have interactions with people who don’t have the same level of familiarity with something as we do. I usually talk about this in reference to customer experience but it actually applies to many areas of our lives.

To illustrate the concept, I have my Tree Stump Theory…

I’ve seen a lot of strategies and “solutions” fail over the years primarily because the solution was crafted before the problem addressed was thoroughly understood.

Many times, the strategy or solution was the result of a brainstorming session filled with type A personalities (me included) ready to make things happen. You may be familiar with the type of session I’m referencing. Usually, there’s a guru consultant leading the charge.

Those types of session frustrate me. I’m concerned there’s too much action, too many unspoken assumptions, and not nearly enough serious thinking.

Over the years, I’ve developed a problem solving technique that I’ve found to work a lot better. I call it the Monkey Cage Sessions.

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” —George Bernard Shaw

I read that quote the other day, and it kind of blew me away. How often, as managers, executives, marketers and team members do we send forth messages and assume effective communication has taken place? I know that I personally have been guilty of spewing forth my thoughts and directives in ways that were clear to me but were not nearly clear enough to my audience.

Over the weekend, I did a bit of reading on communication. As I read Wikipedia’s article on communication, I was reminded of the technical breakdown of communication I learned in my college Organizational Behavior class. While those explanations are useful, I really wanted to think about communication in more practical terms. While communication between individuals is very important in business, effective one-to-many communication can often be extremely challenging.

Technology may impede quality.

“We tried that before and it didn’t work.”

Man, I’ve heard that phrase a lot in my life. And truth be told, I’ve spoken it more than I care to admit.

But when something fails once in the past (or even more than once) should it be doomed forever?

I was once lucky enough to hear futurist Bob Johansen speak, and he said something that really stuck with me:

“Almost nothing that happens in the future is new; it’s almost always something that has been tried and failed in the past.”

In reality, very little in our lives is absolutely certain. We can be certain the sun will rise in the east and set in the west. We can be certain death will follow life. And we can be fairly certain people will lose their minds on Black Friday at Wal-Mart.

But we’re certain about a lot more things than we should be.

A lot of the research focuses primarily on our political viewpoints, but while reading I couldn’t help but think of people I’ve come across in the business world who were unbelievably certain about their viewpoints based on information or experiences that seemed less than obvious to me. I immediately thought of dozens of people, and I bet you’re thinking of many such people now.

In fact, it was so easy for me to think of other people that fit the bill that I couldn’t help but think the man in the mirror was not immune to this universal human fallacy.

In my experience in the business world, we often assume with undue certainty that past experiences will reflect future possibilities. We say things like, “We tried that before and it didn’t work” or “I know what our customers want.” While our past experiences are extremely valuable and are very important for informing future decisions, we simply don’t have enough of them to blindly ignore changes in circumstances, timing and other variables that could significantly alter results for a new effort.

So how do we overcome our natural instincts in order to make better business decisions?

Think you don’t make emotional decisions? Think again.

It turns out that without our emotional brains, we wouldn’t be able to make decisions at all. In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer recounts the story of a man whose brain injury caused his amygdala to stop functioning. As a result, he was utterly incapable of making even the simplest decisions in life. Without an emotional brain to push him toward a decision, his rational brain simply went into analysis paralysis.

Our brains are extremely powerful, but they’ve got a lot going on. As a result, they basically compartmentalize processing power and take shortcuts when encountering situations that seem similar to past situations they’ve encountered. While this compartmentalization is generally very efficient, it has its drawbacks.

Most of us are experts in something. Our expertise and experience are usually significant advantages that allow us to deal effectively with complex problems and situations. But they can occasionally be Achilles’ heels when they breed the type of overconfidence that causes us to overlook simple solutions in favor of more complex and costly solutions. Injecting a little naiveté into some problem solving sessions can spur new thinking that results in more effective and efficient solutions.

In my experience, experts tend to skip right by the simple solutions to most problems. Groups of experts working to solve a problem are even more likely to head directly to the more complex solutions.

We have immediate access to loads of data in today’s world, but just because we can access lots of data in real time doesn’t mean we should access our data in real time. In fact, accessing and reporting on the numbers too quickly can often lead to distractions, false conclusions, premature reactions and bad decisions.

I remember a time I switched on CNN and saw — played out in all their glory on national TV — the types of issues that can occur with reporting too early on available data.

CNN reporters “monitoring video” from a local TV station saw Coast Guard vessels in the Potomac River apparently trying to keep another vessel from passing. They then monitored the Coast Guard radio and heard someone say, “You’re approaching a Coast Guard security zone. If you don’t stop your vessel, you will be fired upon. Stop your vessel immediately.” And, for my favorite part of the story, they made the decision to go on air when they heard someone say “bang, bang, bang, bang” and “we have expended 10 rounds.” They didn’t hear actual gun shots, mind you, they heard someone say “bang.” Could this be a case of someone wanting the data to say something it isn’t really saying?

Q. How are sales forecasts like baby due dates.

A. They both provide an improper illusion of precision and cause considerable consternation when they’re missed.

Our daughter was born perfectly healthy almost two weeks past her due date, but every day past that less than precisely accurate due date was considerably more frustrating for my amazing and beautiful wife. While her misery was greater than many of us endure in retail sales results meetings, we nonetheless experience more misery than necessary due to improperly specific forecast numbers creating unrealistic expectations.

I believe there’s a way to continue to provide the planning value of a sales forecast (and baby due dates) while reducing the consternation involved in the almost inevitable miss of the predictions generated today.

Acquiring new customers is hard work, but turning them into loyal customers is even harder. The acquisition efforts can usually come almost solely from the Marketing department, but customer retention takes a village. And all those villagers have to march to the beat of a strategy that effectively balances the concepts of bought loyalty and earned loyalty.

I first heard the concepts of bought and earned loyalty many years ago in a speech given by former ForeSee Results CEO Larry Freed, and those concepts stuck with me. They’re not mutually exclusive. In the most effective retention strategies I’ve seen, bought loyalty is a subset of a larger earned loyalty strategy.

So let’s break each down a bit and discuss how they work together.

Most digital commerce channels are still achieving single digit conversion rates even though customer intent-to-purchase rates are 20% or higher in most cases. Customers are continuing to run into obstacles to the purchase process that need to be eliminated. The good news is that during this time of limited capital investments, retailers can use low cost means to find and eliminate as many obstacles to purchase as possible.

The first step is to get into the right mindset and remove what I feel is the biggest disconnect with the customers that many retailers have:

We’re way more comfortable and experienced with our own sites than our customers are.

We use our sites every day, and we know exactly how they’re supposed to work. However, our customers are generally nowhere near as familiar with our sites as we are.

We’ve all heard the cliché “hindsight is 20/20” a thousand times. And it’s pretty much true. It’s a lot easier to figure out the path to a particular event when you know the final outcome. But if “what happened” is something bad, determining the reason after the fact doesn’t change the negative event.

How can we do a better job finding those problems in advance of our next new strategy implementation, site redesign, store remodel, or other big effort?

Whenever we’re implementing some new and exciting strategy, we tend to be very optimistic about the results. We’re convinced these new strategies are going to provide positive returns or we wouldn’t be implementing them. That optimism can lead to the same sort of crystal clear signal Wohlstetter referenced, but in the opposite direction; i.e. we tend to only see how everything we’re doing will lead to greatness and can easily overlook variables that have potential to lead to negative outcomes.

So, what do we do about it?

The Customer Engagement Cycle plays a central role in many marketing strategies, but it’s not always defined in the same way. Probably the most commonly described stages are Awareness, Consideration, Inquiry, Purchase and Retention. In retail, we often think of the cycle as Awareness, Acquisition, Conversion, Retention. In either case, I think there are a couple of key stages that do not receive enough consideration given their critical ability to drive the cycle.

The missing links are Satisfaction and Referral.

Breaking down our metrics into these three levels takes some serious discipline. When we decide we’re only going to focus on a relatively small number of metrics, we’re doing ourselves and our businesses a big favor. But it’s really important we’re narrowing that focus on the metrics and objectives that are most driving the business forward.