The problem with seeing everything and changing nothing Modern companies are exceptionally good at producing dashboards. Sales has dashboards. Marketing has dashboards. Customer support has dashboards. Operations has dashboards. Finance has dashboards. Executives have dashboards combining all the other dashboards. Customer Experience teams are no different. They monitor: NPS; CSAT; CES; response rates; complaint volumes; sentiment; review ratings; support resolution time; churn; retention; journey metrics. The organisation can see more than ever. And yet many customer problems remain unresolved for months. This creates an uncomfortable question: If the company can already see the problem, why is the problem still there? The answer is that visibility is not action. A dashboard can reveal deterioration. It cannot decide what matters. It cannot determine who should act. It cannot resolve conflicting priorities. It cannot execute an intervention. And it cannot reliably determine whether th...
When researching my family history, I occasionally encounter an ancestor whose life deserves considerably more attention than a simple collection of names, dates and places. One such person is my great-great-grandfather, Dr. med. Jürgen Christian Georg Berendsen , born on 19 February 1855 in Schleswig and deceased on 19 April 1932 in Berlin. He lived for seventy-seven years, through a remarkable period of German history. Born in the Duchy of Schleswig before the German Empire existed, he witnessed the unification of Germany, the rapid development of modern medicine, the First World War, the collapse of the monarchy and the establishment of the Weimar Republic. His professional career unfolded during an era in which surgery, antisepsis and medical education were undergoing fundamental changes. But what interests me most is not simply the historical period in which he lived. It is the increasingly detailed picture of the man himself: a child described as physically fragile, a univ...