Figures: Chapter 1 – Build Peaks, Don’t fix Potholes
Video by Dan Heath
A study by Stanford professor Chip Heath found that companies tend to be off-balance in terms of how much time they are investing in troubleshooting vs. investing in innovation: “For every hour we spend fixing problems, we spend 15 minutes building peaks.” Yet. “There are $9 of revenues for building peaks for every $1 resulting from fixing problems7.”
In part, that is because troubleshooting is still taking too much time. After all the time invested in fixing existing experiences, there is not much capacity left for innovation.
However, that imbalance also echoes the origins of Experience Analytics, i.e. their narrow focus on supporting troubleshooting use cases at the time. But, now that we know what makes up a good experience, it would be crazy if Experience Analytics stopped there. That would help us make experiences seamless but not inspiring and rewarding.
Check out a video on the topic by Chip’s brother Dan Heath on Youtube: “Build Peaks, Don’t Fix Potholes”.
https://youtu.be/QxXcL28A89M