Welcome to the 11th edition of the CX by Design Ideas newsletter, a monthly mailing by your hosts, Lis Hubert and Diana Sonis, with a focus on sharing human-centered ideas for business. Thank you for being here. We appreciate you. P.S. Was this email forwarded to you? You need your own!

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Fremont Center, NY, Tuesday, August 4, 2020

The phrase “Don’t forget to fail” feels almost ludicrous to a world this far into a pandemic. As if any of us could forget the experiences of setbacks, opportunities lost, or unforeseen outcomes.

We wrote these pieces during B.C. times, but we brought them back to our forefront to remind us of the importance of trying and accepting that most of the outcomes of our efforts will be failures.

We also remind ourselves that the more failures we endure, the more successes we’ll experience.

The same goes for your business. The more failures you see, the more you and your team will learn, grow, and then manifest success.

The key here lies in trying.

Recently, we’ve been honored to work with customers who are willing and ready to try. They try new ways of updating their marketing, business development, and product development based on the methods we’ve helped them employ to gather and then integrate customer insights.

They also try new approaches to help them create a bird’s eye view of their Customer’s Experience with their business. They put effort into using this view to prioritize initiatives that can directly affect their customer’s point of view in a positive way.

The thing is, all this trying isn’t always successful, and that can be hard to grasp for many businesses. But as we’ve said, the ones who embrace the outcomes no matter how good or bad are the ones who learn, then grow.

From this place, and from this place only, can businesses challenge not only company norms, but ecosystem and societal norms to create the business world that is best for them and the customers they serve.

This is the place from which meaningful human-centered businesses prosper. And, it all starts with trying.

We hope you’re able to take the time to enjoy these short bursts of inspiration below, as well as, to check out some of the other human-centered ideas we’ve found enlightening this month.

As always, we love to hear from you. Drop us a line anytime if you have questions or just want to chat about the human-centered design process. We’re here.

Stay healthy,

Lis Hubert
Founding Partner

Many a business person has been inspired by the story of Spanx founder, Sara Blakely. After-all, she IS a self-made billionaire whose passion and perseverance have chiseled out one of the most successful businesses of our time. Who could deny being inspired by that?

Personally, I know many friends and colleagues who have worked to learn from and mimic her actions in an effort to foster their own business success (myself included). However, after reading this interview with Ms. Blakely, I realized there was one foundational milestone that many of us have been overlooking in this quest.

The ethos “There is no such thing as failure” is not new, but when was the last time you, or your team, actually practiced it?

Sure, embracing it too tightly can mean business demise, but what if you held on to the concept just a little?

Have you ever really, truly failed at something? What I mean to ask is, have you ever tried something hoping to get a result that you never even came close to attaining? How did you deal with this failure? Did you decide to let it define you, or did you choose to redefine it?