“Where are you right now?”
The most powerful question leaders, innovators, thinkers and doers can ask themselves to help better understand their customers, access creativity and foster collaboration.
And better still, the question is multiple choice. You’re either ‘above the line’ or ‘below the line’.
I know, I know, bold claim. But hear me out…
I believe this model originated from Michael Bernard Beckwith, but I learned it from Diana Chapman and Jim Dethmer (their book, ’The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership’, is outstanding by the way). The question has proven effective with countless people in many different situations and today we will explore how, when combined with traditional customer experiences (CX) methods, this model can help us better understand our customers and better create products, experiences and interactions.
One of the reasons I love this approach so much, and why it’s so effective, is that it doesn’t begin and end where so many CX processes do, with a model of the ‘content’, the problem you are trying to solve. While content focused tools like Empathy Maps, Journey Maps, etc, can be useful, in my experience, they prove far more effective if you first put attention on the people using them, the ‘context’.
Content = what we are looking at
Context = how we are looking at it
Put simply, in our efforts to better know our customers, we start with the person doing the knowing. You. And specifically the ‘state’ (above or below the line) you are in, right now, to do the work at hand.
A quick word on ’states’ before we continue. A super deep and complex topic that many books have been written on throughout human history. But for today we will keep things simple. States are our present moment experience of our psychology and physiology. For example, being hungover is a ‘state’, you’ve poisoned your body, you are probably sleep-deprived and you are having the correspondent sensations. You may also be experiencing some negative self-talk. Have you made a decision while hungover? Something like “I’m never drinking again”! How’d that work out for you?
Contrast this with how you show up to explore, problem solve and make decisions when you are at your best, most alert, most open, most energised.
States are important.
Let’s bring this back to better understanding our customers.
Imagine yourself in a workshop with your team. The session starts with the reveal of some negative feedback customers have been sharing about their experience of your companies new product.
Now imagine yourself reacting to that feedback from a ‘below the line’ state…
When we are ‘below the line’ there is a sense that reality is happening ‘to-me’, we feel at the effect of the world and as such we operate from a place of threat, of reactivity, of defensiveness, of needing to be right, of recycled drama.
You can envisage, (or probably remember) the scene with a room full of people in this state — tempers flaring, blame and fault being attributed, circular arguments taking place. How much high-quality problem solving do you imagine would go on in such a room? How much understanding or empathy for what the customers were actually trying to communicate with their feedback do you think there would be?
Now imagine reacting to the same feedback from ‘above the line’…
When we are ‘above the line’ we take 100% responsibility for our thoughts, feelings and actions. There is a sense that the world is happing ‘by-me’. We operate from a place of acceptance, curiosity, growth and learning.
Here, people are curious about the feedback, asking questions in a genuine attempt to better understand how the customers experienced the product, there is no self-judgement or judgment of others. The team separate the facts of the situation from the stories they are telling themselves about the facts. The team are asking what they can learn from the feedback and how they might grow as a result.
The two scenarios above are exaggerated to the extremes for emphasis and we know from our own experience there is a range of experience either side of the line. We can be a little below the line, (irritable and a bit defensive) to a lot below (in a full unconscious rage) and a similar range above the line. But I hope it’s clear from the examples above which side of the line would produce the best outcomes.
This model is, of course, like all models, a simplification of the human experience. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be tremendously helpful to us. There is a world of depth we can explore on why we find ourselves above or below the line in certain situations. We can get into much greater nuance for each of the characteristics of being above or below. We can talk to the different approaches you might use to shift your state if it’s not serving you, (and I may in future posts). But there is tremendous value in simply being able to locate ourselves.
Just answering the question (without judgment) “where am I right now” can be enough to cause a shift if you are below the line, or provide us with the clarity to know we are not at our best and we might want to disengage from the work temporarily. On the flip side, if we can confidently say we are above the line, that may help us consciously lean into our positive states, leveraging them as a superpower.
So before your next CX workshop, team brainstorm, 1–1 meeting or dinner with your partner, just check in with yourself.
“Where am I right now?”
