“Customer-centric” is a full-on buzzword these days, but it is in obvious extension of the big-picture social media trend we’ve been watching for several years now, where power is shifting away from the company and towards the consumer. Everyone wants to be customer-centric now. You can almost sense the desperation, actually.

As I think about it, I see why they’re desperate: most cultures today simply don’t work if you put the customer at the center. Right now, senior leadership is at the center (and they like it that way). To put the customer at the center, you would need to give the people closest to the customer the power to make decisions, respond, and react. That’s why in Humanize, we talk about the need now for organizations to be open and move their cultures towards decentralization.

This leads me to this week’s quote, which is from the Open chapter. It’s the explanation of one of my favorite phrases in the book (that we stole from Florence Nightingale): Proceed until apprehended (p. 130):

In decentralized cultures, the default is action, rather than approval. As people move through their day, creating value and solving problems, the underlying assumption is that they can go ahead and do what they think they should do, not needing to get approval first, but knowing that someone will stop them if they go to far. This means, by the way, that the responsibility for appropriate “apprehension” can be anywhere in the system. If you are a lower level employee in a decentralized culture, you may step in and question a colleague who you think has gone too far, rather than simply sending an email to your boss suggesting that she contact your colleague’s’ boss, and so on. 

If you want to get a sense of how decentralized your culture is (or isn’t), talk to me about an assessment.