Personal Accountability to Change within a Team

One problem I have with team building assessments is that most of the data gathering and evaluation questions are very passive. It seems as if team building is something that happens to people. As opposed to people being active players in their work life.

Working with a Managing Partner in a law firm he shared his frustration like this, “We work hard to make this place somewhere people can do their best work, and be happy. And, I keep getting shit from my board about my employee engagement feedback. Many of the questions are not appropriate to lawyers. The question “I have a best friend at work” these are lawyers and they score low because they do not have time and many do not want best friends at work… Where is the way to determine their effort to be friendly, set goals, be motivated?” 

I thought that was a good question and I went to work on looking for an active process of team coaching and consulting. That brought me to Marshall Goldsmith’s Wheel of Change.

The useful thing about the wheel of change is that you can accept the organizational system you are a part of, the passive stuff that you cannot control; while making an active choice to make a change, the active stuff that you can control.

“When we bluntly challenge ourselves to figure out what we can change and what we can’t, what to lose and what to keep, we often surprise ourselves with the bold simplicity of our answers and can thus take significant, real steps towards becoming the person we want to be.” – Marshall Goldsmith

Sharing the wheel of change model, following a 360-Leadership Feedback, with a team or individual you can quickly identify:

• … a behavior I choose to create or add is _____
• … a behavior I choose to preserve or enhance is _____
• … a behavior I choose to eliminate is _____
• … a behavior I choose to accept is_____

Working with many teams and individuals, we quickly saw that this concept as useful.

Using the Wheel of Change with a Team

Facilitating this with a team is similar to working with one person who is receiving leadership coaching.

1. Share the wheel of change
2. Explain – Create, Preserve, Eliminate, Accept
3. Ask the team to share ideas for each area. I recommend you start with Create, then go through Preserve, Eliminate, Accept
4. Ask the team to review each response in the wheel of change and ensure that each statement has personal accountability that is within their control, and they have the authority to act upon.
5. Translate each statement into “Did I do my best to …” See below for examples.
6. At the end of every day have each team member score their effort on each statement from 1 = low effort to 10 = high effort
7. Repeat #6 every day for 18 months …

Example of Personal Accountability to change within a team questions

1. Did I do my best to follow the billing & project process?
2. Did I do my best to hold others accountable for following the billing & project process?
3. Did I do my best to set project deadlines?
4. Did I do my best to achieve project deadlines?
5. Did I do my best to hold myself accountable to work deadlines?
6. Did I do my best to see ‘our company’ as a thriving company?
7. Did I do my best to preserve my quality of work?
8. Did I do my best to be innovative?
9. Did I do my best to achieve & uphold quality standards?
10. Did I do my best to preserve a high trust, empowering office environment?
11. Did I do my best to support my teammates?
12. Did I do my best to accept that others hold me accountable?
13. Did I do my best to accept that others have different quality standards?
14. Did I do my best to accept that others have different goals & priorities?
15. Did I do my best to see conflict/ resolution as a point of progress?
16. Did I do my best to accept others feedback/ critique of my work?
17. Did I do my best to eliminate the belief that others feedback + challenges are all about me?
18. Did I do my best to eliminate ‘our company’ being a scrappy, struggling company?
19. Did I do my best to stop trying to be everything to everyone?

https://bit.ly/2UR85sH

The Secret to Becoming the Person You Want to Be

by Marshall Goldsmith

For many of us, change is impossible because we are so optimistic (and delusional) that we try to change everything at once. We quickly overwhelm ourselves with becoming the “new Me”, and when it doesn’t happen as quickly as we’d like, people don’t notice that we’ve made a change, or some obstacle presents itself, we give up.

Discouraged by our failure, overwhelmed and disheartened, it’s hard to commit to change again. So, we become geniuses at coming up with reasons to avoid change. We make excuses. We rationalize. We harbor beliefs that trigger all manner of denial and resistance—and we end up changing nothing. Ever. We fail to become the person we want to be.

So, seeing our frailties in the face of behavioral change what do we do?

THE WHEEL OF CHANGE

For many years now, I’ve been using “The Wheel of Change” to help clients decide what to change and where to put their efforts. I’ve taken teams, organizations, friends, and peers through this process, and I’ve even use it myself. It is one of the most helpful tools for behavioral change that I’ve ever found.

The Wheel of Change illustrates the interchange of two dimensions that we need to sort out before we can become the person we want to be.

The positive to negative axis tracks the elements that either help us or hold us back. The change to keep axis tracks the elements that we determine to change or keep in the future. Thus, in pursuing any behavioral change we have four options: change or keep the positive elements, change or keep the negative.

Here’s a brief description of each of these options.

1. Creating represents the positive elements that we want to create in our future. Creating is the glamorous poster child of behavioral change. When we imagine ourselves behaving better, we think of it as an exciting process of self-invention. We’re creating a “new me.” It’s appealing and seductive. We can be anyone we choose to be. The challenge is to do it by choice, not as a bystander. Are we creating ourselves, or wasting the opportunity and being created by external forces instead?

2. Preserving represents the positive elements that we want to keep in the future. Preserving sounds passive and mundane, but it’s a real choice. It requires soul-searching to figure out what serves us well, and discipline to refrain from abandoning it for something new and shiny and not necessarily better. We don’t practice preserving enough.

3. Eliminating represents the negative elements that we want to eliminate in the future. Eliminating is our most liberating, therapeutic action—but we make it reluctantly. Like cleaning out an attic or garage, we never know if we’ll regret jettisoning a part of us. Maybe we’ll need it in the future. Maybe it’s the secret of our success. Maybe we like it too much.

4. Accepting represents the negative elements that we need to accept in the future. Most of us tend to commit to the other three four elements in the wheel of change with greater enthusiasm—creating is innovating and exciting, preserving makes sense as we focus on not losing sight of the good things about ourselves, eliminating appeals to the “do-or-die” element of our natures as we commit to stop doing things that no longer serve us, but accepting is a more difficult pill to swallow. Acceptance is an odd player in the process of change—it feels like admitting defeat, it’s equated by many to acquiescence. Acceptance is incredibly valuable when we are powerless to make a difference. Yet our ineffectuality is precisely the condition that we are most loath to accept. This truth triggers our finest moments of counterproductive behavior.

These are the choices. Some are more dynamic, glamorous, and fun than others, but they’re equal in importance. And three of them are more labor-intensive than we imagine.

And, that’s the simple beauty of the wheel. When we bluntly challenge ourselves to figure out what we can change and what we can’t, what to lose and what to keep, we often surprise ourselves with the bold simplicity of our answers and can thus take significant, real steps towards becoming the person we really want to be.

Cynefin framework

Domains of the Cynefin framework; the dark domain in the centre is disorder.

The Cynefin framework is a conceptual framework used to aid decision-making.^[1] Created in 1999 by Dave Snowden when he worked for IBM Global Services, it has been described as a "sense-making device".^[2][3] Cynefin is a Welsh word for habitat.^[4]

Cynefin offers five decision-making contexts or "domains"—obvious (known until 2014 as simple),^[5] complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder—that help managers to identify how they perceive situations and make sense of their own and other people's behaviour.^[a] The framework draws on research into systems theory, complexity theory, network theory and learning theories.^[6]

Terminology

The idea of the Cynefin framework is that it offers decision-makers a "sense of place" from which to view their perceptions.^[7] Cynefin is a Welsh word meaning habitat, haunt, acquainted, familiar. Snowden uses the term to refer to the idea that we all have connections, such as tribal, religious and geographical, of which we may not be aware.^[8][4] It has been compared to the Maori word turangawaewae, meaning a place to stand.^[9]

History

Snowden, then of IBM Global Services, began work on a Cynefin model in 1999 to help manage intellectual capital within the company.^[2][b][c] He continued developing it as European director of IBM's Institute of Knowledge Management,^[13] and later as founder and director of the IBM Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity, established in 2002.^[14]Snowden and Cynthia Kurtz, an IBM researcher, described the framework in detail the following year in a paper, "The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world", published in IBM Systems Journal.^[3][15][16]

The Cynefin Centre—a network of members and partners from industry, government and academia—began operating independently of IBM in 2004.^[17] In 2007 Snowden and Mary E. Boone described the Cynefin framework in the Harvard Business Review.^[1] Their paper, "A Leader's Framework for Decision Making", won them an "Outstanding Practitioner-Oriented Publication in OB" award from the Academy of Management's Organizational Behavior division.^[18]

Overview

Cynefin offers four decision-making contexts or "domains": simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and a centre of disorder.^[d] The domain names have changed over the years. Kurtz and Snowden (2003) called them known, knowable, complex, and chaotic.^[3] Snowden and Boone (2007) changed known and knowable to simple and complicated.^[a] Since 2014 Snowden has used obvious in place of simple.^[5]

The domains offer a "sense of place" from which to analyse behaviour and make decisions.^[7] The domains on the right, simple/obvious and complicated, are "ordered": cause and effect are known or can be discovered. The domains on the left, complex and chaotic, are "unordered": cause and effect can be deduced only with hindsight or not at all.^[19]

Since 2014 Snowden has called the simple domain obvious.^[5]

Simple / Obvious

This means that there are rules in place (or best practice), the situation is stable, and the relationship between cause and effect is clear: if you do X, expect Y. The advice in such a situation is to "sense–categorize–respond": establish the facts ("sense"), categorize, then respond by following the rule or applying best practice. Snowden and Boone (2007) offer the example of loan-payment processing. An employee identifies the problem (for example, a borrower has paid less than required), categorizes it (reviews the loan documents), and responds (follows the terms of the loan).^[1] According to Thomas A. Stewart,

This is the domain of legal structures, standard operating procedures, practices that are proven to work. Never draw to an inside straight. Never lend to a client whose monthly payments exceed 35 percent of gross income. Never end the meeting without asking for the sale. Here, decision-making lies squarely in the realm of reason: Find the proper rule and apply it.^[20]

Snowden and Boone write that managers should beware of forcing situations into this domain by over-simplifying, by "entrained thinking" (being blind to new ways of thinking), or by becoming complacent. When success breeds complacency ("best practice is, by definition, past practice"), there can be a catastrophic clockwise shift into the chaotic domain. They recommend that leaders provide a communication channel, if necessary an anonymous one, so that dissenters (for example, within a workforce) can warn about complacency.^[1]

Complicated

The complicated domain consists of the "known unknowns". The relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or expertise; there are a range of right answers. The framework recommends "sense–analyze–respond": assess the facts, analyze, and apply the appropriate good operating practice.^[1] According to Stewart: "Here it is possible to work rationally toward a decision, but doing so requires refined judgment and expertise. ... This is the province of engineers, surgeons, intelligence analysts, lawyers, and other experts. Artificial intelligence copes well here: Deep Blue plays chess as if it were a complicated problem, looking at every possible sequence of moves."^[20]

Complex

The complex domain represents the "unknown unknowns". Cause and effect can only be deduced in retrospect, and there are no right answers. "Instructive patterns ... can emerge," write Snowden and Boone, "if the leader conducts experiments that are safe to fail." Cynefin calls this process "probe–sense–respond".^[1] Hard insurance cases are one example. "Hard cases ... need human underwriters," Stewart writes, "and the best all do the same thing: Dump the file and spread out the contents." Stewart identifies battlefields, markets, ecosystems and corporate cultures as complex systems that are "impervious to a reductionist, take-it-apart-and-see-how-it-works approach, because your very actions change the situation in unpredictable ways."^[20]

Chaotic

In the chaotic domain, cause and effect are unclear.^[e] Events in this domain are "too confusing to wait for a knowledge-based response", writes Patrick Lambe. "Action—any action—is the first and only way to respond appropriately."^[22] In this context, managers "act–sense–respond": act to establish order; sense where stability lies; respond to turn the chaotic into the complex.^[1] Snowden and Boone write:

In the chaotic domain, a leader’s immediate job is not to discover patterns but to staunch the bleeding. A leader must first act to establish order, then sense where stability is present and from where it is absent, and then respond by working to transform the situation from chaos to complexity, where the identification of emerging patterns can both help prevent future crises and discern new opportunities. Communication of the most direct top-down or broadcast kind is imperative; there’s simply no time to ask for input.^[1]

The September 11 attacks were an example of the chaotic category.^[1] Stewart offers others: "the firefighter whose gut makes him turn left or the trader who instinctively sells when the news about the stock seems too good to be true." One crisis executive said of the collapse of Enron: "People were afraid. ... Decision-making was paralyzed. ... You've got to be quick and decisive—make little steps you know will succeed, so you can begin to tell a story that makes sense."^[20]

Snowden and Boone give the example of the 1993 Brown's Chicken massacre in Palatine, Illinois—when robbers murdered seven employees in Brown's Chicken and Pasta restaurant—as a situation in which local police faced all the domains. Deputy Police Chief Walt Gasior had to act immediately to stem the early panic (chaotic), while keeping the department running (simple), calling in experts (complicated), and maintaining community confidence in the following weeks (complex).^[1]

Disorder / Confusion

The dark disorder domain in the centre represents situations where there is no clarity about which of the other domains apply. By definition it is hard to see when this domain applies. "Here, multiple perspectives jostle for prominence, factional leaders argue with one another, and cacophony rules", write Snowden and Boone. "The way out of this realm is to break down the situation into constituent parts and assign each to one of the other four realms. Leaders can then make decisions and intervene in contextually appropriate ways."^[1]

Moving through domains[edit]

As knowledge increases, there is a "clockwise drift" from chaotic through complex and complicated to simple. Similarly, a "buildup of biases", complacency or lack of maintenance can cause a "catastrophic failure": a clockwise movement from simple to chaotic, represented by the "fold" between those domains. There can be counter-clockwise movement as people die and knowledge is forgotten, or as new generations question the rules; and a counter-clockwise push from chaotic to simple can occur when a lack of order causes rules to be imposed suddenly.^[3][1]

Using the Cynefin framework to analyse policing of the Occupy movement in the United States^[23]

Notes

1. a a,b Snowden and Boone (2007): "The framework sorts the issues facing leaders into five contexts defined by the nature of the relationship between cause and effect. Four of these—simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic—require leaders to diagnose situations and to act in contextually appropriate ways. The fifth—disorder—applies when it is unclear which of the other four contexts is predominant."^[1]
2. b ^ Snowden (2000): "An early form of the Cynefin model using different labels for the dimension extremes and quadrant spaces was developed as a means of understanding the reality of intellectual capital management within IBM Global Services (Snowden 1999a)."^[10][11]
3.  c Snowden, Pauleen, and Jansen van Vuuren (2011): "The framework was initially used in Snowden's early work in knowledge management, but now extends to aspects of leadership, strategy, cultural change, customer relationship management and more (Kurtz and Snowden 2003; Snowden and Boone 2007). The framework is particularly effective in helping decision-makers to make sense of complex problems, providing new ways of approaching intractable problems and allowing the emergence of shared understandings from collective groups."^[12]

2. d  Williams and Hummelbrunner (2010): " ... Cynefin identifies four behaviors a situation can display: simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic. This terminology is not new; the systems literature has used it for decades. However, in Cynefin the behaviors and the properties that underpin these four states are not entirely drawn from systems theories or even theories of chaos and complexity. Cynefin draws heavily on network theory, learning theories, and third-generation knowledgement management.
3. "Crucially, compared with many network and company approaches, Cynefin also takes an epistemological as well as an ontological stance. Similar to the Soft Systems and Critical Systems traditions ... Cynefin explores how people perceive and learn from situations."[15]
4.  e Cynefin uses chaotic in the ordinary sense, rather than in the sense used in chaos theory.[21]

References

 1. Snowden, David J.; Boone, Mary E. (November 2007). "A Leader's Framework for Decision Making". Harvard Business Review, 69–76. PMID 18159787

 2. Snowden, David (1999). "Liberating Knowledge", in Liberating Knowledge. CBI Business Guide. London: Caspian Publishing.

 3. Kurtz, Cynthia F.; Snowden, David J. (2003). "The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world" (PDF). IBM Systems Journal. 42 (3): 462–483. doi:10.1147/sj.423.0462. Archived (PDF) from the original on 18 September 2006.

 4. Berger, Jennifer Harvey; Johnston, Keith (2015). Simple Habits for Complex Times. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 236–237, n. 5.

"Cynefin". Welsh-English / English-Welsh On-line Dictionary. University of Wales. Retrieved 24 November 2016.

5. Berger & Johnston (2015), 237, n. 7.

6. Williams, Bob; Hummelbrunner, Richard (2010). Systems Concepts in Action: A Practitioner's Toolkit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. pp. 10, 163–164.

7. Browning, Larry; Latoza, Roderick (31 December 2005). "The use of narrative to understand and respond to complexity: A comparative analysis of the Cynefin and Weickian models", Emergence: Complexity and Organization, 7(3–4): 32–39 (last modified: 23 November 2016).

8. "Honorary Professorship for David J Snowden". Bangor University School of Psychology. 15 April 2015.

 9. Berger & Johnston (2015), 236–237, n. 5.

10. Snowden, Dave (2000). "The Social Ecology of Knowledge Management". In Despres, Charles; Chauvel, Daniele. Knowledge Horizons. Boston: Butterworth–Heinemann. 239.

11. Also see Snowden, Dave. "Cynefin, A Sense of Time and Place: an Ecological Approach to Sense Making and Learning in Formal and Informal Communities". citeseerx.ist.psu.edu.

12. Snowden, Dave; Pauleen, David J.; Jansen van Vuuren, Sally (2016). "Knowledge Management and the Individual: It's Nothing Personal", in David J. Pauleen and Gorman, G. E. (eds.). Personal Knowledge Management. Abingdon: Routledge 2011, 116.

13. Snowden 2000, 237–266; Snowden, Dave (May 2002). "Complex Acts of Knowing: Paradox and Descriptive Self Awareness", Journal of Knowledge Management, 6(2), 100–111. doi:10.1108/13673270210424639

14. Kurtz and Snowden (2003), 483; "The Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity", IBM, archived 14 June 2002; "Membership", IBM, archived 10 August 2002.

15. Williams & Hummelbrunner 2010, 10, 163–164.

16. Quiggin, Thomas (2007). "Interview with Mr. Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge", Seeing the Invisible: National Security Intelligence in an Uncertain Age. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 212.

17. "The Cynefin Centre: Life after IBM", KM World, 14(7), July/August 2005.

18. "Outstanding Practitioner-Oriented Publication in OB", obweb.org.

19. Koskela, Lauri; Kagioglou, Mike (2006). "On the Metaphysics of Production" Archived 23 July 2008 at the Wayback Machine.. Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference on Lean Construction, Sydney, Australia, July 2005 (37–45), 42–43.

20. Stewart, Thomas A. (November 2002). "How to Think With Your Gut". Business 2.0. pp. 4–5. Archived from the original on 5 November 2002.

21. Berger & Johnston (2015), 237, n. 11.

22. Lambe, Patrick (2007). Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness. Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 136.

23. Geron, Stephen Max (March 2014). "21st Century strategies for policing protest" (pdf), Naval Postgraduate School.

24. O'Neill, Louisa-Jayne (2004). "Faith and decision-making in the Bush presidency: The God elephant in the middle of America's livingroom" (PDF). Emergence: Complexity and Organisation. 6 (1/2): 149–156.

25. French, Simon; Niculae, Carmen (March 2005). "Believe in the Model: Mishandle the Emergency". Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. 2 (1). doi:10.2202/1547-7355.1108.

26. Verdon, John (July 2005). "Transformation in the CF: Concept towards a theory of Human Network-Enabled". Ottawa: National Defence, Directory of Strategic Human Resources.

27. Shepherd, Richard; Barker, Gary; French, Simon; et al. (July 2006). "Managing Food Chain Risks: Integrating Technical and Stakeholder Perspectives on Uncertainty". Journal of Agricultural Economics. 57 (2): 313–327. doi:10.1111/j.1477-9552.2006.00054.x.

28. Bellavita, Christopher (October 2006). "Shape Patterns, Not Programs", Homeland Security Affairs, II(3), 1–21.

29. Pelrine, Joseph (March 2011). "On Understanding Software Agility: A Social Complexity Point Of View" (PDF). Emergence: Complexity & Organization. 13 (1/2): 26.

30. Mark, Annabelle L. (2006). "Notes from a Small Island: Researching Organisational Behaviour in Healthcare from a UK Perspective". Journal of Organizational Behavior. 27 (7): 851–867. doi:10.1002/job.414. JSTOR 4093874.

31. Sturmberg, Joachim P.; Martin, Carmel M. (October 2008). "Knowing – in Medicine". Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. 14 (5): 767–770. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2753.2008.01011.x. PMID 19018908.

32. Burman, Christopher J.; Aphane, Marota A. (September 2016). "Leadership emergence: the application of the Cynefin framework during a bio-social HIV/AIDS risk-reduction pilot", African Journal of AIDS Research, 15(3), 249–260. doi:10.2989/16085906.2016.1198821 PMID 27681149

33. Cox, Kate; Strang, Lucy; Sondergaard, Susan; and Monsalve, Cristina Gonzalez (2017). "Understanding how organisations ensure that their decision making is fair". Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.

34. Firestone, Joseph M.; McElroy, Mark W. (2011). Key Issues in the New Knowledge Management. Abingdon: Routledge, 132–133 (first published 2003).

35. Williams & Hummelbrunner 2010, 182.

What is the customer lifecycle?

As an ecommerce business owner, you've likely heard a lot about managing customer relationships. Consumer appeal is probably a large aspect of your success in retail, so it's important to dedicate ample time and resources to ensure you're equipped with the right knowledge and technological arsenal to meet fluid demand.

It's often said that successful businesses have the most loyal customers. But for your business to create brand allegiance among your clientele, you must first understand your customers and the journey they took to get to your website.

What is the customer lifecycle?

In terms of customer relationship management, the customer lifecycle describes the various stages a consumer goes through before, during and after they complete a transaction. Simply put, it's the Point A to Point B journey a customer takes until they make the final purchase.

The phases a customer passes through during the course of an ongoing relationship with a brand vary on a case-by-case basis, but here are five basic stages of a customer lifecycle:

• Reach: Your marketing material and content needs to be in places where consumers will find it. Reach is the first step in the lifecycle because it develops awareness right away.
• Acquire: Ecommerce acquisition is very important. Reaching potential customers won't mean much if you can't offer relevant content or messaging. Understanding your brand, the products you offer and what type of person will buy them will help with acquisition. Contacting them directly with personalized communication improves the odds of a future conversion.
• Develop/nurture: Once that first purchase is made, your business needs to keep in contact with the customer. This is where you develop a relationship with the buyer, ensuring they're fully satisfied with their initial transaction. You can also use back-end analytics to predict what else they may like based on what they bought the first time around. Asking for feedback also helps develop the relationship; customers like that their opinion is valued.
• Retention: If you're able to continually send relevant and meaningful messaging to a customer, the chances that they return and make another purchase are higher. Retention begins with satisfying a consumer's needs, caring for them and cultivating the relationship. If you can take a customer's feedback and use it to improve a product or service, you make them feel as if they were a part of the process. Performing a customer feedback analysis is key in finding actionable insights that can lead to a stronger customer relationship. This type of trust is valuable to customer retention.
• Advocacy: Once the retention stage of the lifecycle is reached, you want these customers to become a brand advocate for your business. If they are truly satisfied, they likely won't have issues recommending your products or services to friends and family. Spreading awareness amongst social circles is easy to do once a customer is loyal to a brand, and if they continually spread positive recommendations, their extended network is more likely to convert as well.

The beauty of the customer lifecycle lies in the fact that it's nonlinear, meaning it follows a cyclical pattern at the end. Customer retention is the end goal in developing strong brand loyalty, but your business needs to continually offer relevant and timely messaging to prior customers, otherwise your top-of-mind awareness will quickly fade.

The customer lifecycle can help your business maximize the revenue potential for each client who makes a purchase on your website. Once a customer has become a brand advocate, the potential for upselling increases as a result. New product features, releases or exclusive offers are also a great way to progress consumers through the lifecycle. As long as your messaging is consistent, relevant and is in tune with their needs, you can turn one-time buyers into loyal customers quickly.

Ease of Doing Business Ranking

2019 Retail Trends

Richard Shapiro

If we don’t look ahead we risk being left in the dust, and perhaps nowhere is that risk greater than with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a practical retail technology. AI has left the lab, and although its long-range impacts and unexpected consequences remain the domain of science fiction writers, brands and retailers have seized upon it to predict individual consumer behavior and laser-target their messaging. Those who begin coupling AI with the human touch in the year to come will have a huge advantage long-term. As my 2019 trends that follow demonstrate, the technology gold rush will go unabated but savvy retailers will never lose focus on people.

Specialty Stores Thrive; Department Stores Surrender

Department stores have become damaged through perpetual deep discounting and their failures to motivate staff and excite consumers. All around us, once-dominant chains are shrinking and shuttering at a frightening pace, with venerable Sears and Toys R Us among the casualties. At the same time, specialty shops offering unique merchandise, highly trained (and well-compensated) sales associates, and irresistible services and spaces are booming. No retailer better exemplifies the trend—or its staying power—than Mitchells, a “luxury brands specialty store” that’s set the bar with its exceptional customer service; exquisite designer clothing, jewelry and accessories; and multi-generational relationships with designers and consumers. Jack Mitchell, CEO of the company his parents started in Westport, Connecticut, went on to write Hug Your Customers and, later, Hug Your People—titles that concisely sum up his retail recipe for success in a world of unlimited choice.

Consumers Spend As Channels Blend

Today’s customer is channel agnostic, switching effortlessly between online and bricks-and-mortar buying and employing a blend of shopping techniques: patronizing physical stores for tactile and social experiences, conducting product/pricing research via smartphone, and taking advantage of super-convenient online ordering and delivery options. “We don’t hear customers talk about channels very much,” James Nordstrom, president ofNordstrom Stores, told Diginomica. “Customers value experiences, and so the more successful we are in creating a great shopping experience, no matter how they’re choosing to shop, I think the better our business will be.” To exploit the trend, make your customer’s experience a good one no matter where he shops you.

The Circular Economy Expands, Retailers Go Sustainable, and Customers Approve

Serving the goal of sustainability, a circular economy is a regenerative human-managed system in which waste is minimized by slowing or closing energy and material loops. The economic model embraces durability, reuse, repurposing, refurbishing, recycling, and upcycling, and is being embraced by a growing cohort of environmentally-friendly merchants and manufacturers. Companies such as Unilever, Patagonia, IKEA, Lush Cosmetics, and New Belgium Brewing not only have the distinction of executives who can sleep at night, but legions of loyal, educated and affluent customers who reward environmental leadership at the cash register and like to tell their friends about it. Take Patagonia, the cultish outdoor clothing chain that has championed Earth-friendly practices and policies for over 30 years. The retailer’s Worn Wear program provides generous merchandise credits for returned Patagonia clothing in good condition. The returns are sorted into three categories: “Rewear” for clothes suitable for second-hand sale; “Reuse” for well-worn items to be turned into other products; and “Recycle,” which converts everything else to textile fibers and industrial products such as insulation. According to CEO Rose Marcario, Patagonia “wants everyone to become radical environmentalists by keeping our stuff in use longer.” Retailers with their eyes open won’t need a degree in climate science to know which way the wind blows.

Members-Only E-Commerce Becomes More Personalized

Amazon is far from the only retailer that’s innovating in e-commerce. Walmart describes Jetblack—a service launched from the retail giant’s tech incubator “Store No. 8” (not really a store) earlier this year—as “a new shopping service that combines the convenience of e-commerce with the customized attention of a personal assistant.” More pricey than Amazon Prime ($50 monthly for Jetblack vs. $12.99/mo. for Prime), the service is going after an upscale, busy clientele including “time-strapped urban parents.” A member simply texts her shopping request and Jetblack goes to work, delivering the appropriate merchandise within two business days—just 24 hours for popular items—at no additional charge. The launch publicity stresses an entrepreneurial, team-oriented approach to the question, “What if we doubled down on the customer experience and leveraged emerging technologies to build the most effortless, customized, and curated shopping experience possible?” The underlying system reportedly combines the skill and knowledge of expert human buyers with the speed and precision of AI and aims high to satisfy the unique needs of each member customer. If it flies, and it should, we’ll be hearing a lot more about this and other hyper-personalized services to follow.

Cashier-Less Checkout Expands Rapidly

As Amazon expands its Amazon Go chain of self-service convenience stores, dozens of startups are competing with established firms to master and lead this potentially game-changing retail model. An innovative Chinese entrant, BingoBox, has taken the cashier-less concept to another level, automating virtually every aspect of store operations in more than 300 unmanned outlets. BingoBox stocks snacks, beer, and just about any essential food or household item you might need in a pinch when other stores are closed. Shoppers scan a QR code to gain entry and pay for their purchases via mobile app. Other checkout-free startups include Zippin, with a recently opened concept store in San Francisco, Inokyo in Mountain View, and Santa Clara’s AiFi, which promises an affordable, flexible system for mom-and-pop stores and larger retail operations alike. This is an important trend that many of us will want to watch, but here’s the million-dollar question: Will automation that eliminates human staff find a home across the broad retail spectrum, or be consigned to the convenience store market where today’s innovation is occurring?

Retail Metrics Shift from Store Sales to Various Touch Points

While the same-store sales metric has long served as a baseline indicator of retail success, a number of industry analysts are questioning whether the metric is appropriate to measure modern retailing, according to recent reporting in RetailWire and Retail TouchPoints. Stores don’t always serve the same function that they did in the past, when they had one job—to complete the sale. Today’s stores have taken on a number of new roles, including marketing to boost brand awareness. That may mean the store no longer carries and sells products; that it has become an experiential destination center, showroom, and/or distribution center. Clearly, when sales are frequently completed in a channel other than the store, judging performance based on sales numbers alone is misguided. This is a reality that Wall Street investors and shareholders are learning to accept as retailers convert their stores into something new.

AI Becomes A Valuable Tool to Personalize Service

Retailers are using AI to personalize customer service, and the trend is picking up steam. Fifty-five percent of retailers plan to leverage the technology within three years, according to the 2018 Customer Experience/Unified Commerce Survey from Boston Retail Partners (BRP). Among the many applications: merchandise recommendations based on a customer’s response to a short survey, and the ability to contact a given client at the most favorable time of day. In April, Starbucks rolled out voice recognition ordering in South Korea, extending its mobile order-and-pay technology by integrating with Samsung’s AI chatbot, Bixby. Customers can use their phone in a conversational way—as if speaking with a real-life barista—to learn more about available beverages. Meantime, The North Face has adopted IBM Watson’s cognitive computing technology to help consumers find just the right jacket. But here’s the thing. While AI implementations will permit innovative businesses of all kinds to increase client satisfaction, Starbucks and The North Face know full well—as any customer-centric organization should—that connections made between two people will always trump “equipment” no matter how many bells and whistles are thrown in.

Mall Brands Enter the Subscription Service Rental Market

Ann Taylor and Express are notable among the fashion retailers that offer rental subscription services—an innovation that helps to offset reduced in-store traffic and create a new revenue stream. With Ann Taylor’s Infinite Style program, for $95/month subscribers receive up to nine garments every four weeks. “Wear it. Send it back. Get more. Exchange as many times as you like with free shipping, both ways.” Meantime, Express Style Trial works on a set-of-three basis and looks attractive at a flat monthly cost of $69.95. “This service allows our closet to become your closet. Start closeting items by browsing our site and viewing everything Express Style Trial has to offer. Check out New Arrivals for new styles each week.” In addition to helping clothing retailers maximize their inventories, affordable monthly rental programs such as these hold particular appeal for younger customers who may not have otherwise recognized the brand. Now it’s something they’ll want to talk about. According to Allied Market Research, the online clothing market rental market will exceed $1.8 billion by 2023.

In recent years, retailers have increasingly overlooked employees as their most important competitive differentiator, instead focusing on technology solutions that promise to reduce overhead and automate every conceivable aspect of the business. AI is a remarkable tool with capabilities we’ve only just begun to unleash, but as an executive obsession I fear it will further devalue our people. As enthusiasm for AI, unmanned stores, and ingenious self-service options swells in 2019, remember that when (not if) the machines drop the ball, customers will be most grateful for the human being in the room.

And consider the philosophy of MM.LaFleur as articulated by Rachel Mann, director of offline retail, when she said, “for us it’s all about the human experience—a refuge from Alexa and all of the choice and robots … it should be like you’re meeting your friend and she’s giving you good advice.” Now that’s a trend you can bank on.