Interestingly businesses now and days do a great job of hiding the efforts behind the scenes of creating new products, new solutions, new ideas. By the time the customer interacts with it, the customer experience is made to be perfect. I think this has greatly skewed our expectations in our world today.
I buy a fancy new phone and now I can search the web, map where I am, find a cafe near by, take pictures, edit videos, etc. And when there is a dropped call I am gravely disappointed. Or if I purchase a shirt and after 10 washes it gets a hole - how could this happen? We have done such a good job of customer service and innovation and marketing that in all reality we live in a false world. Our expectations that anything can be done are incredibly high.
One side of me completely agrees (I am an optimist), the other side...
What impact will this level of expectations have on moving our world toward sustainability?
For instance, I am involved in a project currently where we want to change a regular behavior in our business to reduce our environmental impact. The first expectation was... "well can't we just change it and be done with it?" 6 months later we find that around ever corner is another set of questions and impacts that we had not thought of from the beginning. It will easily take us easily another 6 months to get this project off the ground. And when it eventually does happen, it will be talked about by our marketing and sales departments like it was an easy switch and we "just did it".
What gets lost here is the countless hours, conversations and testing to see if we can in fact make a sustainable change. I think if we lowered expectations so that they were more in line with the truth, we would see something remarkable happen. People wouldn't think of things in abstract, they would understand the steps it take. I invite all of you who were interested in making a change, but feared the time and effort - know that there is no other way. And what you will gain by going through the process is far greater than anything you can buy off the shelf.
