How being outcome focus improved my grocery shopping experience
I believe that having an outcome focus can have a meaningful impact in your personal and professional life. A few years ago I started going to shops, restaurants, and even grocery stores with a rough idea of what I needed but not a strong opinion on what I should buy.
As an Agile Coach, I’m not an expert on the best coffee machine, clothes, vegetables, fruits, and so many other things. That’s why I go to a store full of specialists ready to help. I’ve found that one of the major drivers in my experience and results is how I approach the shop employee.
I’d like to share a few examples
I was shopping in La Boqueria, a famous market in Barcelona. I had friends coming to my place for a barbecue. First I went to one shop, let’s call it shop A, and asked for a meat cut that is pretty famous in Brazil called picaña. The shop lady went straight to something they have in the front view and showed me something and it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for but indeed was the right cut.
I decided to thank her and I went to a different shop to try a completely different approach.
I went to shop B and instead of asking the output I wanted (a picaña), I told her: “I have some Brazilian friends that are coming to my place tonight and I’d like to cook an amazing barbecue they told me about this Picaña cut but I’ve never bought it or cooked it” So yes I gave shop B the outcome I wanted and this triggered some interesting behaviors. Let’s go one by one:
Advice: It’s valuable to listen to people who have direct experience interacting with lots of customers. People close and listen frequently to the customer. She knew right away what things Brazilian people like about that meat and what it should look like. I learned a lot. I realised I was too far away from having good knowledge in this space and this made it difficult for me to know the best solution and by having a preconceived idea of what I wanted reduced my opportunity to experiment in finding an even better solution.
Motivation: This was impressively different. Instead of looking for the closest product, she checked for the most suitable. I was in front of her talking about my friends and the barbecue while she was choosing the best one from at least 7 others to give me the best to suit my needs. To my untrained eye everything looked so similar but her passion for picking the best one was impressive.
Experience: This made the whole experience more enjoyable, learning, having a nice conversation, connecting with the people, sharing a piece of my story while she was sharing a piece from hers. I wonder if for her it was the same experience when someone just asks for what they want versus when they value the contribution she can make in choosing and the impact that this difference has on her customer’s life: having a good time with friends. I’ll be sure to ask her about this next time.
Results: I was confident I went home with the best piece I could have bought, I even asked for instructions on how to cook it. Of course you can google it, but the web pages don’t know your story and they can’t really recommend what’s best for you. So I went home and turned on the Barbecue while my friends started arriving and together we had a great time — they really enjoyed the meat and how it was cooked. I was happy with the experience and I think I got a better result than I could have expected: not only did I have an enjoyable time with my friends but I also learned something during the process.
I used the same approach when I was buying fruits to bake a cake for my Italian friend. Same experience, same results.
Opportunities to contribute: when you don’t have a clear view of what your customers or colleagues want to achieve it becomes quite difficult to find opportunities to contribute and the view of the problem becomes narrow and immediate. We are losing a chance to incorporate new views where the diversity, experience, passion and creativity of humans are involved. Sometimes we have a limited view of how the other human can help us, we just need to show them what we want to achieve and everyone will join forces and we might get interesting surprises in the journey.
This experience led me to thinking about how much I focus on outcomes during my work — if I need something to be done, do I focus on outputs or outcomes? What is the quality of the result? How much mutual learning do I generate?
I feel that we have learned for so many years to be output focused, in school, universities and maybe in our early work experience. I wonder what could we achieve if we start to unwind the outputs bit by bit and before starting to work on something or asking a colleague for help we ask ourselves, I’m I being outcome driven?
