Cheez-Its® are Important!

Early this year, my four-year-old granddaughter, Charlotte, was a flower girl in her aunt’s wedding. There was an extensive run up to the wedding including a couple of wedding showers, dress and shoe buying, and the general hubbub that comes along with planning a wedding. On the wedding weekend she attended the wedding rehearsal, the rehearsal dinner and then, of course, the wedding day itself which included riding in a trolley, walking down the aisle, eating a fancy dinner, staying up late, and sleeping at the hotel where the reception was being held.  It seems to me that was a lot of excitement for one weekend for a four-year-old.

On Monday, when Charlotte went back to school, during “snack conversation” her teachers asked their normal question: what did you do this past weekend? Since she had an incredibly exciting weekend, what with being a flower girl, staying in a hotel, staying up late dancing the night away, etc., I thought that one of those experiences would have been what she identified as something she did the past weekend.  I would have been wrong!

When Charlotte was asked this question, she said that what she had done the past weekend was to, “eat special food.” Undoubtedly, she did eat special food at the wedding.  Her teachers pressed her further and asked her what special food she ate.  Her answer was, “Cheez-Its®”!  So, on this weekend when she was in a wedding and involved in all the hoopla that goes along with that, the most memorable thing for her was that she ate Cheez-Its®.

We never know what is the most important thing to someone at any particular moment since what is identified as being most important is drastically affected by who we are with and what we are experiencing right at that moment.

I work on the PMO team. We are a service organization and provide expertise and resources to the Institute.  Other people and teams at the Institute are our “customers”.  In thinking about my granddaughter and what was most important to her in the moment when she was eating a snack at school, I realized that little vignette is an example of how we need to truly make an effort to understand what our customers are experiencing before we can provide them with solutions.  We can never assume that because we expect that an experience should result in a specific response means that it will; or that people will react to it in the way we expect.

Whether our “customers” are patients or Institute-based employees, understanding what’s most important to them is the first step to providing effective and relevant solutions that solve the problem the customer is having. Before solutions can be provided, questions need to be asked to clarify needs and desires, and to help determine how important a problem, issue or experience is to the customer.  Otherwise you might be thinking that the wedding that just happened is the most important thing to someone when actually it was the Cheez-Its® they ate that really made an impression.