Journeys are everything, and they’re everywhere.
Published October 2, 2020.
In an earlier article, I touched on the topic of journeys as I explained the important distinction between process and friction.
Journeys are a big deal to me (as you may have guessed from the imagery on my Deedub Inc. home page and in my Friction Fixer launch article), and I think they should be a big deal to you, too.
Why? Because life is one big journey consisting of numerous smaller journeys within. As a result, journeys are so fundamental to who we are as humans that they permeate everything we do — including the interactions and relationships between people and organizations like yours.
It doesn’t matter whether yours is a school, university, government, non-profit, or for-profit — literally every interaction between your org and its people is either a journey, or an experience within a larger journey.
For example, when a person goes from:
- Searching for job opportunities to accepting your job offer.
- Researching potential colleges to graduating from your university.
- Buying a property to getting the plans for their new home approved by your city planning department.
- Landing on your website homepage to finding a specific subpage and downloading the document they were looking for.
- Considering various worthy causes to making a substantial donation to your non-profit.
- Feeling a sudden sharp pain to recovering from surgery performed at your hospital.
- Shopping for a new couch to buying one and having it delivered by your furniture store.
All of these are journeys where the person is driven by a specific want, need, or goal, and they move through multiple successive steps and experiences to reach that destination.
Ultimately, the success or failure of your organization is tied directly to the quality of these journeys and the experiences within.
As a result, the bottom line is crystal clear:
You must take journeys seriously.
Help your people complete their journeys and achieve their goals in a helpful, intuitive, low-stress way. Do this, and you’ll not only improve their lives, but you’ll likely gain a loyal, vocal fan and a lasting relationship. Everybody wins.
But, if you add friction to the process and derail their journeys — even unintentionally — you’ll make their lives worse, drive them right into the arms of a competitor, and likely gain a vocal critic. Everybody loses.
So how can you prevent this kind of negative outcome from happening?