“Design is all about learning from doing. That’s how we evolve to the best solution.”
— Tim Brown, IDEO
A Decade of Voice of Customer Work
Listening to the people an organization serves has been the constant in my career, even as the method has matured.
At Auben Realty, that meant informal Voice of the Employee and Voice of Customer work — direct conversations used to improve process and service delivery. At RBW Logistics, it became systematized: an enterprise NPS program and CRM built to track customer sentiment continuously, not just when something went wrong. At Genworth/CareScout, it became a governed, enterprise-wide VOC strategy and customer intelligence function, feeding directly into behavioral segmentation, claims experience, and policyholder decisioning work across the business.
Same capability. Ad hoc, then systematized, then strategic — over roughly a decade.
Reflective Inquiry
As a practitioner and researcher, I believe organizations improve when they build the capacity to understand people, interpret uncertainty, and act with coherence. Design — and the broader disciplines of behavioral science, service design, and organizational systems — are tools toward that end, not ends in themselves.The Design Process is one vehicle for discovering solutions to those problems; building an organization's permanent capacity to keep discovering them is the deeper work I care about.
Understanding the full picture of what an organization is trying to become lets teams see how individual capabilities — research, design, operations — connect into a larger system of adaptation. I still draw on Jobs to Be Done Theory thinking and Agile , continuous-discovery practices day to day. Increasingly, though, I draw on the theoretical traditions behind adaptive systems — Dewey's theory of inquiry, Wiener's cybernetics, Luhmann's systems theory — which inform my doctoral research into how organizations generate coherence under uncertainty.
Read more of my thinking on Medium.