Warby Parker, the online eyeglasses retailer, has made a name for itself based on inexpensive, stylish products and great customer service (including a home try-on and free return policy that removes the risk of trying to pick out the right frames online.)

But they also have a showroom in Manhattan. You can make an appointment to stop by and try on their frames in person.

The showroom isn’t located in a separate building from the Warby Parker office. It isn’t even a separate space.

Why would Warby Parker run a brick-and-mortar showroom? And why would they put it right where their employees work, where it’s most likely to be a distraction?

Because it keeps them connected.

Paraphrasing Tim Riley, WP’s Director of Online Experience, who spoke recently at a great event hosted by IDEO and First Round Capital: there’s no replacement for seeing customers think out loud as they handle the product. Interacting with your customers is inspiring, but it’s also the source of real insight about how to make things better.

It sounds obvious once it’s said. But it’s a lesson that is still being learned by many who are designing online experiences.

Retail, up until very recently, had customer interactions baked in. And more traditional design fields have understood this for ages. Would you take a new chair to market without asking a few people to sit in it? Of course not.

But now it’s possible, if you’re not careful, to create and sell a product without ever talking to the customers you’re designing for. And that doesn’t do anybody any favors.

Fortunately, more and more people are re-learning the lesson that you can’t build for people without understanding them. I suspect we’ll reach a point where it will seem absurd that we ever tried.

Unilever announced that they’re going to shift their social media strategy away from one focused on fan acquisition, and towards one focused on engagement and sales.

In other words, instead of using social media to drive social media, they’ll use it to drive business. It sounds like common sense, but it’s actually a notable shift from what is still the norm.

There are times when we collectively mistake means for ends in themselves (in this case, social media), and have a hard time grounding ourselves in how a new tactic connects back to the bottom line (or double bottom line). Some of that is probably essential – we shouldn’t wait to know how to measure Twitter before we start experimenting with it. But as the newness fades, our standards go up. It’s impossible to know how effectively Unilever will incorporate this new ethos into their day-to-day operations, but it’s a  step in the right direction.

Caveat: Though we’ll see progress, we’re not likely to ever see a complete switch from hype-campaigns to measurement-driven activity. Television, for instance, is still a medium in which brands will gamble a million dollars on a Super Bowl ad with surprisingly little thought to how truly effective the ad is in shifting people’s behavior. We’ll still have to live with something like this:

• Marketing Team is formed at Company to help sell products.
• Marketing Team collectively celebrates their mission to be a.) creative and b.) results-driven.
• Marketing Team receives annual budget, gasp at the number of zeroes they have to play with.
• Marketing Team comes up with ten ideas. Three seem promising. One of those three, involving a talking dog, is hilarious.
• New Guy suggests they test all three.
• People really just can’t get over how hilarious that talking dog ad is. New guy no longer invited to Marketing Team meetings.
• Marketing Team decides to ‘make a bold move’, and go with their gut. Remind themselves of the mission: to be creative.
• Talking dog ad runs during the super bowl.
• Ad gets viewed 17 million times on YouTube. (No one remembers who the ad is for, but man, that dog is hilarious).
• Marketing Team gets budget doubled for the following year.
• New Guy questions his understanding of reality.

We need more of them. My post on the topic is up over at Mashable.

I’m convinced that there’s huge potential here. But there are also some pretty gnarly questions raised by a shift toward creating more digital products; especially around funding and evaluation. Hoping to explore those in more depth soon.

It’s a metaphor so engraved in our thinking that many of us probably fail to even notice it (I know I have). Gareth Morgan illuminates it wonderfully in his book ‘Images of Organization.’

The worker is a piece of a bigger system. That piece has a designated role with associated tasks. Those tasks interact with those of other workers in designated ways. The resulting work produces designated outcomes.

Morgan notes a number of problems with this system: its dehumanizing effect on workers, the rift that can emerge between individual incentives and the objectives of the organization, and more. But one problem in particular stands out, and it has to do with innovation:

Have you ever seen a machine change what it’s built to do?

Marvin Bower, considered by many to be the father of modern management consulting, once said ”I am convinced that the history, makeup, ways of doing business, attitudes of people, operating philosophy and procedures of even directly competing companies are ordinarily so different that information could be exchanged between them with no harm to either.”

He was talking about secrecy. But there’s another point in there. Ideas are easy. Culture is difficult. If you’re worried about your competitors stealing your ideas, then focus on establishing a culture that constantly makes its best ideas irrelevant with better ones.

The implication today is that if you’re at work and you’re good at your job, you should know exactly where you’re headed at all times.

Unfortunately, that’s simply not the case – especially if you’re in the business of creating anything. If you’re building something new, there are times when you’ll have more questions than answers.

What if a business culture made that uncertainty ok? What if people acknowledged, expected and respected uncertainty at key stages in the professional creative process?

For example, a software company aiming to create new products could say: “We’re going to engage in a needs-finding process to decide on the next product we want to create for our customers. You should feel confused regularly during this period, and something in you should be longing for some certainty. That’s natural, but don’t focus on it. At this stage in the process we’re creating options, not making decisions.”

Some people have adopted this for brainstorming sessions and the like. But it still feels like an exception to the rule. It still feels new. It shouldn’t.

It seems like knowledge workers, or those employed for their creative thought, all too often find comfort in the idea that if they’re in front of a computer, they’re doing their job. Or, if they’re not sure what they’re supposed to be doing, they’ll probably find it in their email. Or in social media. In their computer. Somewhere.

What if we stopped thinking about that as our default location? What if we had as healthy of a relationship with computers as we have with, say, a fork? We go to it when we need it. But we don’t rely on it to calm us when we’re unsure about what’s next. (Pause for a recommendation: Jonathan Franzen’s article on the unquestioning, addictive love we get from our devices.).

I’m not 100% certain what the framework is that replaces what we have now. It’s not a new location. Maybe it’s a litmus test. Maybe we should be asking what we’re learning in any given moment, or what we’re being pushed to look at differently. Isn’t that closer to where our real value comes from?

Seth Godin on the Gig Economy:

“This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything.”

From War and Peace:

“For the investigation of the laws of history, we must completely change the subject of observations, must let kings and ministers and generals alone, and study the homogeneous, infinitesimal elements by which masses are led. No one can say how far it has been given to man to advance in that direction in understanding of the laws of history. But it is obvious that only in that direction lies any possibility of discovering historical laws; and that the human intellect has hitherto not devoted to that method of research one millionth part of the energy that historians have put into the description of the doings of various kings, ministers, and generals…”

Source: The Fifth Discipline.