A website, a sales problem, a product name, and an operating bottleneck can look like separate assignments. Often they are different views of the same system.
THE USEFUL PART
The first description of a problem is rarely neutral.
A mental model is simply the explanation a person or organization carries around about how something works. It determines which customers count, what a salesperson is for, what belongs to a department, and which choices feel possible.
Most mental models are reasonable. They often come from experience and may have worked for years. Trouble begins when the model is treated as the business itself rather than one way of understanding it. At that point, improving the parts can leave the larger problem untouched.
My role is often to make the working model visible, test what it leaves out, and help the people involved describe the situation more usefully.
FOUR EXAMPLES
A change in the frame changes the available work.
ECOMMERCE / WHOLESALE
Every customer might be a larger customer.
A maker wanted to increase wholesale sales but had built a hard boundary between retail and wholesale customers. Wholesale required an application, a separate locked store, a minimum opening order, and actual shipping charges.
That arrangement assumed there were two fixed kinds of buyers. It also meant that a good retail customer could not simply notice that buying more would improve the economics.
A different model treats buying behavior as a continuum. Tiered prices can make volume worthwhile, a free-shipping threshold can remove uncertainty, and the cart can show the exact benefit of adding a few more units. Easy reordering and useful point-of-sale materials can help a small order grow into a durable account.
ORIGINAL MODEL
Retail and wholesale are different populations.
ALTERNATIVE
Wholesale is a behavior that more customers can grow into.
SALES / RETAIL PARTNERS
Small accounts are not failed big accounts.
After losing a large account, a sales team naturally began looking for another large account to replace it. The search made each retailer a target and put the salesperson in the familiar position of asking for an order.
In a tightly regulated market, there were still ways to become more useful to smaller retailers. Sell-through support, point-of-sale tools, and forward-applied depletion allowances could make the salesperson a partner in building the account rather than an adversary trying to load it with inventory.
The goal was no longer to find one customer large enough to repair the sales line. It was to help a group of smaller customers become more successful with the product.
ORIGINAL MODEL
Replace the lost big account with another big account.
ALTERNATIVE
Help smaller accounts sell through, reorder, and become stronger partners.
PRODUCT / POSITIONING
A better question changed the product.
A regulated consumer-products company was preparing to introduce a new format. Its working name came from the hardware supplier and used language already circulating among competitors.
The choice initially seemed practical, but it created several problems. The term did not accurately describe the product, belonged to another company, and gave the customer little reason to distinguish this offering from anything else on the shelf. It also directed attention toward the hardware when the company’s real advantage was the quality of what went into it.
We stepped back from the naming exercise and asked what the customer was actually buying: a convenient way to enjoy an unusually good product without having to understand the category’s equipment or terminology.
That answer informed an ownable name based on the occasion, along with the packaging hierarchy, product claims, regulatory language, retail presentation, and sales story. What began as a naming discussion became a more useful examination of how the product would be understood and sold.
ORIGINAL MODEL
Use the language of the supplier and the category.
ALTERNATIVE
Name the value and occasion that belong to the customer.
OPERATIONS / SYSTEM DESIGN
Finding the structure beneath the work.
A complicated operation can accumulate a procedure for every task and still be difficult to understand. Each instruction may be reasonable, while the relationships between them remain unclear.
I start by looking for the smallest underlying model that can faithfully describe the operation. Processes that appear very different often share the same structure. Understanding that structure makes it possible to describe new work without inventing another set of exceptions.
The procedures follow from that understanding. They have a place in a coherent model of how the operation works, making it easier to see where a change will have consequences elsewhere.
ORIGINAL MODEL
Write a procedure for each task.
ALTERNATIVE
Find the underlying model that connects the work.
WHAT I LOOK FOR
Where does the current explanation stop being useful?
Sometimes the answer is a new site, name, product, tool, or sales program. Sometimes the most useful work comes first: changing the description of the problem so everyone can see more of it.