New Book – ‘What We Want: Patterns of Customer Desire™’

Patterns Which Connect

Gregory Bateson (1904-1980), the great British anthropologist and ‘polymath’, coined the phrase Patterns Which Connect.

My admiration for Gregory Bateson is immense. I discovered Bateson’s work in the early 90s when I first read Structure of Magic Volumes 1 and 2. The Magic books were Richard Bandler & John Grinder’s first texts about what was then called META, later evolving into what became known as Neuro Linguistic Programming or NLP. Bateson had been a significant influence on Bandler and Grinder’s work.

I have a keen interest in the ‘source of the sauce’ and wanted to know more about Bateson, his background and his ideas. Bateson intrigued me. Here was a man who appeared to be a true polymath, that is, an expert in many different fields of endeavour. He started out as an anthropologist and evolved into a thinker, researcher and commentator on a diverse range of disciplines including psychology, systems thinking and cybernetics, ecological integrity and environmentalism.

His concept of ‘Mind’ in nature was fascinating; the idea that an ecological collective of animals, plants and an eco-system could adapt to an environment. He referred to a Mind as ‘…an aggregate of interacting parts or components’. The metaphor for business and specifically the world of supplier behaviour and customer experience was obvious to me.

The most intriguing of all Bateson’s ideas was his reference to Patterns Which Connect. He highlighted how patterns in nature are repeated in diverse sets of animals, plants and organisms. He identified patterns which connect in language, in engineering, in communities and in communication. He proposed that connectivity and patterns are everywhere!

What We Want: Patterns of Customer Desire™ is one such Pattern Which Connects.

This book describes a paradigm of what the therapist Milton Erickson, called a ‘content free’ model, that is, there is no specific situational message. It is a framework which can be applied in a diverse range of circumstances with an equally diverse range of ‘players’.

The beauty of What We Want: Patterns of Customer Desire™ is its ease of application to any customer experience environment. It simply requires populating with content. It is a Pattern Which Connects.

What We Want: Patterns of Customer Desire™ as an Operating Model

‘Patterns’ is an effective, well-proven operating framework for all customer service providers. The model is simple to adapt, easy to train, and quick to coach. It works equally well in business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) customer experience environments. As a set of principles for managing and delivering class-leading service experience it delivers for commercial operators, public sector agencies, NGOs, and the increasingly competitive world of Third Sector organisations.

It is used as the preferred operating model for global, prestige B2C and B2B service providers.

Class-leading brands have already worked with me to integrate What We Want: Patterns of Customer Desire™ into their process streams, their CRM, HRM and ICT systems. Most significantly, management development, staff training, and employee coaching are shaped around supporting the philosophy and principles of What We Want: Patterns of Customer Desire™. I have been privileged to help global brands implement and achieve consistency and sustainability of delivery, for the benefit of end user customers.

The power of What We Want: Patterns of Customer Desire™ comes from its intrinsic emphasis on the internal representations of customers and the feelings they are experiencing at any given moment.

In this book readers will learn how, by following Bateson’s principle of applying Patterns Which Connect, we can ‘get inside the world’ of customers and begin to help them in new ways.

What We Want: Patterns of Customer Desire™ consists of three core elements:

1. Understand Me
2. Fulfil my Future Feeling
3. Make it Easy for Me

What Customers Want™ is published in full by Pollinger. © Nick Drake-Knight June 2015