Faces of innovation: the Caregiver

The Faces of Innovation is a series of posts I’m doing based on Tom Kelley’s book The Ten Faces of Innovation.

The Caregiver is the third "building" persona. Caregivers represent the human element in any organization. Doctors and nurses epitomize what a Caregiver is all about: providing personal, competent care in a gentle, warm way. Caregivers have a great "bed-side manner", and they strive to understand each individual customer.

Caregivers are the pastors of the church. "Pastor" is a term often used to simply denote a church leader, but that’s not the way we use the term. We see pastors as one part of a team of people gifted to equip Christians for their role in God’s mission in the world (the others being apostles, prophets, evangelists and teachers). Pastors (Caregivers) exude a warm interest in and care for individuals. They love to be with and pray for others, and excel at encouraging people.

In innovation, Caregivers can be invaluable in that they notice the experience of the individual, and can take measures to make their experience a better one. Caregivers can help churches simplify and explain clearly processes that can be daunting for newcomers, like finding the bathrooms or dropping their children off in Sunday school classes. Caregivers can also identify barriers that keep people away from church, and seek to hurdle or tear down those barriers.

An example from the business world is the wine company Best Cellars. Joshua Wesson, the co-founder of the wine shops, noticed that while most people enjoy drinking wine, "the mysteries, confounding rituals, and downright snobbery surrounding the industry" often put people off and prevent them from actually going into a wine shop and buying wine. So he created fun, un-snobbish wine shops that simplified the process of finding a wine you like and buying it for an affordable price. They have categorized wines into eight categories (four for whites, four for reds), and educated people about wine. Essentially, they’ve removed the obstacles between normal people and their enjoyment of wine.

The other lesson we can learn from Best Cellars is that offering fewer options can be the best thing to do. Most people are overwhelmed with too many alternatives and not enough clarity about how to make a good choice. Pruning the "products" you offer down to a few excellent options, and then equipping the customer to make a good decision about which option is best for them can work wonders for a business.

Caregivers also represent the importance of real human contact in any business or enterprise. Just because you can automate something doesn’t mean you should. How many of us just love getting an automated answering system when we call a large company? How refreshing would it be to simply have a real human being answer the phone? Churches, too, need to guard against the temptation to automate and systematize everything. Human interactions can seem inefficient, but what you gain in the long run far outweighs what it costs in the short-term. "Being human" could be a great guiding value for any church or business.