Tag: ikea

Storytelling for Behavioural Change at the e-Learning Event

Maggie Shelton works for Ikea and talked about storytelling. She started her talk by showing some of the stories that Ikea allowed their staff to tell about their personal lives and how they relate to the culture at Ikea. See this one for an example (not the example Maggie used, the stories aren’t public):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAxeutoipI4]

Ikea’s Human Resources department actively uses these videos to share how their culture lives and it can be really be a tool that engages people with the company. Storytelling is all about gaining trust. Authenticity is important. This means there is a big difference between a message coming from high above or a message coming from “the workfloor”. I personally find these type of stories (consciously not using a big Ikea logo in the back) of which they have more than a thousand(!) incredibly valuable. According to Shelton they are also timeless.

She then shared the example of the “home furnishing introduction”. This was an assignment where she, as a learning person, had to help the home furnishing manager with some of her goals around how people should be engaged with home furnishing. She created a story about a guy who is a bit in mess and who starts reflecting on himself through his own home. She played us the first episode. The film was made with as little spoken language as possible as it had to be translated into 28 languages. The video is then used in a two-hour lightly facilitated workshop.

If you want to have maximum impact with your story (on learning), then it is very important to have discussions after watching the film, usually by asking questions about the video.

One more thing I learned from this session is that there is a circular Ikea store built in 1965 Stockholm inspired by New York’s Guggenheim, interesting!

Ikea Store inspired by Guggenheim
Ikea Store inspired by Guggenheim

Outsourcing to the Customer

Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write an essay of no more than 500 words discussing the title in relation to Knowledge, Innovation and Quality. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.

Ikea by Flickr user splorp, CC licensed. Anybody interested in co-authoring a book titled: "Ikea for Dummies, Guerilla Shopping for the Whole Family"?
Ikea by Flickr user splorp, CC licensed. Anybody interested in co-authoring a book titled: "Ikea for Dummies, Guerilla Shopping for the Whole Family"?

Outsourcing, the process of subcontracting to a third party, is mostly discussed in the context of large businesses offshoring some of their work to other countries. Reasons for outsourcing can vary, but usually have to do with saving costs, getting access to proprietary knowledge, improve quality through standardisation or help with research and innovation.

I have also seen the term used in two other contexts:

  • People now outsource part of their brain functions to technology. To use myself as an example: a lot of my memory is now outsourced to my mobile phone (much more than the phone numbers of my friends; also reminders, lists, pin codes, etc.).
  • Smart companies outsource a lot of their work to their customers, saving costs in the process. The most brilliant example is Ikea. In the old days furniture was delivered fully assembled and straight into your living room. With Ikea you drive your purchases home yourself and then spend hours putting it all together. Ikea takes this very far, letting you tap your own soft-icecreams.

“Subcontracting” to the customer has become very pervasive in the Western world. You take your own groceries from the shelf (in the past somebody got them for you) and in some supermarkets you are the one scanning them at the cash register. Full service gas stations don’t exist anymore. Money is taken out of ATMs, not at a teller and in many restaurants you have to clean up your table yourself.

There are two types of outsourcing to the customer:

  • Things that are just as fast and convenient when you do them yourself as when they are done by somebody else. The ATM is an example. This type is usually made possible by technology and will keep expanding in our society.
  • Things that are more inconvenient or take more time to do yourself, but that allow the service/product to be cheaper. Gas stations are an example of this. This is only interesting for a customer if there is an attractive balance between time lost and money saved. When time is very valuable, paying a bit extra to get service becomes interesting. That’s when you decide to get your groceries delivered for a fee or pay somebody in India to research and book that next trip abroad. As long as the costs of labour in the BRIC countries stay much lower than labour costs in the US and Europe I foresee more and more cases of individual customers offshoring what was outsourced to them.

If I had more words, I would have tried to explore what these trends might mean for the way that we teach, train and learn. I can imagine that learners soon will be asked to assemble their own curricula, find their own sources and even assess themselves. In that sense there are parallels between outsourcing to the customer and the shift from “push” towards “pull” in learning.

Maybe in a next post?

Unfortunately, I didn’t stick to the self-imposed rules in this post. But Lars von Trier didn’t do that in most of his Dogme 95 movies either (and he took a “vow of chastity” which cannot be said of me!).