IGNITION POINT
Have We Lost Our Way?

To succeed in today's fast-paced automotive markets, developing, implementing and ultimately servicing effective technological innovation has become a mainstay. Having and employing an open mind in regards to innovation is optional.

Innovation has become pervasive, liquid, authentic, personalized and immediate, if not seemingly instant. Technology may be its fuel but adoption is its enabler. Innovation can make your job easier, but it can also make what you do today irrelevant. The pressure to keep pace with accelerating change can overwhelm at times. In essence, innovation acts like a road construction grader: It smoothes the way for most, while it pushes industry dinosaurs to the side.

Weird, or Just Different? There's a flip side to everything," says futurist Derek Sivers, the founder of MuckWork. "We must never forget that whatever brilliant ideas we have or hear, the opposite may also be true. Too often, we get trapped in one way of thinking so deeply that we are blinded by our own assumptions from seeing a different or innovative way of doing something. Click here to see how practicing open mind can open doors to seeing the value of innovative solutions. (Video - TED Conferences LLC)

If treatment is science, healing is an art
While driving to a conference in Dallas recently, I happened to be listening to a National Public Radio interview of a Nobel Prize winning cardiologist, Bernard Lown. The gist of Lown's comments centered on how contemporary medicine has strayed off course.

"Today's medical training paradigm is partly to blame," Lown says. Doctors today, he explains, are trained ask a patient what's wrong and after about 20 seconds, cut them off, make a diagnosis and recommend some tests or treatment. Healthcare is now clinical, quick and designed to push people through the pipeline.

Healthcare has also become proficient in incorporating the science of rapidly innovative and technical diagnosis and lean, time-efficient clinical treatment. The rush to innovation and the crush to build and maintain the competencies required to use it has led to healthcare to mortgage its heart and soul.

The science of diagnostics has amputated the cultivation of trusting relationships, sympathetic active listening and more from the toolbox. Healthcare, Lown asserts, has lost the art of healing, and with it that 'bedside manner' which did so much for the well-being of all — from patient-customer to physician.

Have we got blinders on?
As I continued to listen to the interview, I was awestruck by the parallels to the automotive industry, from design through to repair. Overalls or suits may be our scrubs and labcoats, but we are immersed in a technical world just as complex, dynamic and demanding as medicine.

Like doctors, we're pressured by time and spiraling innovation. We deal with high vehicle counts (see how easily we reduce people to things?). We also need to blend family, work, reading, recertification, continuing education, management and other stress-filled tasks into the mix. The parallels, are eerie and staggering, both in number and effect. Perhaps you can think of others?

Do consumers, and more specifically our customers, view us as caring car health providers or as cool, clinical practitioners?
The more I think about this, the more I respect Dr. Lown's concern: Have we lost our way?

Here's what might seem like a weird question for you, at least initially: What if, for the cars we make or service, our customers only paid us for the months that their cars were healthy?

Some, I suspect, may think the question — and perhaps its poser — is just nuts. Some may be kinder and simply reject the question outright. Others perhaps paused for a second or two, amused by either its oddity or audacity, and then moved on. A few, perhaps, escaped their biases, preset perceptions and beliefs to let the question linger.

In so many ways, however, that's the genesis of innovation and emergent paradigm shifts. It's about resisting 'why bother,' to embrace 'why not?' Like an electrical short stops current, our personal bias-blocks and perception mechanisms can hinder the creation and adoption of innovation, tolerance and more. The everyday work we do can also be the unseen prison that keeps progress and our humanity at bay.

How long have we heard that automakers failed to listen to, let alone invite, feedback from their customers? Have you ever cut a customer off who was trying to explain in her or his nontechnical, sometimes rambling, manner what was happening? Perhaps you may have read the password-protected mocking of customers present in online forums or shared in convention meeting, board or lunch rooms?

These examples illustrate how our biases create a disconnect between customers and us. That disconnect suggests our industry is abandoning the art of healing vehicles. Lown laments how doctors have reduced people into vessels of illnesses and conditions that need treatment. Too many of us automotive folk, I suggest,  have likewise reduced our customers to the vehicles that they drive — a necessary evil that we tolerate to get to what we've trained to do best.

An open mind is the ultimate innovation
It's easy to say, "I have an open mind." We all want to believe that about ourselves. But in practice, we're sometimes only open to that which fits nicely into the world we know and want to keep as it is. After all, then we do not have to embrace what we choose not to hear or are predisposed to not understand. And if change is involved, rejection is too often the most lubricated path chosen.

Look around. Have you seen the infighting that occurs between some industry segments, such as technicians vs. automakers? Or experienced the bickering and intolerance that happens within different industry segments? Does your own tolerance for new ideas or perspectives wither as soon as you know the source? For that matter, are these attitudes quietly imposed onto customers?

One acid test for truly having and using an open mind is to walk the talk. Get outside your comfort zone. Leave the nest. Sit amongst a group of customers or attend a meeting of industry folks that aren't in your known, comfortable segment of the automotive universe. Attend a conference outside your trade. Escape orbit — leave the gravity of your biases, perceptions and normal environment. Get outside your box.

Communicate and collaborate. Listen and learn. Practice using your open mind like a sponge that never goes dry. Use it to open doors to hearing new questions, considering new answers and discovering new understandings and insights, rather than closing the door to keep the old and familiar trapped inside. Make time, perhaps a 30 minute first-time customer appointment, just to get to know 'what they're all about.' Put healing back in your toolbox.

This is the reason I embrace the innovation that the National Automotive Service Task Force (NASTF) is. NASTF welcomes open minds and a sharing of different worlds, from consumer through manufacturer, and all segments in between. It is the lifeblood of what makes this organization tick.

The blended passion for vehicles doesn't mean everyone agrees at all times. But it does mean we've learned to dialogue and, especially, to listen with positive regard to the views of other industry segments. It has melted tensions, fueled innovative solutions and fostered new ways of looking at issues and closing gaps. Common ground has been created that didn't exist before, and which wouldn't, if legislation, rather than voluntary collaboration, was its foundation.

Most of all, the NASTF's dialogue heals and helps us find grasp the future. More than an organization, the NASTF is a movement that needs and deserves your involvement.