What Clayton Christensen and I Talked about 12 Years Ago
Chapter Four: Principle 3—Customers need the Whole Job to Get Done
Dear Friends,
Many of you know who Clayton Christensen was: a Harvard professor who introduced the world to disruptive innovation and became the most important advocate for jobs to be done thinking of our day. In this post, I will share a bit about our conversations regarding the whole job to get done.
What Clayton Christensen and I Talked about 12 Years Ago
Four Lenses for Seeing the Whole Job to be Done
As you have probably guessed by now, when I speak about the whole job to be done, I’m not talking about the big job to be done. In my last post I described three different approaches for determining what is the big job to be done. The third being the preferred approach. And I used Google as an example.
What I am not saying with the Google example is that the company gets the whole job done. Nor do I think that most technology companies to date get the whole job done. Maybe Apple. We will see. Nor do most companies in finance, restaurants, healthcare, consulting, travel, or entertainment. Certainly no one in manufactured goods. Definitely not the commodities people.
And as I mentioned earlier, the impact of not doing the whole job for the customer is that the customer becomes expert on and the only one capable of fulfilling a situational need in a meaningful way. As more and more goods, services, and experiences compete for the time and attention of people, people are behaving differently than before. They choose solutions that fit into their defined (or undefined, too) plan for getting things done and keeping things in motion.
I have used this example before, and I apologize for making you think, ‘ouch!’, but bear with me. When a child breaks her arm, a whole chain of events must occur. Her parent must cancel whatever other plans he or she had. The child must see a doctor. The doctor can do some very important activities to remedy her. But there’s a lot the doctor cannot do. The only person who sees the whole job to be done is the parent. And the parent is the only person who will see the child through the recovery process.
No journey map can articulate the entire job because it’s based on the parent and the child’s situations. The parent, as caregiver, must create his or her own ‘journey map’ and that map or plan will include technologies and relationships that only the parent will accept. Most likely those technologies and relationships are already in place and the parent needs only to activate them to support the challenge he or she faces.
When speaking about the whole job to get done, we have to acknowledge that business models exist to create a profit. The doctor cannot take on the role of caregiver. He or she can only do the part that the medical office gets paid for. Oftentimes, the business model becomes the lens by which the company sees the customer’s needs and develops new solutions. Continuing with the broken leg example, the doctor’s office is very likely to see patient needs during visits and create solutions to help progress the healing. But without a financial incentive, anything that happens before or after a doctor’s visit—which is when most of the recovery occurs—will likely not fit into the business model.
The same is true for restaurants, cruise experiences, coaching—you name it. A company can only sustain innovation and affect the experience of the customer at touchpoints that directly pertain to its business model. Leaving the customer to fend for his or herself when the solution doesn’t get the whole job done.
There are, however, additional lenses that strategists can use to help them see the whole job. These lenses push the company to pay attention to aspects of the job to be done that are not readily apparent. Here are four.
The JTBD Taxonomy – Different types of JTBDs have different experiential requirements
The Customer’s System – Your solution fits within a customer’s system
Intelligent Amplifier – The more intelligent the solution, the more jobs the customer wants the solution to do
Channel Defects – If they can’t finish the job, why do you need the channel?
The Stone Mantel JTBD Taxonomy
About twelve years ago, I met with Clayton Christensen, the man who discovered disruptive innovation and popularized jobs to be done. We were at a conference for dentist manufacturers. He was the main speaker and I was running a breakout session that focused on his work. Here’s how part of our conversation went.
Dave: I wondered if I could talk to you about some of the research I’ve conducted on jobs to be done.
Clay: Sure. Go ahead.
Dave: As you know I focus on experiences, in the way that Joe Pine defines them. We have a program we run called the Collaboratives. And each year, we invite 10 companies to participate in a yearlong research and innovation process. I’ve conducted hundreds of one on one interviews with consumers, and I believe that there are actually four types of jobs to be done.
[When I spoke with Clay, I had only identified four of the five categories I’m going to present below.]
Clay: Okay, go on.
Dave: There are functional, emotional, social, and aspirational jobs to be done. People are predisposed to expect different things from each of these JTBD categories.
Clay: Wait, the job to be done is the job to be done. There aren’t category types.
Dave: I think there are. [Goes on to explain.]
Clay: Well, you know, I’m just a professor with an opinion and the work has gotten much larger than me. You may be right.
It made me happy when Clay emailed me a few weeks later to ask how he could help me. We talked about an article with HBR. Later he revisited some of his thinking about jobs to be done and started promoting the idea that most solutions have a functional, emotional and social component to them that must be addressed by the innovator.
I took his newfound respect for emotional and social jobs as a complement. He never fully agreed with me. But now that he’s graduated to a celestial glory, like many, I miss him.
The Five Types of Jobs
Consumers—or better, people—have certain predispositions toward experiences created for their usage and enjoyment. It’s not that they overtly expect the following requirements. Instead, they pick up on what you say you are going to do for them and they associate your experience with other experiences—some completely out of your business category—that help them in similar ways.
If you don’t have certain basic elements in your experience, there is a high likelihood that you are not getting the whole job done for the customer. People have expectations of experiences that deliver on functional needs. Those expectations are different for experiences that deliver on aspirational needs. There are five primary types of jobs, or five job categories. They are:
Functional JTBDs—Help me accomplish a task
Emotional JTBDs—Help me feel deeper about a moment
Social JTBDs—Help me relate to others
Aspirational JTBDs—Help me change something about me
Systemic JTBDs—Help strengthen me across different parts of my life
To be continued . . .