Getting Small To Go Big: The Power of Emergent Properties.
In my last article, I walked through the three practices necessary for an organization to unlock the potential of automation tools like AI to help manage and grow relationships with customers. This article focuses on the first practice: the data framework. By describing engagements in greater detail, you can reduce the complexity of your data ecosystem, provide the context machines need to deliver meaningful results, and make the process of describing data easier. While this might seem counterintuitive—more detailed descriptions should mean more data to account for, manage, and describe—the opposite is true, thanks to the principle of emergent properties.
Emergent properties are a concept where complex systems arise from the interactions among a small number of simple parts. We see this phenomenon everywhere. For example:
Every word in the English language is based on the same 26 letters.
Every tree is made up of a small set of cells that combine in different ways to form roots, bark, and leaves.
Our entire planet is composed of the same 118 chemical elements.
Similarly, an organization’s relationship with a customer, and all the engagements that comprise it, represent a complex system with emergent properties. Like English, trees, and the Earth, these relationships are created by combinations of a small number of simple elements interacting with each other in simple ways.
The data framework to describe an engagement is broken into six facets: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. Each facet is further divided into categories and sub-categories. In total, fewer than 500 elements are necessary to fully describe any engagement for any customer for any reason. Each individual element represents a specific “fact” about the engagement. For example:
Who: The audience’s gender, location, or previous activity
Where: The exact engagement channel where the connection occurs
What: The topic of the engagement and the team that created it
When: The time and type of day the engagement occurred (weekday, holiday, etc.)
Why: The organization’s product/services that the engagement supported and the customer lifecycle stage to be influenced
How: The approach the organization took to facilitate the engagement and (if applicable) the intended combination of Who, What, Where, and When used in the approach
This framework leverages the principle of emergent properties to capture a rich tapestry of engagement data in a format a machine can "see" and use without first needing to know exactly how, where, or when the data will be used. Different teams and systems in the organization can combine various data elements to power and analyze whichever systems they require.
If this level of detail seems overly elaborate, remember three things:
Machines aren’t smart – they only know what we tell them.
People exchange this level of detail all the time – we just use shared experiences and shortcuts to do it.
These shortcuts aren’t perfect – incomplete information, misguided assumptions, and misunderstandings are the root causes of most of the inefficiency organizations experience.
If this still seems like a lot, keep in mind it isn’t one person’s responsibility to capture this context. Every individual in an organization plays some role in the description some element of an engagement. It’s just a matter of making it easy for the right person to document the right decision at the right time.
Next time: how to make that happen.
