"It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive."
— Chuck Klosterman
— Chuck Klosterman
I think that this is often true, particularly for complex experiences like a bank or a church. And it gets back to a critical point in customer satisfaction research: we tend to focus on 'things gone wrong' because we can catalog 'defects' and apply a process to eliminate them. 'Things gone right' are often much less discrete - or in Klosterman's words: amorphous.
For example, in our small start up church we speak of 'community' as being a core value. But community is hard to define and looks different to different people. Is community holding pot lucks? Or a well timed smile? But that doesn't let us off the hook, does it? Regardless of its amorphousness (amorphoticity? amorpheonism?) the underlying value is real and our goal should be to demonstrate more and more dimensions of it. To give it more substance, make it more real.
Of course fix things gone wrong, but we should keep our focus on making a lot of things go right. Because if they are, then the occasional stumble isn't going to matter nearly as much.
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