In this time of economic constraint, there’s probably many business looking at efficiencies and optimizations trying to create value by trimming excess. But guess what: creating value isn’t a subtractive process.

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Icky approaches like Business Process Reengineering were over-hyped and misapplied in the past because they focused on cutting back, not on the people in the processes. They asked, “what can be eliminated by new technologies and short cuts?” But as consumers we don’t think of value as the removal of waste. We think of it as the delivery of what we really need for the least sacrifice. Real consumer value isn’t something you back into and cut down to. It’s something you find, focus on, and delivery.

A while ago Peter and Jesse shared this simple diagram of how many businesses approach delivering value to their customers. They start are the core, working outward to eventually paint on the layer of experience. But that’s not how customers approach it.

Instead, they just see this:

From their perspective, the value is the experience they have with the product or service. Everything else, in fact, is just magic.

To create real value that resonates with people, businesses need to work from the outside-in.

Customer value has to be sensed and constructed from their perspective; not from the perspective of a costing spreadsheet. Reductive approaches create commodities. Put planning solutions from the customer’s perspective can create systems of solutions that are difficult to copy.

The simple way to design the customer perspective is to spend time in their world and construct solutions as they might experience them. THEN, work backwards into the organizational capabilities to support those experiences.

One great tool for thinking outside-in is the swimlanes tool created by Yvonne Shek at nForm. The basic idea is to create a new solution scenario, then map the flow of that scenario back into dependencies for the user interface, technology, and organization.

Another approach is what we’ll be sharing at our Good Design Faster workshop in April: rapidly create many ideas for new customer value, work as a multidisciplinary team to find the best integrated set of ideas to pursue, then quickly translate those ideas into prototypes that can be immediately evaluated with customers.

Designing from the outside in allows everyone in the organization to focus on the only thing that ultimately matters to customers — the experience you end up delivering. From that ultimate perspective, team members can make the smart decisions that will obviously result in great products and services.

(And if you’re interested in joining us for the Good Design Faster workshop, use BLOG when you register for 10% off.)