I had an interesting discussion with author Jim Hanas (@jimhanas) on Twitter today about customers and education. It started with Jim’s comment (re-tweeted by Director of Digital Initiatives for Chelsea Green Publishing, Kate Rados / @KateRados):
“When you start trying to ‘educate’ your customers, it’s the beginning of the end for any industry.”
I disagreed, and said so. I believe education informs and liberates. Rarely is it a negative thing in life or business.
But as it turned out, in this context ‘educate’ meant something different to Jim than it did to me. For Jim, it was a sinister euphemism for scold, blame, bully, and punish. ‘Education’ was “code for ‘litigation.'”
If I understood him correctly, Jim was saying that to ‘educate’ our customers would be to repeat the mistakes of the music industry.
Needless to say, I don’t want to see publishers suing school children. For me, though, ‘educate’ means to inform, communicate, and engage — all things publishers should do and not just with their books. To educate means, for example, an editor talking about a new acquisition, a production manager explaining why they used FSC approved paper, or a designer explaining how to use their tools.
Until now, we have assumed that nobody cared about this stuff. But the web has showed us that it can be endlessly fascinating, and, perhaps more pertinently, that an unwillingness to explain what we do ourselves creates a vacuum that will be filled by others who either have something to gain or who find our lack of transparency and engagement frustrating (looking at you Hugh McGuire!).
Ultimately, then, I don’t think Jim and I were in true disagreement. We just understood a word differently. Perhaps the lesson is that publishers need to educate, not “educate”?
I think the bottom line is developing a more compassionate tone in our effort to educate. Sure, there are people out there who think they know something and they don’t and in an effort to “educate” them we may even find that to them, ignorance is truly bliss. But there are also those who educate with agenda, with hidden motive—without compassion and a true desire for progress or positive change. So it brings me back to the idea that education in it’s truest form involves and should come from a place of compassion.
It is a nice feeling to be wrong every day. Or more accurately to feel that there is more to learn and that your beliefs yesterday are old hat and can use some rethinking, retooling. This is the hard part, because it calls for humility and acceptance—going against your own grain. Open mind = open vessel. I think most of us are in some way hard wired to hold on and remain “full” with our beliefs.
I have had many clients feel offended by my effort to educate them. I have had many who are thankful and appreciate the education. I often find that in the end, in our effort to educate, WE ourselves are in effect being educated…
Thanks Ian. I agree. I wrote this post late last night and so I wanted to keep it brief, but part of my thinking was definitely that education includes a willingness to learn yourself and that it is an ongoing, adaptive process.
It does make sense to educate clients – I dot it on a daily basis – as long as it simply means that I am trying to get the client to understand what the work they are asking of me represents and why they need me to do it. For example, I tell them that taking a picture costs in terms of time, and also in terms of equipment (all digital cameras have a limited lifespan), that they are also paying for the years I spent developing my skills as a photographer.
Once, a client explained to me that they could not do the job in-house because their camera was not good enough. He offered to swap my camera (an entry-level dSLR) for his camera (a full-frame high end dSLR costing ten times mine). Needless to say, I tried to educate him but soon decided to proceed with the swap. A month later, he called back, acknowledging that the problem was not the camera but the lack of in-house photographic skills.
The difficulty is that in explaining to clients we should avoid to patronise and lecture… Tough. I am learning everyday on how to manage clients, and their – often unrealistic – expectations.
Thanks for a very thought-provoking post.
http://davidikus.blogspot.com/.
Thanks for your comment David.
I think it comes down to how you understand ‘education’. I don’t think it is lecturing clients, customers, or readers on a one-off basis, I think it is a continual process of providing information and being transparent about our work.
But there is a danger of education being simply a last ditch defence of the status quo… In publishing, for example, we can’t suddenly decide to lecture our readers about pricing if we haven’t addressed issues of quality and availability… Perhaps if we had been quicker to embrace e-books, made them better and been more transparent about the process and the costs before hand, THEN we might have a leg to stand on…
Richard Curtis makes this observation at E-Reads:
I think he’s probably right…