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Definition of 'Excellence' : As per Oxford dictionary the meaning is "Quality of being very good" Definition of Paradox: A Cambridge dictionary meaning of that is "Seeming impossible or difficult to understand because of containing two opposite facts or characteristics. What is about this "Paradox of Excellence": “The Paradox of Excellence”, is a book written by David Mosby and Michael Weissman. The general norm is that when an organization provides a superior performance/service to its customers, there is supposed to be a high customer loyalty and an increased brand value. But the reality often is different: The superior performance/service of the organization is taken for granted and undervalued by the marketplace. This makes the organization cold-faced many a times and can make their reputation damaged and can bring down their business to a loss as well Adverse Effects (due to the 'Paradox of Excellence' phenomenon) on the excellence journey of an Organization: 1. Customer (over)Expectation not met: Human beings go by beliefs. If an organization is providing consistently a good performance/service, people will go with that belief and expect that to be the same always, irrespective of the situation. Does it sound odd ? No. Think of Kano Model where "Delighters" category goes to Basic(Must have) expectation, over a period of time. For instance, you are being served a juice every 2 hrs on a flight from Chennai to San-Francisco journey, say on two occasions. Next time when you board the same flight operator, and go from Chennai to Dubai (which is probably say approx. 1/4th of the travel time to Chennai-San-Francisco distance) you would still expect multiple juices to be given to you!! That is because of the high expectation you had, as prior experience with the flight operator. There could be such experiences other passengers might have with that same flight operator. Not every time organizations can necessarily meet the customer expectations 2. Reputation Loss/Brand Image impacted: Understanding customer expectation is the key. If that is not understand then organization will have its brand/reputation impacted. An organization may not be even aware of the expectation that its customers have on it. That can be much more damaging. 3. Loss of Customer Confidence/Customer Dissatisfaction: Delaying to meet the customer expectation or not understanding that, can result in customer dissatisfaction and customer getting frustrated and loosing confidence and shying away from the organization's services/products 4. Potential Employee Disengagement: When employees are not engaged properly, there can be a slow but steady decline of performance/service degradation. Remedial Measures: 1. Retrospect: Do a retrospection as where the gap is and see if there is any trend if there are multiple feedbacks. Try to understand the nature of the problem and include right stakeholders to discuss on the issues observed. Come out with relevant action item(s) and implement them as per priority with a SMART approach 2. Employee Engagement: A key stakeholder in any organization is people (the workforce) who can shape or make a product!! If employees can be satisfied, then every change is possible!! Happiness index of the employees is therefore a key metric for the success of an organization. Therefore getting the employee feedback/ideas/challenges.. can help in overcoming challenges. 3. Continuous Improvement: Finding ways to improve the existing product/processes that have helped in achieving the customer satisfaction(during the past). Experiment with some ideas, inspect if that works and adapt your system/process accordingly. Example: While telecasting Cricket, the technology got improved day-by-day and year-by-year. As more and more cameras got placed at various vantage points on the ground, the expectation amongst the fans(the 'customers' for the game) grew up for the technology to show right-decisions to help the standing umpires. There was a challenge when close run-outs and faint edges came into picture, which those cameras could not pick, in several cases. So the Cricket governing body (ICC) latched on to a new technology - Decision Referral System(DRS),that helped the third umpire to provide a more closer look and improved the right decisions on close runouts and faint edges. The expectation only increased from the customers(fans). Still few other challenges remained. Getting prompt LBW and how about hair-line decision of runouts. So, the ball tracking technology came to decide whether a batter is out or not. Then for hair-line runouts, as soon as a bail lifts from the stumps, the LED light would display. So these technologies ensured that right decisions always given to the maximum hilt. This is what the fans wanted!! With continuous improvement, the ICC has been able to address their customers' expectations and therefore sustain its performance/service. 4. Customer Feedback: 1. Getting feedback from customer after a service is done is always a good option to understand customer pain points, emotions, mindset 2. For Key customers, focused interviews, face-to-face meet.. can be better Having the customer feedback can provide great insights for the betterment of the service/performance provided by the organization, to its customers 5. Knowing USP: An organization has to see how it can further leverage its Unique Selling Proposition(USP). Accordingly it has to harness its strength. It also should try to see how to expand its business on that area to see if that can put a positive spin on addressing customer expectation. Conclusion: As a Six Sigma BB consultant, this can be a perfect situation to help an organization facing this sort of challenges. Understand the issues. Decide upon if the problem is perennial (if the organization is suffering for quite some time). If this current process/setup cannot be improved upon, then go for DMADV/DMADOV, Else DMAIC. As we seen, it is essential to understand the implicit and explicit expectations of the customers and address them at the earliest possible time to avoid the ignominy of not meeting customer expectation Reference: https://scottpublicrelations.com/the-paradox-of-excellence-high-performance-low-respect/