Ali Carmichael on the outside-in paradigm shift

Session synopsis

Ali’s session opened with a kitchen sink. Two of them, actually. Same kitchen, same tins, completely different experience of what was there depending on which side of the window you were standing on. It was a simple image that carried real weight: most organisations are designing from the inside out, and working harder within that frame just gets you to the wrong place faster.

The core argument Ali made is that teams accumulate what he calls “organisational autobiography,” a body of assumptions about customers that feel completely rational from the inside but frequently miss what is actually happening for the person on the other side. The shift he advocates for is not complicated in theory. It means stepping outside your own perspective and encountering your customer’s actual reality rather than your version of it.

He walked through three examples from his own research. A holiday home park had answered every ownership question a buyer could have, clearly signposted in a website tab. Users skipped it entirely, because “ownership” was not the frame they were approaching from. A free members’ club was read by users as an additional fee before anyone had clicked through. A product labelled as an “investment portfolio” attracted exactly the wrong audience, because the language signalled professional finance rather than leisure and lifestyle. In every case, the team thought they understood their customers. In every case, the gap was larger than expected.

Ali closed with three questions worth pausing on. When you say “we can’t do that because,” is that a fact or a default response? When you say “our customers don’t like,” what is the evidence actually based on? And when you describe your customer’s experience, is that description built on real behaviour, or on what you expect to see?