The Problem with Amazing

A richness of emotions

My wife and I were having a birthday breakfast with our son Jasper recently, just the three of us. The waitress was a charming purple-haired Fitzroy half-goth who used the word "Amazing" after every micro-interaction.

Jasper’s order of waffles? Amazing. Our coffee choices? Amazing. My request for the bill? You guessed it — amazing.

Jasper’s amazing waffles

Now, I know she's not using the word literally (and she knows it too); she’s only trying to engineer some friendly zing into our breakfast service. But her linguistic habit got me wondering: do we have a poverty of language around emotions in our business offerings?

Sidebar: Think of the emotive richness that all languages capture. English has 4000 words for different feelings! Even then we lack what the Spanish call ‘duende’ — that spine-tingling feeling when something moves you deeply. Finnish offers ‘sisu’ — determination that transcends mere grit. Germans report feeling ‘Torschlusspanik’ — that panic when you feel time is running out. And, one of my favourites, the Greeks experience ‘pronoia’ — the opposite of paranoia, a feeling that the world is conspiring to help you.

Like our cafe waitress, I see a similar emotional flattening with some of my clients when they talk about their customers. An aged care provider told me they want residents to feel "safe”. A museum strategy I once read said they wanted their visitors to have a "satisfying experience."

Really?

A different — and very impressive — aged care provider instead wants its residents to feel known and — get this — loved. A pre-eminent art museum told me they want visitors to experience wonder or even awe — that transcendent feeling when you encounter something that expands your sense of what's possible. These desired emotional states then drive their strategic choices: design of buildings, processes, staff training, communications.

When you settle for generic emotional goals, you set yourself up for generic results. Remember that Disney doesn't settle for "satisfaction" — they go for magic.

Question: What's the specific emotion you want your customers to experience, and how might making it explicit change how you deliver your service?

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Should we get married?

I met my wife Kate in 1992, over a squid-ink linguini (not waffles). For years, we were friends. We became a couple in 1999 and cohabited a year later. We finally married in 2005, and welcomed our son in 2009.

Am I a slow learner? Yes, perhaps!

But our deliberation is similar to that many organisations need to make if they’re seeking to merge (or 'marry'): When does it make sense to go all-in, and when should you stay more loosely connected?

Each year, I’m asked by a half dozen clients for help here. I act as a kind of “strategic match-maker” and I go to each ‘family’ (or board) and ask nine questions. From their answers, I can confidently predict whether they should:

• Merge unreservedly — it's a marriage made in heaven.

• Merge reservedly — it's not heaven, so manage your differences carefully (and I name them).

• Don't merge, run — you're fundamentally ill-suited (and I explain why).

• Or my personal favourite: Don't merge, but partner — there are many ways to realise benefits without subsuming everything under one entity.

The partnership continuum I use has four distinct levels, from simple information sharing (think casual dating) to full merger (the wedding). Here’s an over-simplified version of what I’m talking about:

If you want a more detailed version of this continuum to help with your strategic decision-making, drop me a line and I’ll gladly send it to you.

Most organisations jump straight to merger talks when they'd be better served exploring coordinated service delivery or shared back-office functions first. Sometimes the best relationships aren't about becoming one entity—they're about becoming better versions of yourselves together.

Question: When is it in your interests to 'merge' versus 'partner'—and what would you lose by choosing the wrong level of commitment?

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Imagination as a muscle

I was leading a strategy session last year when a hospital CEO said something that stopped me in my tracks: "What if we planned for a future where most of our patients never come to our building?"

Her board looked uncomfortable — this was heresy in a world governed by ‘bed count’ and ‘headcount’. But she was doing something rare: questioning the fundamental assumptions that invisibly govern how we think about problems. Cognitive scientists call this "breaking conceptual frames" — our brains naturally slot new information into existing mental models, which is efficient but limits genuine innovation.

Think of conceptual frames as the invisible scaffolding your brain uses to make sense of information quickly. When you hear "hospital," your brain instantly activates a whole network of associations: buildings, beds, machines that go ‘ping’, doctors, sick people coming to get fixed. This frame is incredibly useful — it lets you process information rapidly and make decisions without having to rebuild your understanding from scratch every time.

Eighteen months later, that organisation has mobile clinics, community health hubs, and a telehealth program handling serious outpatient volumes. But here's what's fascinating: they didn't stop imagining. They're now piloting AI triage and home-based dialysis programs.

And, they can do this because they don’t get stuck with old cognitive frames. I frequently help non-profits get unstuck from "service delivery" frames when they could be thinking "systems change." Or a government agency that operates within "compliance" frames when "enablement" might serve citizens better. The frames aren't wrong — they're just incomplete, and undersell the potential of these organisations.

The best leaders I know treat imagination like deliberate ‘frame breaking’ training. They systematically challenge their own mental models, invite contradictory perspectives, and create safe spaces for heretical thinking.

Question: How do you build imaginative capacity into your senior people—and enable them to ‘frame shift’?

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If you felt today’s 5MSM was “amazing”, please click the heart. You doing so will definitely make me feel something untranslatable into simple words (at least in English).

See you next Friday,

Andrew