Let’s suppose that I have the first world problem of having my home bathroom renovated. Lucky me.

I (the client) want others to do this work for me. I’m not competent/capable of doing it myself, so I contact a qualified builder.

Now, given this ‘scene setting’, I want to compare and contrast two vastly different ‘system designs’ in dealing with my need – I’ll label them as ‘Push’ and ‘Pull’…and I’ll then use my builder analogy against many a conventional service system.

Note: The Push and Pull concept can be used in several ways. In this scenario I am using:

• ‘Push’ as the client being pushed around an inside-out focused design (as if they were merely a ‘widget’); and
• ‘Pull’ as ‘value’ being pulled towards the client by their helper (builder), making for an outside-in flow.

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