Damien is "In A Pickle." His organization's delivery stats tell them that they're doing quite well. But when they do customer survey data, the customers don't think they are. So, Damien wants to know why there is a discrepancy.
The problem here is perception. The internal perception is shipping is going great, but the customers' perception isn't. If perception is reality, they have two realities—only one matters.
Can you guess which one it is?
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For my part, it's the customers' perspective. I'm always interested in what the customer tells me rather than all the internal stats. How we interpret and compare experiences to our expectations affects how we evaluate things.
However, those four terms—perception, expectation, interpretation, and evaluation—have distinct ideas or stages, per psychologists. So, to clarify, let's look at perception and interpretation from a psychologist's or scientific perspective:
Perception is related to the five senses, meaning things we see, touch, or smell. Interpretation gives meaning to these chemical or light signals.
In other words, perception is how information comes in, and interpretation is what we get from that information.
Expectations affect our interpretation. So, if you respond to it and feel good or bad about it, satisfied or unsatisfied, that will depend on your frame of reference.
Evaluation is the sum of your interpretation and your expectations. So, if you feel good about your interpretation, you have a positive sum. If you feel bad about it, then it's a negative difference.
This video from the BBC also explains how perception and interpretation interact.
Therefore, you can see that these ideas are interrelated. Our expectations influence our interpretation of things, and they certainly influence our evaluations, and you couldn't have any of these reactions without first perceiving them.
For example, my wife and I ordered a chair for our lounge. When it arrived, I thought the color differed from what we saw in the showroom. Lorraine disagrees. We disagree on the color of the chair. We view the same thing but have different interpretations and feelings about it.
Then we add in the expectation. I expected the chair to match the lounge decor. However, the interpretation was that the color was off from the floor sample. Therefore, my evaluation was less than ideal, a negative difference.
So, getting back to Damien's pickle, the discrepancy could be that while Damien's firm is comfortable with their shipping policy internally, customers interpret the length of the shipment time differently than what they expected after they heard or read it initially—and it's a negative difference.
Plato's Allegory of the Cave
Going deep into philosophy for a moment, consider Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In this allegory, we are to suppose that prisoners are chained up in a cave and cannot turn their heads to look behind them. Behind the prisoners, their captors have a fire burning and a wall they can stand behind. The area above the wall with the fire behind it allows captors to project the shadows of objects on the wall, like a book or a bird.
The prisoners might refer to the shadow of the book they see as a book. However, Plato argues that they did not see a book. The prisoners saw a shadow and inferred it was a book but would need to turn their heads to know it was. Therefore, Plato argues that the names are not for the actual thing but the thing we think we see.
One could interpret Plato's argument that our perceptions trap us, barring our access to reality. Regarding Damien's customers, they perceive the experience as troublesome because of how they see it, like a shadow on a cave wall. The reality could be something else; they would have to turn their heads to see.
And Then, Memory Plays a Part, Too
All of this ties into one of my favorite subjects, memory. Returning to the chair in my lounge, I have a clear picture of what it looked like, a leather captain's chair that was yellowish brown. When it arrived, it was a mid-range brown, which was not what I had pictured.
However, when I searched Google for chairs, it showed me all I had looked at before, including the chair we ordered. The photo showed a color different than what I remembered.