The Case Against Centricity

What's wrong with customer-centric, user-centric, and human-centric

We need a center to steer explanations, summarise values and focus attention. It comes as naturally as the urge to compare and is closely related to it. Comparing can be explicit. We prefer this over that, and we say so. It can be wishful. Something that is not the case, but we want it to be. And there is a third case, where we only realize our true priorities in hindsight.

It's possible that out of these needs, the practice of adding “-centric” took off, and some of its products enjoy high circulation. Whatever the reason, all popular something-centric words seem to me either delusional, hypocritical, misnomered, counterproductive or simply wrong. How so?

This AI-generated cartoon has so many things wrong that, in the beginning, I was about to discard it. But then, since centricity is equally problematic, I kept it.

Let's start with customer-centric. I doubt there is a need to convince anyone of how popular this is, and less so when we add variations like client-centric and consumer-centric. It is an announcement that now we care about the customer, finally. There is, if not empathy, at least an attempt to imagine what it is to be our customer. But if that was the case, the first thing to realize is that nobody identifies as such.

the system imagines that it has “customers,” although the people thus designated would hardly describe themselves as customers of a specific enterprise or even allow themselves to be addressed as such (with the possible exception of Porsche drivers).
—Niklas Luhmann, 1978¹

Customer-centricity is offered as a solution to many business problems. Only if you search hard may you find some good arguments on why customer-centricity is not the solution but the problem.

Ultimately, customer-centric and variations are new euphemisms for profit-centric, a necessary shift when preceding euphemisms run out of steam.

Customer-centric is problematic also for another reason, but that’s easier to show with the next popular term, user-centric.

User-centric is in high circulation. If in doubt, google it. Seven million results. The value of user-centric is rarely questioned. The proposals and polemics only focus on how.

What's wrong with it? Well, it's simply a misnomer. Users exist in relative terms. A user can only be a user of. The respective system, tool or service has primacy. If anything is in the center, that is not the user, but what comes after of.

Admittedly, user-centric approaches have made a mass of improvements. But I wonder if such an obvious glitch is in the blind spot of so many, what other groupthink norms are equally problematic but less visible.

Next up is one very dear to me: data-centric. Being a proponent of data-centricity principles doesn't make me like the choice of a word to communicate them. “Data is self-describing and does not rely on an application for interpretation and meaning.” That‘s the main thing. Data must be decoupled from applications and be with explicit semantics. Calling all this data-centric is justified only historically to reverse the application-centric tradition. Yet, apart from being an inappropriate substitute for data-application decoupling, calling it data-centric raises three risks for what the movement strives to achieve. First, data-centric invites misinterpretations. One I often hear, and the last time it was two months ago at a Dagstuhl Seminar on a closely related topic, is that if something should be at the center, it's the knowledge, not the data. That's right, but it's also what self-describing suggests. Data-centric, then, can easily be misconstrued even by thought leaders unless they happen to map it to what it is meant to stand for. Another risk is related to organizational politics. A data-centric initiative will put the leading team or department in a privileged position. Why would I support something that puts somebody else, more competent at this or any way mandated, at the center of attention and makes them an attractor for higher budget allocation? That's counterproductive because you need the cooperation of many for such a transformation to succeed. The third risk is that data-centric can now easily be confused with how it is used in the context of AI.

While the problem with data-centricity is in the name but not in the practice, there are other cases where centricity isn't explicit but is undeniably practiced. One obvious case is the already mentioned application centricity. And here’s another, from a different domain: cognitive science. For that, we’ll need a bit of background.

The main divide in cognitive science is between the computational and the embodied paradigm. The first computational school of thought is Cognitivism, which was popular in the 70s and 80s but is still dominant today in different forms. It takes seriously the computer as a metaphor for the mind and sees the brain as something independent from the body and the environment. The brain, cognitivists claim, works by processing internal symbolic representations of a pre-given world. The other computational school, Connectionism, uses the neural network as a metaphor for the brain. It has a more systemic view but still claims that the outside world is only known through internal representations but of a different kind, non-symbolic. In other words, the computational school in all its flavors is neuro-centric (cognition happens in the brain only) and agent-centric (independent of the environment for its functioning). Different varieties of embodied cognition provide their own argumentation to reject those theoretical commitments. If you are curious, I would recommend checking those of the enactivists.

If all these something-centric words are problematic, can't we find at least one that is less so? Something we can agree on. How about human-centric? Yes, that sounds about right. But wait, wasn't that the implied thinking that gave permission to humans to exploit the planet? (Remarkably, the current economy model seems coupled with that of computational cognitive science. The first exploits the environment; the second ignores it.)

Planet-centric, then? But won't that give permission to colonize, exploit, and pollute other planets? And also, haven't we tried that already before Copernicus? What was once a bad explanation can resurface as a good justification.

So, no, centricity is not a good thing.

This essay is part of the What's Wrong with...? series.

1. Luhmann, N., Baecker, D., & Barrett, R. (2018). Organization and decision. Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1978)