It’s a thrilling and hopefully infrequent illustration of why hierarchy sucks and free-playing, experimental and autonomously responsible human beings are the best.
After their cruise ship was holed, the captain hid and the senior managers ran away.
The entertainers worked out something was wrong, then, worried about the customers and the rest of the crew, did something about it. They initiated processes that saved all 581 people left on board, including themselves.
Maybe they were able to do that precisely because they weren’t on the org chart?
You know your clients are individuals. With individual personalities, character traits and preferences. You know that what delights one won’t delight another.
You also know that you want them all to be delighted by your service. You want an equality of result, and you recognise that using exactly equal means won’t deliver that.
In the same way, you know that your people are individuals, with individual personalities, character traits and preferences. That what delights one won’t delight another. Yet you want all of them to be delighted to work here, because that’s how they are motivated to delight your clients. You want an equality of result, and you recognise that using exactly equal means won’t deliver that.
“But how do I keep things consistent?”
By setting boundaries for behaviour, a floor for what has to be done, then giving your people free play to experiment and explore what delight means to them and to clients.
Doing exactly the same thing every time is what machines do. Cookie-cutting is an efficient way to produce to a minimum standard at scale, but it’s rarely a delightful experience.
Equality doesn’t have to mean treating everyone the same, it can be about doing whatever it takes to produce the same outcome. And if a delighted human is your desired outcome, delighted, free-playing humans are your best means of achieving it.
Our modern world is built on treating people like strangers. That means we can concentrate on things, on the transactions through which we acquire things, ignoring the human being(s) behind them.
That makes life very convenient, but it also makes it unsatisfying.
It also makes it dangerous. It’s easier to attack a stranger than a friend. And when you’re used to ‘unseeing’ people, even those you’ve lived among for decades can easily become strangers.
I’ve had a lot of work on this last couple of weeks. A fair chunk of it as a customer.
My bank is asking me to re-give them some information they have had for at least 11 years; my pension manager has asked me to give them information about dependents – but won’t use that information to update anything they already have, so now I have call them to check that myself; I’ve had to chase to get a replacement pair of boots delivered and I’ve had to walk my own ‘last mile’ to pick up a parcel that got to my doorstep, but not beyond.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with do-it-yourself – where that makes my life easier.
We humans want agency. We want to do things for ourselves. What we don’t want is to get tangled up in the inefficient bureaucracy and busy-work that is clearly going in inside these major organisations. Bureaucracy that’s happening because they’ve forgotten who they really serve. The customer.
Do your own job guys, that’s what I pay you for.
PS If you want to know more about bureaucracy in modern times, read this book. Watch the author’s summary here.
But for some reason its purpose fails and the parcel never makes it past my front door.
Even though I was on the other side of it waiting for delivery.
There was no knock. Only the faint rustle of a blank ‘no delivery’ card pushed through the letterbox. By the time I got there the van, and my parcel, had gone.
Later that evening my husband and I walked the mile and a half to the collection point to pick it up, because it was too heavy for me to carry on my own. That was, in part, why I’d had it delivered.
This seems to be a growing feature of our modern lives. Every low-paid, precarious service job is surveilled and tracked to within an inch of its life, and at the same time compressed into an ever shorter timeframe, until the point becomes to satisfy the tracking system – even if that means dissatisfying the customer.
This misses the point, big time. The purpose of process is to support human beings to be better humans. To remove the need to remember the things we’re good at forgetting, so we can concentrate on doing the things we’re good at doing – like focussing on the customer as another human being. But of course, that can only happen by acknowledging that the delivery person is a human being too, not a poor substitute for a robot, who you don’t know, don’t care about, don’t think is worth decent pay, and who therefore won’t be in the job long, so can’t be trusted to do the job properly.
So in the race to the bottom, what we end up with is process as a means to consistently and efficiently deliver bad service.
It’s easy to conflate ‘enrolment’ and ‘onboarding’ and think they are the same thing. They’re not.
Enrolment means to ‘sign up’, to ‘commit’, to ‘buy into’. It’s what you want your prospect to do at the end of Share Promise. You want them to say ‘Hell yes, I’m in!‘, and start their journey with you.
Onboarding means to ‘acclimatise’, to ‘socialise’, to get to know ‘how things work around here’. It happens at the start of Keep Promise – if it happens at all, that is. Because if you’ve built your business around the client, it should already feel like home to them.
