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Organizational Rot

Problem Practices, , , , , ,

We expect organizations to get better at what they do.  But many atrophy, sometimes because of the rules-based digital systems on which they depend.

Despite clear advances in information systems, there is obvious evidence that many organizations are faltering in their abilities to provide services to their clients and customers. We expect organizations to get better at what they do.  But it seems that the older the organization, the more it is likely to atrophy, sometimes because they opt for incremental fixes for core problems. A big claim, to be sure. But the increasing longevity of Americans makes it possible for more of us to see the decline of services over time.

                                             Medium

Consider a recent personal case. An direct flight from the northeast to Chicago should take just under two hours.  That is what I thought when I boarded a plane in Philadelphia bound for Chicago’s O’Hare.  But the United flight was delayed in leaving due to a glitch in an old Boeing 737 that was probably older than my students. We left about 40 minutes late, not that unusual.  Partly because of the delay, we were effected by afternoon thunderstorms building up over O’Hare, leaving us with too little fuel to wait them out. So we eventually diverted north to Grand Rapids Michigan to get more fuel, and to continue to work on the maintenance issue.

As luck would have it, several families on the plane were actually going to Grand Rapids via a previously arranged connection in Chicago.  So the fates delivered them to their city. Or so they thought. But despite the two-hour wait on the tarmac just short of a gate, the folks who could practically see their neighborhoods from their seats were not permitted to leave. Apparently security rules don’t allow people to change their routing. So they sat all afternoon, waiting with the rest of us to move on to an overcrowded O’Hare on the other side of Lake Michigan. Of course they then needed to find a new connection to get back to where we had just come from. This is surely not what previous generations meant about “American know-how.”

The problem here was the weather, a badly outdated plane, corporate indifference, and digital security systems constructed as a series of binaries. These days you are captive to your airline until you reach your final destination. But not that many years ago baggage could be pulled from the hold if a passenger’s plans changed.

As it happened, our return later in the week was not much better, leaving Chicago after 6:00 p.m. and not reaching our home until the next day at 2 a.m. because of more ground delays.

Crowded skies and over-scheduled airlines now make flying an endurance test for travelers that are amazingly passive and compliant. One friend described a direct flight from Albuquerque New Mexico to New Jersey that went from a scheduled four hours to nearly three full days and two unscheduled hotel stays.

Don’t fault the young; it’s all they know. But my independent-minded ancestors would have never stood for it, surely ending up on no-fly lists if they were still with us.

To be sure, travel horror stories aren’t new. But they are representative.  The point is that, like the airlines, more organizations seem to be expanding their “services” by setting up systems that can’t deliver on what was originally promised. That’s sometimes true in bank and financial services, consumer loans, appliance repair, medical insurance and governmental services: everything from basic road repairs to enrolling for Social Security. Even appliances in need of simple fixes are now tossed rather than submitted to the vagaries of  a service gauntlet.

 

These days most corporate dollars seem to go into marketing rather than customer service.

We sense the problem when a call to a service provider for help. The usual routine is that a robotic phone or online system takes over.  It typically allows for only a certain number of categories of response. Questions that are preset by the service provider are a cheap if deficient solution for “listening” to what another wants to say. Short of buying a yacht, no one in most organizations really wants to talk to you. These days most corporate dollars seem to go into marketing rather than customer service.

There are notable exceptions. One reason the behemoth Amazon is so popular it that it usually delivers on its what it promises. UPS has also been a part of that success. Others report good results with some car makers, insurance providers like AARP, and a large number of streaming services. These are in sharp contrast to essential human services that have been squeezed by tight state budgets and plain old bureaucratic ineptitude. For example, it’s a small kindness to not ask commuters in New York of Washington D. C. to ask about their subway commutes.  These publicly financed systems are struggling. But service problems are  often just as bad in large businesses with bloated management costs and under-paid line personnel. If you have challenges using the Post Office or a government body, look to the top, not the bottom.  Problems with mail or Amtrak or the Affordable Care Act should be laid at the doorstep of our politicians, not their workers.

A sorry solution for organizational atrophy is to find refuge in the software of amusement. It’s tempting to ‘visit’ places online rather than bother with the physical trip.  The tether of a screen seems to function as our escape route. Even so, and as challenging as it is, flying is still an amazing experience.  The thrill of seeing our world from the other side of the clouds should always matter.  And yet I traveled in a blackout on my trip to Chicago.  Passengers  near me on both sides of the plane kept their window shades down so they could play games on their phones.

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Tight Spaces

Models, Rhetorical Mastery, , , ,

[The Interpersonal dynamics of Communication are always interesting, and never more so than when we are pushed into close proximity with others. Cramped conditions can be ad-hoc laboratories: chances to see how individuals cope with another’s intrusion into their intimate space.This piece from 2014 is a ‘close reading’ of these kinds of encounters, with an important lesson that usually follows] 

Life has a way of randomly throwing us together with complete strangers in tight spaces.  Trains, elevators and planes typically violate the two- to four-foot zone that the study of proxemics says Americans want to preserve for themselves.  How do we cope?

We’ll skip sitting in steerage on an airliner, where the experience is something to be endured, and where travelers are thankful to still have free use of the pressurized air.  But consider the ubiquitous elevator, and the mix-and-match experience of sharing a meal in a railroad dining car.

As little closets expected to hold 10 or 12 people, elevators represent the triumph of necessity over comfort. Walking up twelve flights of stairs is a good workout. But no one wants to arrive at their business destination looking like they just finished the New York Marathon. So in the cramped space of the little vertical room eyes are averted to the ceiling, the poster advertising the restaurant in the lobby, or to a middle distance that is supposed to relieve others of the need to respond. It actually becomes harder to remain completely disengaged when only one or two are on an elevator. But there are safe tropes for a brief conversation that can help pass the time.  Comments on the weather are usually safe, as are observations on how slow this particular version of the vertical room is. In a hotel, perhaps a timid query about where a co-passenger is from will work. But even that can tread near the borders of the acceptable. Not surprisingly, our comfort in these settings seems to be in direct proportion to the frequency of the experience. Living in the center of Chicago or New York, a person learns how to be a compatible stranger.

As the elevator went up the mood of the passengers inevitably went down.

A few years ago I was at a convention at a large urban hotel where the management thought it would be a good idea to include a small built-in television just above the elevator’s control panel. Strangers who stepped in had to be ready for more than a vertical ride. They were immediately thrust into the world of CNN, where a good day means covering a national or world crisis with live and often disturbing images of mayhem. On this occasion I recall a report focusing on community outrage over a police shooting. The story featured a home video of police beating and subduing two African American men.  Gunshots followed and one of the men died.

Endlessly looping the footage of the attacks over audio discussions of excessive force had the effect of throwing many convention-goers out of their celebratory mood and into the much harder world of a socially polarized nation. As the elevator went up the mood of the passengers inevitably went down.

Here’s the interesting thing. The collection of individuals in the elevator became common witnesses to an ugly incident.  And yet no one wanted to react; no one wanted to reveal themselves to strangers by overtly reacting to the report. Opinions remained too intimate to risk with this transitional group.  Even so, our daily lives are not unlike this transitional moment. Like the tiny space that shuttles between floors, the pervasiveness of our media constantly deliver us to social situations which are not stable for very long.  Media relentlessly push us into vastly different crises that are part of the human drama: some comforting and most disturbing.

Eating in an Amtrak dining car is as close as most of us will get to making contact with a random group of ordinary Americans.

Long-distance rail travel is another interesting case. The day of the long-distance passenger train has mostly passed in the United States.  Even so, some travelers and a handful of trains remain. By custom, a single passenger eating in the dining car of a train will be asked to join others to make a table of four. Amtrak doesn’t accommodate the shy who want to eat alone. Perhaps no other social routine is so likely to throw a person into the intimacy of a shared meal with total strangers. And yet the experience can be surprisingly refreshing.

If most of us live in a bubble of like-minded friends, the dining car is easily going to pierce it. On a recent trip that included lunch and diner I met a clearly well-heeled woman from Virginia horse country returning home after a speech to a woman’s group.  We sat across from a trucker from Elkhart Indiana who delivers buses all over the U.S. (and had to tell us about his $60,000-a-year salary).  At other meals I met two retired professors from Berkeley on their way to see family members in Minnesota, a grizzled Florida retiree returning from a football game in Nebraska, and a perfectly dressed older woman off to see friends in the District of Columbia.

The rules of the table were always clear: references to hometowns, the lateness of the train, and dispersed families are all fair game. Politics, religion and other “third rail” topics are not.  We also had the common experience of having hit a car just after midnight.  It had died and been hastily abandoned on the tracks.  So we compared notes on who had been able to sleep while fire crews pulled the impaled automobile off the front of the engine.

My experience is that Midwesterners sometimes go on for too long about the prospects of their city or college football teams. I usually return the favor by becoming loquacious about the surprising beauty of New Jersey. But there is a bigger lesson here. Spending time in these close quarters is usually reassuring.  If we allow it, even this chance encounter can remind us of our shared and simple decency.