A bit of background
I started my career within the telecommunications industry, as one of the people who took the phonecall when a customer’s internet service failed.
As a team, all we were interested in, because it’s what we were targeted on, was getting through the call as quickly as possible and onto the next.
Having suggested a couple of improvements, and shown a great deal of interest in what I thought at the time was customer service, I was rewarded with a few promotions and soon found myself managing a large team.
Working for an outsourced call centre provider meant that we were very much targeted on standard KPIs such as:
- Time taken to answer call
- Length of time on the call
- Length of after-call work
- Number of calls taken
- Sickness/absence levels
There was no view whatsoever on whether the customer had got the service they required to solve their problem, in this case, restoring their internet connection to full working order. We never even considered the purpose of the system from our customer’s point of view.
The targets understandably manifested themselves in staff behaviour, including:
What |
Why |
Other implications |
Cutting people off when the timer approached our target call length |
To ensure the time spent on each call was below the specified contract target |
Repeat calls received (failure demand) |
Once a customer had been waiting longer than the contracted target, other calls were prioritised over them |
Once a call had taken longer to answer than the target, it counts against you in percentage terms. Leaving it longer makes no difference to your performance |
Customers would be kept waiting for significant periods of time, while other customers, who had not had to wait, were dealt with first |
Completing the after call work for one customer, while talking to the next |
To ensure the agreed target for after call work time is not exceeded |
Rushed after call work meaning records were not accurate, and added no value when revisted (which they regularly were) Lack of attention on the customer in hand, leading to further failure demand/rework |
Taking just enough time off on sick leave so as to remain below the ‘sickness absence policy radar’ |
By formalising a sickness policy and communicating the triggers, it was made very clear how the system could be used to ones advantage |
Managers no longer had the ability to look at sickness/absence on a case by case basis and make a sensible decision. The policy dictated the action with no manager discretion |
Of course, I disciplined those in my team that I caught partaking in the above, believing that they were bad staff, but never made the connection with the real reasons why – the targets!
Very little or no attention was given to the measures that would have told the true story about our service, such as:
- End to end time to resolution
- Number of repeat calls (failure demand)
- Customer satisfaction
Furthermore, the contracts we had in place actively discouraged any form of improvement. By doing what was right for the customer, we would have been penalised under the terms of the contract. With no incentive to change, very little did.
My view of the world was wrong! And what was the worst part? Troughout it all, I believed that I was an excellent manager delivering my service to target, and that my staff were wrong for distorting their behaviour within the system – the system that I was creating for them.
I spent a few subsequent years as a business analyst and project manager, blindly following the same command and control management mentality, redesigning processes from the wrong perspective and missing the point completely.
The pivotal moment
The point at which I became curious about Systems Thinking was not while I was at work, but while I was a customer.
Back in 2007 I was unlucky enough to get flooded. The result of this was knee-high water in my house for three days and loss of the vast majority of my downstairs items.
During the resulting clean up, we were allocated a loss adjustor, project manager and two contractors. Of course, in a common sense world the following would happen:
In actual fact, the following was closer to reality;
By the time I’d had contractors shuttle to and from my house a few times, I started to think that there had to be a better way. Spending a little bit more time and effort getting the job right first time would save on a whole raft of failure demand.
I remember being in my house while the contractors were working one day and their manager stopped by. He stated to all the workers that he wanted my house finished by the weekend. Clearly he thought he was doing me a favour by speeding up the work and showing a commitment to a time-bound resolution. In reality, all that happened was that the workers started to work faster at the expense of quality, and hence, more failure demand ensued.
All in all I made in excess of 200 contacts to various organisations, by phone, letter, email and face to face, to try and get my house fixed. This included regulators, who were less than useless. The Financial Ombudsman Service is a great example of how you have to be completely let down, and then wait even longer before you can even make it onto their waiting list. Needless to say, I had solved my own problem through sheer determination before they got involved.
This was the point at which I really started to see and understand flow. It also became apparent that each stakeholder had their own de facto purpose as part of a disjointed system, which failed because it was being managed by targets and remote decision making.
I was lucky enough to speak about my woes to a colleague who jumped on the opportunity to make me curious about a better way and introduced me to Systems Thinking. I was ready to hear it, and it has fascinated me ever since.