A few years ago, I was a long way down the path towards losing my biggest customer. The problems with our service ran deep, but the bigger problem, my problem, I had no idea things had gotten so bad. I had lost the thread and was blissfully ignorant.
My team was frantically working to resolve every customer issue on their own without escalating to me. And I was letting them. I called it trust but it was closer to neglect.
If you don’t know the difference, leave your kids home alone for a week and tell CPS it’s trust. They’ll be happy to clarify.
I had my doubts about the service but thought checking in on the work and demanding regular briefs was overreaching. Micromanagement. I hate micromanagement and wasn’t going to make my team the victim of it.
And one day all the clues and whispers clicked into place when we received a surprise RFP from the customer. They were going to bid. They were looking for options. You don’t go to bid if you love your current provider, you don’t look for options when things are running smoothly.
You go to bid and look for options when your current partner is stinking up the joint and you need to make a change.
Lucky for us, we were not so awful as to be excluded from the RFP, but we were in a bad place.
How did we lose control of the program?
When did things go into decline?
What exactly were they unhappy with?
Why didn’t anyone from the team make me aware?
I couldn’t answer any of those questions. Nobody had sounded the alarm. And the truth was, no alarm was available to them.
Lucy & Ethel Wrap Chocolates:
“All right, girls. Listen carefully. This is the wrapping department.
Now, the candy will pass by on this conveyor belt and continue into the next room where the girls will pack it. Now, your job is to take each piece of candy and wrap it in one of these papers, and then put it back on the belt.
You understand?
Now, this is your last chance. If one piece of candy gets past you and into the packing room unwrapped, you’re fired.
Let her roll!“
Halfway through, Lucy tells Ethel “I think we’re fighting a losing game,” and she’s right.
They can’t keep up, and they can’t call for help.
So, they fake it. And are rewarded with more work as the call goes out to “speeeed it up a little.”
This is a common scenario in business, as Charlie Munger would say, it’s rewarding the winner of the pie-eating contest with more pie.
The Lucy .gif has become synonymous with being overworked. Trying to keep up. Trying to stay ahead. And we don’t think much about putting ourselves and our employees in the same position, with no recourse, no way out, and no way to sound the alarm.
Warren Buffett said, “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked,” but I’d like to think we have a chance to spot those swimmers before they jump in. Or at the very least educate them on the importance of a little sun protection.
When things get moving, we are tempted to take shortcuts and build bad habits. Just like Lucy trying to keep up, chocolates end up on the floor, down your shirt, or in your hat, but the work keeps coming.
Things start off innocently enough, they slowly ramp up, and eventually, the train jumps the tracks.
We need ways to drive awareness. That means improving our people, establishing solid processes, and upgrading our tools. Lucky for us, a few people have worked on this problem before, and we can steal tactics in preparation for the next low tide.
Navy SEALs:
The US Military: a rigid organization that emphasizes the chain of command.
Don’t speak unless spoken to. Follow orders — no questions asked, right?
Not exactly.
In a world with dire consequences, communication and collaboration are key. Those are hard to come by if information only flows one way. So, the military emphasizes clear two-way communication to keep missions on track and limit loss of life.
Clear mission, goals, and rules of engagement are important, but they can still lead to a “you can’t handle the truth” scenario.
How do they avoid that and promote a high-functioning collaborative culture?
Navy SEALs use briefings and after-action reviews. They help improve communication as well promoting a culture of inclusive two-way communication. Team members are asked to get involved, ask questions, and make sure everyone is clear on how to meet their objectives. Accomplishing the mission while taking care of one another.
These meetings allow them to assess what they can do better, what they can do differently, what they learned, and what they did well. It provides a forum for improvement, learning, communication, praise, and it involves everyone. It breaks down silos and hierarchy.
Is that the military you know?
In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle takes a hard look at how Navy SEALs promote a culture of open communication.
“During missions, [Commander] Cooper sought opportunities to spotlight the need for his men to speak up, especially with newer team members. He was not subtle. “For example, when you’re in an urban environment, windows are bad,” he tells me. “You stand in front of one, and you can get shot by a sniper and never know where it came from. So if you’re a new guy and you see me standing in front of a window in Fallujah, what are you going to say? Are you going to tell me to move my ass, or are you going to stand there quietly and let me get shot? When I ask new guys that question, they say, ‘I’ll tell you to move.’ So I tell them, ‘Well, that’s exactly how you should conduct yourself all the time around here, with every single decision.’”
Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code
That is a powerful message for a young SEAL. You are here to contribute, and we need your contribution to be successful. In the military, the contribution will save lives.
A process that allows voices to be heard will improve the whole team.
Organizations come in all shapes and sizes. Cooper instills the team with the understanding that no matter what level or role they play, their skills are valuable to the team. And he sets the expectation that they will share what they see, including simple reminders to not get shot standing in front of a window.
If he could install a big red cord that the team could simply pull on when they notice an issue, I’m sure he would, but that is a tall order when you’re in the middle of a shootout in downtown Fallujah.
But what if you do something a bit more controlled and slightly less deadly? Say, you run a multinational car manufacturer. Then could you install a giant red cord?
Toyota and the Andon Cord:
If you trust your people, and you trust your training, use them.
That is exactly what Toyota did when they installed Andon Cords in their factories. A physical cord that ran along the production line.
It reminds me of the Tim Ferriss quote, “What would this look like if it were easy?”
Installing a big red cord through the factory and telling people to pull it when things go wrong is so simple it is laughable. Alas, simple is not always easy, but it’s a damn good start.
Any Toyota worker could pull the cord and it would stop production. It would call attention to the location of the pull, and a supervisor would inspect the situation with the line worker to resolve the issue and make process improvements up and down the production line. It created a feedback loop that made massive positive impacts on overall quality.
Sort of like this drawing I stole from the internet. If the car shows up at your station and the wheels have fallen off, pull the cord and your boss will come running.
What’s important to understand about the Andon Cord is not just the physical cord and the manual inspection with a supervisor. That is giving the employee a voice, but a voice is just one-half of sounding the alarm.
As the old saying goes, if an alarm goes off in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
The alarm only works if someone is there to take action.
And for many companies, that’s the bigger hill to climb. Do you think Lucy would have pulled the cord with the boss she had? Not a chance.
But you better believe Cooper’s SEALS would.
Toyota knew it was a two-way street and focused on how that feedback was going to be received from leadership. When supervisors arrived at the location of the issue, they would thank the employee for using the Andon Cord and bringing the issue to their attention. It created a safe space and the process improvements reinforced everything because workers would see how their voice was making change.
That means the boss didn’t get snarky. No eye roll, no finger pointing, no accusation of the ‘boy who cried wolf.’
A simple thank you. Thank you for helping a customer in the short term and thank you for helping the company in the long term.
Toyota has changed what it means to be “made in Japan” from low quality to the most reliable car on the market. And it wasn’t just the tools, the Andon Cord, it was the process and the resulting improvements to their culture.
Your team may not be engaged in urban combat or massive-scale multinational manufacturing, but you can absolutely provide training for your people, improve processes, and provide tools that give them a voice. And if you can, you’ll shift the culture towards hearing and learning, and improving.
Fire Drills & The Chaos Monkey:
“Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent.”
Ms. Jen, kindergarten teacher
So, practice well.
Memos and playbooks. Half-day training sessions. Annual reviews. They don’t quite cut it.
What the team needs is practice. Practice like it’s the real thing.
How will it look and feel on game day?
When we practice this way, and we repeat it enough, good habits will be built. Practice will make permanent.
In school, we do fire drills. At work, we run ‘fire drills’ as well. We’ll call in with issues, stage events, and create fictional scenarios that test the team in a variety of ways.
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Netflix is way cooler than my consulting firm and they went as far as putting these ‘fire drills’ into their code base. Sinister and awesome and I love it. They called it the Chaos Monkey.
Chaos Monkey randomly terminates virtual machine instances and containers that run inside of your production environment. Exposing engineers to failures more frequently incentivizes them to build resilient services. It also provides practice when they don’t.
Everyone at Netflix was aware that the Chaos Monkey could strike at any time. They knew their systems and code would be tested. And they acted accordingly.
The best way to avoid being a failure is to fail constantly, on purpose, so that you can improve constantly, on purpose.
I love the Chaos Monkey because of the randomness. Even the boss doesn’t know. Fire drills work, they help, but everyone knows they’re coming. It’s like being on your best behavior when Grandma comes to town. Chaos Monkey is like Grandma swinging over just as you start making out with your best friend’s sister. You better be ready.
What happened with the big customer?
I know this story would be better if the whole thing blew up and I had a Jerry McGuire moment, taking Flipper the goldfish after being fired, but this one does have a happy ending.
The nice thing about being the incumbent is that you know where all the bodies are buried. If you can get the train back on the tracks, you can accelerate more quickly than the new guy.
You can also offer them $100,000 in credits if they give you a second chance.
And that is exactly what we did.
It paid off and we still have the work, but it took more than the credits. We put a lot of hard work into improving our service.
Better training, improved processes, available tools, and leveled up team culture. Once you install these basics, you can test your work with a little chaos.
See it and say it. Bring critiques and ideas to discuss with the team, up and down the chain of command.
You may not want to do it, but you need to sound the alarm.
Do it early and often. Make sure communications are flowing.
Over time, things will improve. And over time you won’t need to reach for the cord as often.
