Permanent Solutions to Temporary Problems

I was reading re-reading The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry today and a section of text jumped out at me that had not before.  There is a section where Mr. Henry talks about a spider crawling out of his couch while he was working, and his subsequent overreaction to it.  After killing the spider, he says that he checked the couch for spiders every day for a year.  There had never been a spider on the couch before, and there was never one again after that day.  His point was that he had created a long-term (and costly) solution to a temporary, one-time problem.

This happens all the time in business.  An irate customer calls in because something went wrong this one time, and a manager changes an entire department’s workflow and processes to “ensure this does not happen again.”  Some executive comes flying in and demanding this or that change, without really thinking about the problem in an objective way.  Sometimes it’s a justified response, but in my experience most of the time it’s not.  If the product or service is good most of the time, and someone makes a mistake, sometimes it’s just a mistake.

Having managed a help desk for a couple of years, and having been involved in customer service in one form or another for most of my career, the temptation is so great to make the radical change.  There is a feeling of real change, and a story to tell to the customer about what happened as a part of their incident.  However, after reading this section of the book again, I bet that 90% of the time all that is required is just to keep doing what you were doing.  The cost of change and retraining, as well as overburdening people with a bunch of rules, is significant.  Furthermore, once a new rule or procedure has been implemented, it almost never is unwound.  Just like taxes, it is here to stay.

Hiring good people and letting them do their job seems like a better path.

Have you been in companies where they manage to avoid permanent solutions to temporary problems?  Or is your experience more like Todd’s or mine?  Leave a comment!