Taking a Whack Against Comcast

This week Comcast came to our apartment building and did their usual "two-phase" installation for a new customer. It's always the same - we've seen them do this maybe 8 times in the past 10 years.

First, one guy comes, gets what seems like 100 extra feet of bright orange cable, and runs it from the junction box at one end of the building across the middle of the lawn, across the sidewalk at the entrance to the building, around my mother's plants, up over a patio wall and down into a snaky spiral of an extra 40 feet or so, left on their patio before it connects to the service entrance there.

After a few days of disbelief that they really consider this "done", we call our landlords, who call Comcast, who sends a second guy to do it right. The second guy always seems very sincerely irritated with the first guy. In a way, too bad - I was thinking if my mom tripped on it, we'd be set for life once our attorneys got done with them. Then I dismiss that thought, mostly.

Anyway, it baffles us how they make money doing this, let alone good customer relations. It makes me wonder again if this is even visible at the top, or if every instance of this is discounted and written off as "grumpy customer - isolated incident." It has to be the latter.

It reminds me of when my then wife and I got "Swine flu" shots back about 1980. We'd been healthy for years, got the shot, and woke up the next day very sick. We were sick for days. When we reported this to our doctor, he said this couldn't be a result of the shot, because it didn't have that reported side-effect. We asked if he was going to report our experience. He said no, there was no point, because this was clearly an isolated coincidence. Hmm.

In that mood I was perversely delighted to see the article in this mornings's Washington Post
titled "Taking a Whack Against Comcast", about a 75-year old lady who took her irritation at poor customer service to a new level, involving a hammer. I won't spoil it for you.

Still, it seems a prototype of a reality that belongs in the comic strip Dilbert. How can a company's top management be so blind, or uncaring, or out of touch with reality that they can't believe this is happening, or, believe it but don't care?

The first impression is to say "Well, they are bad people." However, I warned against that repeatedly in recent posts, and suspect that they are actually, as bizarre as it seems, good people who are victims (on their end) of looking at reality through the wrong end of the telescope, and not being able to see what all the fuss is about, and therefore writing it off as "Well, they are bad people" (that is, the customers who complain.)

This problem is so widespread, among companies, that it becomes really important. And when the companies are hospitals, say, as the issue at Kaiser earlier this week in California, the problem becomes life-threatening at the bottom, and then, probably to their surprise, life-threatening to the whole company at the top, who "never saw it coming."

No one wins from this, and no one really investigates "it" because it's so "obvious" to people on each end that the problem is due to "bad people" on the other end.

Those are the kinds of situations we study in Systems Dynamics, and in books such as Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline - where "the system" is actually the problem, but no one understands how that happens, so everyone assumes the breakdowns are due to "idiots" or evil people at "the other end."

That's the challenge for the conflict-resolution crowd - to disentangle all the entrenched blame from a problem that is as subtle as the error in M. C. Esher's Waterfall, and then to find the structural "system" problem actually responsible for the resulting perceptions and behavior.

Yes, I think there are "bad people" - but way fewer than we commonly assume. Hybrid scale-dependent vision seems to me the most common culprit in setting the stage for things to go wrong, and then feedback loops close the trap and lock it in place.

Comcast could probably save enough money if they fixed this problem on their end to relieve the pressure that makes them push the first installers so hard that their only choice is to rush and run. There are two "stable states" of the system -- doing a good job and making a decent profit, and doing a terrible job, with everyone unhappy, and making less profit. The problem is that the middle state is worse than either of those, so the system gets hung up on the "less profit" local maximum (the top of the little hill) and can't find its way down and back up to the top of the larger profit hill, because "down is bad" and pressure to make profit is so high.

The challenge is getting people to believe long enough that the "obvious culprits" might be innocent that they can step back and look at what is really going wrong.