3.1 253 Outside your skull-sized kingdom

Today’s podcast

Worksheet

SETH GODIN What do we do when it breaks?

The unexpected happens.

Systems fail, humans are unpredictable, interfaces aren’t perfect…

The customer service professional demonstrates their strategic insight when they plan for eventual failure instead of denying it’s possible.

The first step, of course, is to design things with resilience and care so they don’t break.

Then what?

One option is to save the day at all costs. This is a large reason that healthcare in rich countries is so expensive. Doctors and healthcare workers work hard so they never have to say, “I’m sorry, we can’t help, you’re going to die.” As a result, the response of the system is to expend every possible resource in the shortest period of time, at the last minute.

The second option is to triage. In this scenario, an organization quickly escalates an unexpected failure to a trained person or team that has the tools, authority and expertise to do something about it. It won’t always work, but it might help 80% of the time. This is what happens when the manager intercedes and changes a policy on the spot.

The third option is to simply accept the breakage, and perhaps, to torture the user by not acknowledging that you already decided to do this. This is what happens if you try to fix a glitch at AT&T or get actual customer service from a big tech company. They don’t have customer service professionals standing by, instead, they have cut costs and given their front-line team very little training, support or authority.

Each choice has costs and benefits, and the useful approach is to enumerate them.

All costs: It’s morally satisfying, professionally thrilling and incredibly expensive.

Triage: It’s economically efficient and requires you trust your team and that you acknowledge, with grace, when it’s simply not going to work.

Acceptance: It’s the most stable internally, and the most costly to your customers and their experience. It is cheaper in the short run and more expensive over time. And one way to minimize the carnage is to be clear to customers that this is what you’ve chosen to do.

June 2, 2025