Everything is connected
June 30, 2024
One thesis I’ve started to have around support and frankly an entire team, product, and company is little details have just as much impact as larger, and sometimes much more obvious details. Everything is connected in ways that are not always obvious. Caring about internal rituals a team has to stay connected are as important as caring about something like an NPS score.
The basis of this is rooted in Systems Thinking.
The performance of a system doesn’t depend on how the parts perform taken separately, it depends on how they perform together – how they interact, not on how they act, taken separately. Therefore, when you improve the performance of a part of a system taken separately, you can destroy the system.
One of my favorite anecdotes about this is the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone Park in the United States. Seen as a threat to cattle and livestock in the early 1900s, wolves were hunted and extirpated from Yellowstone Park.
In 1995 wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park, and few could have predicted positive impact. For instance, bears now have more berries to eat:
The team found that as the wolf population climbed and the elk population waned, the quantity of the elk’s food source, berries, increased, with some varieties of berries doubling in amount. And as those populations changed, researchers found that the percent berries composition of bear feces climbed – less elk meant more berries, and more berries meant that bears were increasingly using them to fill up.
When reintroducing wolves, I’m sure it was hard to see that it would mean more food sources for another predator, though in the end it did.
Now let’s apply this to support. Let’s imagine you have the world’s best support team. You have an incredible CSAT. Your customers recognize the team for being so great. It’s only natural to say “Let’s make it better and make our support response time quicker! We’ll take it from 2 hours to 30 minutes.”
So you introduce policies to enforce the fast response times, and in a few months, your customers are raving even more about how great your team is. But remember the part of systems thinking where improving one part of a system can destroy the other?
Maybe your team is now burned out because they used to have natural breaks between tickets. Suddenly they don’t. Maybe raises don’t match the faster work expectations. Soon you might see departures of key employees that help you achieve that quick response time. Instead of quick response times, you’re now prioritizing training junior employees. Customers start asking “Why are the response times so slow?” while they’re the old great 2-hour response time.
The point of this isn’t to advocate against faster response times but to make sure you consider small details when making a bigger change. While it’s impossible to account for every little detail, make sure you understand the small details that impact the big change.
If you want to learn more about Systems Thinking, I’d highly recommend Thinking in Systems.