Pushing Through Organizational Inertia
On a recent flight from overseas, I appreciated some perfect timing.
After flying for nine hours, our plane landed and as soon as it pulled off the runway to the taxiway, I received a text message (with the appropriate labels inserted) “Welcome to [city]. Your connecting flight [flight number] is departing at [time]. Please make your way to gate [gate number]. You will need to clear customs”.
Some team set up this event as part of a customer experience. While I usually look up this information in advance, it’s nice to have it exactly when you need it. Notifications at the right time are extremely useful. They give the impression that the service provider cares about the experience of the user and is following them to ensure they are getting what they need.
A little feature like this takes a lot of coordination and for many things to work correctly. Different systems need to have APIs and notifications set up, subscriptions to different services need to be established, and service level agreements need to be negotiated. Many people need to be aligned around an idea as it might seem gratuitous to work on thse in comparies to other ideas.
Little things make a big difference but they’re also extremely hard to implement. They’re not hard because of technical challenges but rather people-based. “We have bigger things to work on”, “that’s not a priority”, “we don’t have extra resources.” The ability to push through this inertia comes from leadership enabling focus on them by creating vision and mapping out strategic priorities. When vision and strategy are revisited regularly, it can help jostle loose these little ideas.
