I felt like an excited kid anticipating my cross-country trip from Oakland, CA to my new home in Charlotte, NC. Route 66! Lake Havasu and Winslow, AZ, Albuquerque, Amarillo, Oklahoma City, then to Little Rock, Nashville, and the Smokies before landing in Charlotte. Changing landscapes, cityscapes, cultures, and National Parks to experience! It was a great adventure, and it left me hopeful that people with vastly different beliefs can have civil and open conversations about hard-to-talk-about topics.
But something else captured my attention. Traveling across the country and settling in a new city requires a lot of things to work. Just how things work (or don’t) became a preoccupation, a curiosity as it all unfolded:
PODS is a great idea. You load a POD up with your stuff, it gets picked up, transported, and delivered to your destination where you unload it. Easy peasy. I had just left Oakland for my first stop when this call came in:
Me: “Hello?”
PODS: “Is this Kathleen Stafford?”
Me: “Yes”
PODS: “Did you load a POD last Friday?”
Me: “Yes.”
PODS: “Did everything go ok?”
Me: “Yes?”
PODS: “Did the driver stay the whole time?”
Me: “Yes?”
PODS: “Did you have any trouble with the driver?”
Me: “No. Why?”
PODS: “Because we can’t find your POD.”
Me: “What? You’re giving me a case of the oh-my-gods. My life is in that POD.”
PODS: “Can you describe the POD?”
Me: “What’s to describe? They’re all the same. 8’ with the orange tag with my name and customer number on the lock.”
PODS: “Ok. Let me see if I can get this sorted out.”
My POD did make it to Charlotte (a “paperwork mix up”) but the fun continued — last minute delivery time changes with no notice, and head-shaking procedures that kept the POD from being delivered.
Apple My iPhone went missing the day before I left, so off I anxiously went to the Apple Store for a replacement: Greeted at the door. Helped right away by a calm, knowledgeable Specialist with great bedside manner. In and out with a fully functioning phone in 20 minutes. A very dear and determined friend retrieved my phone and got it to me. I stopped at the Apple Store in Little Rock to return the replacement: Greeted at the door. Helped right away by a calm, knowledgeable Specialist with great bedside manner. In and out in 10 minutes with a full refund and fully functioning old iPhone.
Holiday Inn I needed an easy in-and-out at each stopover, as I was traveling with a dozen of my favorite plant buddies, and it was terrifyingly hot, so they couldn’t be left in the car. Every single Holiday Inn (seven of them in total) provided an accessible and covered front entrance with carts at the ready. I was given first floor rooms so I didn’t have to wrestle an elevator with a cart full of plants. Rooms were clean. Staff were friendly and well-trained. And, as a bonus, I had the most interesting conversations there with my fellow stopover-ers.
The truckers I gained a whole new level of respect for our trucker community. They were my steady, comforting roadtrip trail guides. I was fascinated by how they had an understanding, a set of norms, for how they passed each other (or didn’t); how they judged and finessed uphill and downhill grades. And even how they patiently put up with clueless motorists mucking up the works.
West Elm I logged over 30 phone calls with customer service, the warehouse, the local “hub”, delivery drivers, and sales people over three weeks to get a rug and couch delivered to my apartment before arriving. It wasn’t a supply chain issue — no Blame Covid for this one — it was an internal colossal logistics breakdown to just get two simple items in inventory from point A to point B.
Gateway West Apartments After 11 days on the road, I was looking forward to the first night in my new place. I arrived to a building I didn’t recognize from the tour I had taken in June. Hallways were stifling hot, filthy, and reeking of a stench of rotting garbage. The garbage room was terrifying. Packages were strewn all over the mail room. Finding a delivery was like going on a 10 minute treasure hunt. My apartment was not exactly clean, and some things didn’t work. They still don’t after two weeks. Management is unapologetic.
Simple Moving Labor was scheduled to unload my POD in Charlotte. The POD couldn’t be delivered (POD system failure), so they quickly pivoted, sent a truck to the local POD facility, unloaded the POD, and delivered my stuff the same day — on a busy Saturday when they were already booked. And that’s not all. A couple of small but important-to-me items were missing. They found them hiding in the moving blankets and made two extra trips to get them to me.
Amazon I’ve been an Amazon avoider — trying to cut down on my box footprint and support local business. But the darned system works. Fast, accurate, reliable, and on that rare occasion when something goes wrong, they refund you or resend an item. No questions asked. I succumbed as I ordered my household essentials.
Got systems? training? management?
Our lives — our households, the goods and services we depend on, and our workplaces — are an amalgam of systems. Systems are tricky. Not only are they hard to get right, they constantly have to evolve as our lives and businesses do. At any point in time, too much ”system” can squash creativity and innovation and create bureaucracy and obstacles. Too little “system” can create chaos making it feel like we’re doing everything for the first time, even though we’re not. How does Apple do it? Holiday Inn? Amazon? What accounts for the total system failure of West Elm?
I was reminded of a brilliantly simple rubric brought to us by Zingerman’s to help diagnose and remedy systems problems. When a system is broken, we tend to go straight to re-engineering the system. Often, it’s not the system that’s broken:
Do we have an agreed process or system for doing something that if everyone used it properly it would work? If not, we have a systems problem.
Is there a system in place, but people either don’t know it exists, or don’t know how to use it? If so, we have a training problem.
Is there a system in place that people know how to use, but they’re not using it? If yes, then we have a management problem.
And, when diagnosing and fixing systems, training, or management problems, include the people who are doing the work. They know best the kinks in the system and how to fix ‘em.
The give-a-darn factor
I didn’t get an inkling that anyone cared about me over the arc of the experience with PODs, West Elm, and property management at Gateway West. They were just slogging through. It felt transactional.
Apple, Holiday Inn, and Simple Moving Labor felt relational — like they actually cared. The human factor. And even though Gateway West had system failures, and the property management were uncaring, the warmth, care, and humor of Bonita (the Office Leasing Professional) made it not feel so bad. Same with PODS. At the tailend of the debacle, one person on the ground in the Charlotte facility took the time to navigate the absurdities of the system to get my POD released to me. That made a difference.
Systems run the people, and people run the systems.
Michael Gerber
Sunday Morning: 172