Why adding people won’t solve a problem faster

In the movie Minority Report, a group of Precrime cops led by Tom Cruise foresee crimes before they happen and nab future criminals.

This superpower to stop bad things from happening is called 𝐮𝐩𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠. We already have it. But we let it rot.

Here’s a true story.

In 2012 an online travel company receives 20 million customer calls. The main reason: to ask for a copy of the itinerary.

Imagine you are heading the customer service team. What would you do? Request your boss to staff up to handle the call load and ensure customers have a good experience.

Now, the customer calls have been shooting up for years. But it is no one’s job to ensure customers don’t have to call for support. That’s why as head of the team, you’re less likely to ask 𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘤𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘳𝘺? But you do ask in the story. Miraculously.

Turns out customers are mistyping their email address. Or itineraries are languishing in spam. Or they are being accidentally deleted. And there’s no way for customers to retrieve a copy from anywhere.

Would staffing up help solve this problem? You wish.

So what caused the problem to become this big? It happened because every department was working well. Too well perhaps. Marketing was bringing a ton of high-quality traffic; product had designed a frictionless experience so that the customer didn’t have to retype their email; and customer service met every request for a copy of the itinerary diligently.

Remember what I said earlier. This is a true story. All of this happened at 𝘌𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢 and the book 𝘜𝘱𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘮 recounts it well.

Now, once the Expedia folks identified the root cause, they solved it upstream, Minority-Report style. Instead of adding customer support folks, they added an option to their IVR system for the itinerary, built a self-service tool for customers to download the itinerary themselves; and so on. Customers calling for support dropped from 58% to 15%.

As leaders, we reward focus. But this strength is also our weakness. No one’s looking at the full picture. As a leader, our job’s to ask: Who’s thinking upstream?

Let me clarify. I’m not saying we should not bother solving problems. I’m saying we should also think about stopping them from happening. Let’s think about how we’ve set up our teams and functions. Have people look upstream for root problems just as you have people fix the symptoms.

Once we do this, we may see that a lot of things we think we need immediately, like more customer service reps, we may not need at all.