The hotel I’m staying at requires you to sign for everything delivered to your room. However, they don’t really care if your signature is real. For instance, I just marked the sheet with a small dash yesterday. No reaction. The guy bringing the tray thanked me and moved on.
Here’s how this system came to be – some guests in the past complained about additional items on the final bill. Some internal or external consultant looked at the data and suggested they add a signature to the order process to avoid exceptions. Cue: an organizational habit. They probably stuck to the habit of checking every signature for a while before they realized that the exceptions aren’t worth the additional effort of training their organization to check the signature. Or even more likely, perhaps they just forgot to do so. So, they are now stuck with a habit that doesn’t meet any real purpose.
There are a couple of interesting learnings here –
1. It is easy to accumulate bad/unnecessary habits over time. Perhaps we ought to think about a system reboot every couple of years and examine how we run our lives. Perhaps we ought to do this in our teams too.
2. It is not anywhere as easy to accumulate good habits. For a hotel, it would be amazing if there was an “unnecessary” world class service habit – e.g. saying thank you one too many times. These things rarely happen. We hardly ever find people who say they exercise too much or spend too much time reading great books.
3. Aside from an overall system reboot every couple of years, it is likely very worthwhile to sit down every few months and ask ourselves “why” we do what we do in a day. Just like the signature, we might find that we’ve forgotten the “why” and are simply stuck with the “how” and the “what.”
A Learning a Day 