I was talking to our Chief of Cardiology earlier this week who apparently just returned from the American Heart Association meeting in New Orleans. He is a jazz trumpet player, so I asked him if he took his trumpet with him. He did, of course, but then he told me that he wasn't sure that the street musicians would welcome him to join in and play with them. He only played the trumpet in his hotel. Too bad!
He then told me a story that on a similar trip to New Orleans several years earlier, he and one of his friends, who happened to be a pediatric heart surgeon, had brought their musical instruments (a trumpet and banjo, respectively) to play on the streets of New Orleans. Unfortunately, his friend's banjo was damaged beyond repair during the flight. I asked our Chief of Cardiology if he had heard of the story, "United Breaks Guitars", which I first learned in business school. He hadn't heard of it, so I sent him a link to the story.
I last posted about "United Breaks Guitars" in 2017. The story is the subject of a famous Harvard Business School case study (called simply enough "United Breaks Guitars"). Basically, a professional musician named Dave Carroll was traveling with his band on a United flight from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Omaha, Nebraska. The flight had stopped briefly at O'Hare airport in Chicago, and Carroll overheard another passenger on his plane claim that the baggage handlers were tossing around a bunch of guitars. Carroll's guitar was damaged, and he later filed a claim against United to pay for the repairs. United refused (several times over the course of 15 months), so Carroll wrote a song about his experience that went viral on YouTube. Within four weeks of the video going viral, the United stock price dropped over 10% at a loss in shareholder value of nearly $180 million. The whole point of the case study is to address issues such as (1) communication with customers, (2) handling negative complaints and facilitating service recovery, (3) dealing with and minimizing the impact of negative press.
It's a great story with a happy ending. When I first posted about it, I mentioned another unfortunate situation that United was trying to address. There had been several social media posts about an incident that occurred on a United airlines flight from Chicago to Louisville. Apparently, United overbooked the flight (as many airlines do) and had been offering vouchers for passengers to volunteer to take a later flight instead. None of the passengers volunteered, and they were then told that the airline would be randomly selecting passengers to step off the plane and take a later flight. According to some reports, there was another flight crew that needed to get to Louisville to fly another plane. One of the passengers refused to comply, security was called, and several videos (taken by other passengers on their smart phones) showed airport security and one man in plain clothes (reportedly an airport police officer) forcibly removing the man from his seat and dragging him (semi-conscious) off the airplane.
Well, when I mentioned the "United Breaks Guitars" story to our Chief of Cardiology, I went back to see what had happened with this other story involving the passenger being forcibly removed from the plane. We all make mistakes, and thankfully we often get a second chance to do things better in the future. United clearly learned something from their "broken guitar" mistake, as the airline quickly paid for the pediatric heart surgeon's broken banjo. Hopefully United has learned from this incident too.
As discussed by John Deighton in a Harvard Business Review article (see "Companies like United need to cultivate good judgement, and free their employees to use it"), United made several mistakes in how they handled the passenger security incident. For example, it took more than two days for the company's CEO to issue a public apology. Though the lessons of this case go beyond merely how to respond quickly to a public relations nightmare. Deighton suggests that companies such as United need to empower their employees to make decisions beyond rigid policies, fostering a culture that values critical thinking and listening and ensuring leaders have the experience and awareness to make sound judgments in complex situations. I can't help but think of the famous "Tire Story" in which a Nordstrom employee accepted a return from a customer who brought in a car tire! Nordstrom has a notoriously simple and incredibly lenient return policy.
Organizations have to find the right balance here. There are always some policies and rules that organizations (and their employees) will have to follow. However, we shouldn't force employees to rely solely on heavy-handed policies that can stifle them and slow down organizations. As I have discussed several times in the past, there should be "guard rails" between which employees have relative freedom to move and make decisions. Similarly, organizations should give employees the authority and training to use their judgment to solve problems and prioritize the customer experience. Good judgement can often be better than rule-based decision making, especially in "predictably difficult situations" where automated rules are insufficient. Lastly, organizations need to acknowledge that some policies, though intended to create consistency, can lead to negative consequences when followed blindly. They should be prepared to offer alternatives or exceptions to prevent a crisis. In retrospect, calling security to forcibly remove a passenger from an overbooked flight was a horrible decision.
Deighton's final paragraph was eerily prophetic given the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence today. He acknowledged that a computer algorithm had likely overbooked the United flight and likely also selected which passengers needed to get off the plane. He suggested that in most circumstances, this is probably justified and indeed better than if a human had to process all of the data and make a decision. However, the computer's decision should be considered a suggestion, not a command backed up by a threat to call security! He concluded, "Machines follow orders. People use discretion. Learning the importance of that truism is the lesson of this awful situation, and it will be a lesson of growing relevance and application as algorithms and machines play ever larger roles in service delivery."
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