Stewpid

So three varying tales of customer no-service in my RSS aggregator this morning.

Alexei Kosut a series of conversations with Cingular this month, where customer no-service doesn’t seem to know how to deal with data service and a family plan at the same time.

(for the record, the only time I have ever in my life cursed at a customer service person was at Sprint, where I cancelled my service, and Sprint kept charging me three months in a row, and when I called Sprint customer no-service — multiple times — put me on hold, hung up on me and finally in the third month, transferred me to collections. I was livid by then. I sincerely and deeply apologized to the person I did it to, but that’s how frustrated I was.)

Jeremy Zawodny quotes another page from Seth Godin regarding experiences at a bank.

and last, but certainly not least, Bruce Schneir links to an article about the TSA detaining toddlers whose names show up on the No-Fly list.

Complete…. lack…. of… common…. sense.

So the real question for me is that most sane people will all read these incidents — our cell phone companies, our banks, the airlines, and will deride the lack of common sense, yet we will go back to our jobs and do very similar things, follow procedures, fail to think for ourselves, fail to allow our employees to think for themselves — and implement the same asinine procedures.

Do they address this topic in business schools anywhere? How can organizations create environments that foster people thinking for themselves and to not pay victim to the “procedure” or when the “computer says I have to do this”. Even more, how do you also have people think to ask their peers and supervisors to help sanity check their own thinking and to maintain consistency (which is why all those “procedures” are created in the first place)