Don't make rules in response to exceptions
I was privy to a conversation recently where a GM and CEO were discussing an adjustment to company policy after a client 'slipped through the cracks' and suffered a poor experience.
They were considering a number of different strategies to ensure such an issue wouldn't happen again. Of course, every strategy came with a foreseeable cost or downside. Some would be resource intensive; some would have cultural impacts for the staff; some would make the general client experience slightly worse.
In the end, the leadership team made what I think was the right decision: to change nothing.
Initially worried about the problem happening again, they eventually realised an important fact: it had never happened before! Nearly everything in the universe follows a normal distribution curve of some sort, and everything distributed normally will throw out an occasional outlier. Such outliers are rare, by very definition.
When something totally weird and unexpected happens, remember:
Generally, it’s best not to make rules in response to exceptions.
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