The telephone game is something that I played some as a kid. It seems to me that I spent more time playing it in my Communication classes while at school. The entire point of using this children’s game in college was to demonstrate or illustrate just how much information get’s lost in the process of being passed from one party to another.
Ironically, in the effort to build our organizations into highly efficient and effective groups, we often establish departmental structures which create the same results as the telephone game.
As a result, there is a growing communication gap that exists between people who use products and those charged with determining the strategy associated with creating products. Restated, there is a communication gap that exists between customers and product managers. This communication gap is filled with various obstacles such as different people (sales, account management, support, etc.), different motivations (contract renewals, up selling/cross-selling, closing support tickets, etc.) different systems (CRM systems, excel spreadsheets, bug tracking systems, etc.) and different belief structures (customers are king, customers are necessary, customers are annoying, etc.). Each one of these elements has a dramatic impact on the quantity and quality of the information that is ultimately absorbed into the corporate consciousness and made available to the product manager. Further, it is rare that this information is provided without the context of the biases or the deficiencies of the communication channel.
Experience has shown that those who are empowered to make decisions on the direction of the product are typically the farthest removed from direct interaction with the market/customer. The very nature of customer orientation in the organization structure modifies the bias of the individuals involved. For example, there is an exorbitant amount of anecdotal evidence that illustrates how the front line of the organization becomes hardened to the customer / market’s feedback. This hardening occurs either as a natural result of building up a tolerance of the tone of the customer and boredom associated with hearing the same information over an over again or as the result of being placed in a position where the employee is not empowered with any mechanism for helping the customer with their true concerns. This is not to say that we are endorsing a requirement that a company should be should be nimble enough to immediately respond to customer feedback. Instead, we’re merely pointing out that failure to provide the employee and the customer with any sense of closure is not an acceptable behavior.
Further, a negative feedback loops starts to emerge as a result of organizational dysfunction, and further compounds the problems described above. When a customer doesn’t feel as though anyone will listen to their feedback, they have a natural disincentive to provide it. When an employee feels as though the organization doesn’t value their efforts to transport the information, the employee will have a natural disincentive to transport the information. If both the customer and the transporting employee have natural disincentives to provide and transport the information, the decision maker will not receive the information required to enable accurate and appropriate decision making. In order to improve the feedback process, it is absolutely critical that the organization seeks disintermediation of the transporter role. The newly factored transporter must provide the customer with the necessary incentives and reinforcements to foster frequent feedback and must actively pass the information on to the decision maker with out any bias.
