Iceberg ahead! Conquering your icebergs before they sink your service ship

In the business world, an iceberg is a situation that appears smaller or more benign than it actually is.  We’re moving at such a rapid pace that it is tempting to dismiss customer complaints, quality issues, and employee problems as isolated incidents.  This risk is missing out on a tremendous opportunity or allowing a critical problem to go unsolved.  That’s why we use a simple model to examine these “isolated incidents”.

A simple iceberg model:

 

Incident: Don’t assume it’s isolated
It’s always wise to pause, reflect, and possibly investigate before you assume an incident is an isolated event.  Here’s an example:

I am actively involved with the San Diego chapter of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD San Diego), a professional association for workplace trainers.  Recently, I discovered that two people who thought they were members did not appear on our membership roster.  I passed this along to our Office Manager, who did a little digging and discovered they had paid for their memberships, but an error prevented them from being added to our membership database.  At this point, it was really tempting to fix the error and move on, especially since my role has nothing to do with membership administration. 

Fortunately, I asked, “Is there an iceberg?”

Model: Check to see if it is broken
The best way to check for an iceberg is assume that similar errors have occurred (or are likely to occur in the future) and check the process or service model for flaws.  In this case, I contacted ASTD San Diego’s secretary and suggested she audit the membership database to see if she could find similar errors.  (The secretary is responsible for membership administration at ASTD San Diego.)  Her audit revealed two interesting issues:

• There were several similar issues that had occurred over the past month, all involving corporate memberships.
• We had another error in our membership system that was costing the chapter $20 every time a member joined ASTD San Diego and ASTD’s national organization at the same time.  (We were passing an extra $20 along to ASTD national.)

Both of these issues were costing ASTD San Diego members, money, and goodwill!  When you find an iceberg like this, the time and effort involved in auditing the process becomes very worth it.  At this point, it’s tempting to fix the model and move on. 

Fortunately, I asked, “How can we apply this lesson?”

Strategy: How can we use this iceberg to improve our strategy?
Discovering an iceberg and fixing the model often presents an opportunity to elevate the issue to the strategic level and codify the lessons learned.  In the case of ASTD San Diego, the membership iceberg revealed a broken link between our membership database and other systems.  This insight led to two decisions that will improve the chapter’s performance over time:

• Short-term: The chapter secretary will audit our membership roster once per quarter to look for membership “icebergs”.  It should be noted that this was already part of the secretary’s job description, but she hadn’t considered this a vital function and consequently hadn’t been performing the audits until this incident occurred.  Her very first audit revealed several errors that were easily corrected.
• Long-term: The systems issues revealed by this iceberg created a business case for improving or replacing our membership database to ensure our information systems did a better job of communicating with each other.  This part of the story is still ongoing, but it would not have been considered without a viable business case.

Where are your icebergs?
Toister Performance Solutions specializes in “iceberg hunting”.  We’d love to hear about yours and would be happy to help you find them!