Smooth Power Differentials

Don't give people abrupt cliffs. This newsletter first appeared on the Duha One substack.

Leadership Moment: Asymmetric Communication

Checking into hotels has become increasingly automated. For a recent hotel stay, I received a WhatsApp message from the hotel asking me to provide some pre-checkin information, to smooth the check-in process (reading between the lines: reduce the cost to the hotel to check me in with a human). After a quite reasonable and smooth interaction with the automated system, it offered to handle any queries I had.

So I reiterated my room preference, just to make sure I received a room that matched my needs [separate story: didn’t happen!]. I immediately received a response that they were busy helping other customers, and would get back to me as soon as possible. Apparently, that would be 48 hours later (noting that the room request was already in the order, they made no promises, and would make every effort to meet my requests).

Asynchronous communication is fine - I wasn’t in a hurry on this, and so waiting wasn’t a big deal. But the asymmetry – their ability to push a notification right to me, where I was clearly having my communication stuck in a queue that no human would look at for a while – left me with a bit of an unpleasant taste. I’m not opposed to automation, especially where it can reduce costs and smooth interactions; but implementing automation as a way to protect one side of the interaction without really helping the other side of the interaction pushes towards worse customer service.

One Minute Pro Tip: Stop Waiting to Zoom

How often have you connected into a virtual meeting (Zoom, etc), and received the spinning circle with Waiting for host to start the meeting? Maybe you don’t see that message, because you’re usually the host, and if you had a hybrid meeting, you were busy greeting half of the meeting in person, before it was time to get to the meat of the meeting … when you connected in all of the remote participants.

You’re depriving all of those distributed participants. They had the opportunity to also have the social ramp-up time for the meeting, and you kept it away from them. Instead, they go from staring at the waiting room’s blank screen (or, more likely, in the middle of composing an email) to right into the start of a meeting.

Turn off the waiting room for meetings, unless you’re doing a broadcast-only meeting.

Appearances

Recent

June 18: Vulcan Cyber Risk Summit

Upcoming

June 25, 1330 IL: Cyberweek Tel Aviv Main Plenary: The Immeasurable Challenges of Risk Measurement

July 2, IL: Cyber over Breakfast: Nine Truths Your Buyer Needs

July 16, NYC: CISO Dinner with Valence and AIM Security

Aug 5-8: (tentative) Black Hat

September 24: HOU.SEC.CON