Subscription Engineer #31: Achieving Balance vs Achieving Stability

While I was reflecting on the recent DX3 Canada I realized that I keep getting the same thought that there is more and more balance in retail and e-commerce. And before I expand on that let me explain what I call balance and why it’s different from stability for me.

As I mentioned in one of the earliest blog posts I like to work with complex systems because I see beauty in them. For me an important quality of the system is balance - for every force there is an equal opposite force that balances it but doesn’t bring the efficiency of the system down. Here is an example. The CEO tells the CTO - there are too many bugs in the system, you have to fix this. CTO comes up with an idea of quarterly releases and regression testing. Number of bugs is going down, the system is stable but inefficient. Or CTO can do the root cause analysis of the situation, find out that the team is not using automated testing, implement it and bring the number of bugs down as well. Now the system is balanced.

If we get back to the retail/e-commerce industry we see more and more examples of balance everyday:

• When we talk about personalization customers are ready to provide their personal data but mechant should explain how they are going to be used, stored and insure that data will be secured
• If a merchant is not offering a good service customer can initiate a chargeback. But if a customer is trying to fraud the merchant then PSP will support the customer.?
• Retail is a for profit business but more and more merchants think about sustainability, how raw materials and being sourced and even if the SaaS services they use are sustainable (for example, they are located in data centers that use green energy)

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of industries that are stable but not balanced. For example, aviation. Everyone who was ever late to the check-in knows - if you are 1 minute late then you need to book a new ticket, the airline won’t let you in. I actually saw once that one company offered a paid service that if you are late you can pay and you will be escorted directly to the gate with no problems. But if the airline is late even significantly (my 2 hour flight to Toronto was late for 1 hour and 40 mins, hello Delta Air Lines ) you will get zero compensation from the airline and sometimes zero visibility about reasons. You can always try to fly with another airline but most likely you will have the same experience. But because there is no government regulation about that, airlines won’t fix the problem. So the system is stable, airlines operate normally but it’s not balanced, I don’t have an opposite force.??

Another example will be the insurance industry. Everyone who ever dealt with it knows that you pay enormous money for the healthcare services and there is no justification for that. And again the system is stable and not balanced because of the lack of regulation. But as I recently learned from the book The price we pay there are actually forces inside the industry that changes it:

• First, more and more companies become self-insured and control the spend
• Second, more and more medical facilities make their pricing transparent and available upfront.

Getting back to where I started about reflecting on DX3. One of the panels that I participated in was called Leaders of the Future and the common topic during this conversation was that modern leaders should focus more on communication, people management and kindness if they want to build long lasting companies. I believe that directly correlates with the topic of achieving balance. If we as leaders can help our team members achieve balance in their day-to-day activities then our companies are destined to live long.

What do you think? What do you see as examples of balance and stability in various systems???