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There's a name for this. I forget what it is, but I remember having the principle explained to me, and thinking to myself: "Holy fucking shit, this is some seriously out-of-touch economic high-finance quantit=ative bullshit." Like, the kind that always expects all graphs to go "up and to the right." Basically, you sit down at a restaurant, order a meal, and on the way out, the host or hostess ask you to mark off checkboxes rating the experience on a scall of 0 to 11. Eleven being the Spinal Tap interpretation, and Zero being the hospital visit. We now face three realities at this point, completely disconnected and untethered from one another, doomed to resolve as if it were some Cellular Automaton rule set from hell. On the customer's side of things, maybe they let their small child mark the check boxes to satisfy the child's curiosity, maybe it's the waitress' mom dropping by for a visit to take pictures at their first summer job. Maybe it's an actual normal customer, a random person with with a pulse, fresh off the street. Anything goes. Straight A's or all balls. The wait staff, have no control and don't actually know how they're being judged. By what criteria, or rules. They just know what it means to wait tables. They've been in a restaurant before, and they know what middle of the road is. Unless specifically advised of the level of service, they observe their surroundings, and follow their instinct, drawing on prior experience and whatever they learn as they go. The analyst that receives the feedback however, operates according to rules both alien and strange to normal people. Only 9, 10 and 11 are positive ratings. All others are an insult to the business, and all parties associated with an 8 rating or less must be eliminated from the system. They don't want to see paying customers that aren't ecstatic, nor do they want employees delivering service that catches a middling rating. To them, a 9 represents a danger zone, threatening profits with a backslide. The person who explained this principle to me was my boss' boss, and it was in this moment that I knew the ship I was on was aimed at an iceberg, and that I needed to escape. He was referring to our OKR process, while simultaneously explaining this principle in relation to our review process. It was a very "Steve Ballmer/Stack Ranking/Cut the Weakest Link" sort of discussion, and I stuck my thumb out and found another job, for better pay, and less demand within weeks. |
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter