This chapter extends the discussion of the propositions to more general properties of unusual routines within complex organizations. Each proposition is represented by just one or two of the salient examples from the full case. The chapter concludes with a substantially reworked model of UR dynamics, indicating what we see as the relationships among innovations, organizational culture, and URs.

Proposition One

If a new ICT mitigates or exacerbates URs it does so not simply as a more efficient channel (the first-level effect) but also as an innovation the organization must process (the second-level effect).

The interviews revealed a number of URs with associated subroutines, some of which the system implementation seemed to be impacting as a second-level effect. Perhaps the change in the grading system is the clearest example. Arguably, the past debates over the grading system can be seen as a delay subroutine, in that the issue was never decisively resolved either in favor of retaining the existing non-traditional grades or in favor of a change, despite extensive discussion time spent on the issue. To some informants, the grading system had become a “sacred cow,” resistant to change regardless of substantial criticism. While the new ICT was still in its early implementation phase at the time of these interviews, a major change in the grading system was made in a surprisingly short time frame. A number of informants saw the ICT as a contributing factor in this change.

Based upon the analyses and reviews of the prior chapters, this chapter provides some recommendations (Box 9.1) for how to increase awareness of, attention to, discussion about, and resolution of factors and contexts that encourage unusual routines and related problems.

Encourage customer service feedback from all stakeholders

The literature on ways to strengthen customer satisfaction is vast. Jones and Sasser (1998, p. 19) suggest several approaches to continually monitor and improve customer service. These include:

1. (1) embed customer satisfaction indices (measure over time, and type of product/service, or customer);

2. (2) seek feedback through multiple channels and content (comments, complaints, questions);

3. (3) conduct market research (both before people become customers and when they defect);

4. (4) train, empower, and support frontline personnel to better listen to customers and to forward the problems and solutions to the organization; and

5. (5) develop strategic activities involving customers in the business.

Wexler et al. (1993) provide detailed recommendations of ways to instill and improve service quality, in the areas of service zones, integrating service and selling, encouraging demanding customers, nurturing complaining customers, managing recoveries from service problems or failures, generating moments of positive and negative experiences as well as truth, grounding the organization in vision and values, implementing a quality service change effort, and managing the people systems that provide the foundation for all the service components.

Perhaps the most familiar unusual routine is the combination of a customer's experience with and then complaint about some unsatisfactory interaction with an organization, its service, or its product, and the organization's lack of, insufficient, or mismatched response. The main assumption behind this claim is that most customers are not asking for any particularly exceptional or unusual service, product, or information; they are simply following the standard, normal, or explicit procedures associated with an advertisement, offer, instruction, standard retail clerk interaction, attempt to use the product or service, or inquiry. Despite this, they experience difficulties or problems with one or more of these, suggesting that others – possibly everyone – also following the procedures will experience the problem as well. When they attempt to communicate with the organization to gain an understanding of the situation, resolve it, return the product, get a refund, possibly institute legal action, or simply to convey their feelings the effort involves a variety of work, delay, error, and blame (as well as straightforward financial cost) subroutines, along with general frustration. And it may not result in a favorable response, or, for that matter, any response at all. So there are two levels of problems here: the original UR experience, and the UR experience in trying to communicate about the original experience.

The allure of unusual routines

The impetus for this work was our puzzlement at the frustrations and disappointments so commonly felt both by organization members and by outsiders interacting with complex organizations. While both of us are academicians by trade, it seemed obvious that the imperfections we perceived in organizational functioning were not unique to our personal workplaces. This is an experience the authors had shared at various academic institutions and organizations, and many others outside of academe have described to us in ordinary conversation. Interestingly, very soon after beginning to describe the phenomenon, most people would immediately relate to the concept and begin to tell their stories of dealing with URs, although before then they would have had a hard time articulating the experience, its components or complexity, and certainly would not have called them URs. Neither of us expects that the real world should perfectly conform with our individual preferences (that would be a much poorer world, indeed!) or that organizational processes should be perfectly functional or reasonable (and the criteria for that would be impossible to agree upon) – but nonetheless we both wondered just how it is that so much of everyday organizational life and interactions with organizations could seem so nonsensical. In the broadest sense, our aim has been to try to understand a subset of the imperfection of human communication behaviors within and with organizations, imperfections that might possibly be resolved or mitigated.

This book identifies, describes, and analyzes the pervasive and frustrating experiences people have with dysfunctional feedback in organizational and societal contexts, by showing that they are symptoms and consequences of unusual routines. An unusual routine is a recurrent interaction pattern in which someone encounters a problem in trying to accomplish normal activities by following procedures, then becomes enmeshed in wasteful and even harmful subroutines while trying to resolve the initial problem, creating and reinforcing unintended and (typically) undesirable outcomes, to some set of people, subsystems, organization, or society, either within or across system levels (or both). Often, the feedback loops about this initial unusual routine are either non-existent, dysfunctional, or deviation-reinforcing, creating a second-level, or meta-, routine. The term “unusual routines” is intentionally oxymoronic. The processes and consequences, when known, would be considered unusual, unacceptable, or negative by one or more stakeholders. Although the phenomenon is pervasive, any particular instance may be infrequent and difficult to identify. Nonetheless, the process and consequences are systematic, to the point where they become routinized and embedded in other routines.

A seemingly straightforward solution to preventing, avoiding, mitigating, or resolving unusual routines would be to vigorously institutionalize feedback from users and participants, both internal and external to the organization, which would then be analyzed and used to adapt or correct the problem. Certainly task and performance feedback is a central concept in organizational management. Feedback is presumed to foster organizational learning and improved productivity through identifying problems in past performance, providing ways to resolve those problems, reinforcing organizational goals, and helping employees improve their interpersonal competence through providing credible information about their impact on others (Ang et al., 1993; March, 1991). Job feedback may be explicitly about individuals and their absolute performance, or socially comparative, relative to others. Errors provide opportunities, through feedback, for organizational learning, especially if they reveal underlying causes and lead to implementing positive changes (Tax and Brown, 1998). Garvin (1993) compiled a list of definitions of organizational learning that ranged from “the detection and correction of error” (Argyris and Schon, 1978, p. 2) to “encoding inferences from history into routines that guide behavior” (Levitt and March, 1995, p. 517) to “the process of improving actions through better knowledge and understanding” (Fiol and Lyles, 1985, p. 808).

This chapter and Chapter 6 describe how each of the five propositions played out in a lengthy field study at an educational institution (Cooper, 2000), based upon our working model of unusual routines introduced in the preceding chapter. While the initial intent was to focus on the effects the implementation of a computer-mediated communication system (one kind of ICT) might have on URs, the early data collection suggested that the study would provide broader insights into UR dynamics in decision processes and operations. The study utilized depth interviews with a stratified purposive sample of organization members, and such qualitative methodology often does lead to pleasant surprises in the knowledge the study generates. That is to say, the study convinced us that the model had broader application than to ICTs alone, and had particular analytical value in understanding the relationship between problematic routine behaviors and organizational culture. It is important to emphasize that in no way was this intended as an assessment or critique of communication at the site! Indeed, we expect that the URs and interaction scripts surfaced in the study may be all too familiar to our colleagues at other institutions.

Method

The research site

At the time of the study, the organization had just begun a major end user computing initiative to implement a shared database of student records, and to provide email to all faculty and staff. Up to that point, college records had been maintained on a mainframe computer by an information technology (IT) department.