194: If You Are Wrong Fess Up

<p>Mistakes are either great learning exercises or catastrophes damaging the trust in the brand.  Step one is getting people to admit they made a mistake.  Finding out about a major mistake when it is too late is every bosses nightmare.  You have the authority, the power the money to fix it, but that window has closed out. </p> <p> </p> <p>Sometimes things go wrong.  Mistakes are made, errors pop up, best laid plans are laid low.  Stuff happens.  How we deal with these incidents makes the big difference.  Some societies are legalistic, litigious and phalanxes of lawyers are lined up telling us to deny everything.  Japan isn’t one of those cases, so we expect a different way of doing things here and admitting blame is accepted, as long as it is handled appropriately.</p> <p> </p> <p>Troublesome word “appropriately”.  It is a bit like “common sense” which often proves to be very uncommon.  What we may think is appropriate isn’t shared by others.  This is where things get murky in the service sector world.  When things go wrong what is the appropriate response by both parties?  The aggrieved client can completely lose it and let go with both verbal barrels, tearing strips off the offending service provider. </p> <p> </p> <p>Given nearly thirty percent of the Japanese population is over sixty five these days, we can all look forward to various short fuse jichans or granddads exploding with rage, when some level of service is not delivered at the “appropriate” level.  Those long Japanese life spans, combined with ever shortening tempers and easy irritation from other people creates an explosive service sector cocktail.</p> <p> </p> <p>A friend of mine was lamenting some poor service provision in the IT area.  The project was nine months late and when it did finally come on line it didn’t work properly at all.  We all know that everything in IT takes longer than promised and always costs more than expected, but at least it is supposed to work.  There can be many reasons for this.  The brief may have been unclear, the e