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Aug 14, 2026
009 · The Shock Absorber
009 · The Shock Absorber
00:00
19:37
Transcript
0:05
This is Harvest the Signal, where the smallest signals can change the biggest systems. And now, here's your host, Jody Lynn Owen. What is the system trying to teach us? That's the question behind every field note.
0:21
This week's is the shock absorber. So personal story. My husband and I had made an appointment at a bank. We booked it through the bank's app.
0:34
We had the confirmation, and we arrived at the address the app gave us after battling Seattle traffic for forty minutes. We got there at the time it told us to be there.
0:46
The person at the front desk greeted us and then calmly informed us he had no record of our existence. He was warm, friendly, and immediately helpful.
0:58
He gave us exactly what we say we want from someone in a customer-facing role. "Don't worry. Sit down right here. I'll help you." It was really good customer service, and it almost made the evidence disappear.
1:14
My husband offered to show him the confirmation on his phone, not to prove that we were right. He kept saying, "No, I want to show you so you can fix your system."
1:24
He wanted to show him this evidence is, like, sitting in my hand, and you can make it better. And, yes, I am an ops nerd married to an ops nerd.
1:34
He wanted to fix their system before he wanted help for what we went there for. So at first, the employee didn't need to see it. He was just not interested. From his perspective, the problem was already being handled.
1:48
Two customers were in front of him. He was willing to help them. Why spend more time investigating? Except he couldn't help us.
1:57
We were there for a conversation that was outside his area of training, so he looked further.
2:04
He found the person we were supposed to meet with, called him, and discovered that the specialist covered multiple branches and had gone to a different one. We hadn't gone to the wrong place.
2:15
The app had sent us to exactly the right address, but the app had sent the specialist to the wrong branch. No catastrophe, no angry scene. We just got in the car and drove ten minutes to meet him.
2:29
But I could not stop thinking about what had almost happened. A failure in the system had reached the front desk. A very kind employee had been ready to solve around it.
2:41
And if that had worked, the organization might never have known there was anything to learn. For the record, they still might not.
2:49
We were hand-delivered two workarounds before our meeting was over so that we could bypass the system the next time.
2:55
So that tells me this happens a lot, and the employees have figured out how to help people directly instead.
3:03
But the strange thing about good service is that sometimes the better people are at recovering from a failure, the easier it is for the failure itself to disappear. I've hired versions of that job.
3:17
I've actually worked that job. I've managed versions of that job.
3:22
And in healthcare, I've watched so many organizations struggle over and over to recruit, train, and retain the people who sit where the public meets the operating system.
3:34
We describe front desk jobs as customer service roles. We look for someone warm, organized, and calm under pressure.
3:43
Just go look at the LinkedIn job descriptions and go look at common interview questions for this position.
3:51
We want someone in that position who can make a patient feel welcome while answering a phone, finding an insurance card, fixing a scheduling problem, responding to a clinician, navigating a payer question, and figuring out why the computer suddenly insists that the patient standing right in front of them doesn't exist at all.
4:11
Then we put that person at the point where nearly every single failure upstream eventually arrives. The schedule doesn't work, front desk. The insurance information is wrong, front desk.
4:23
The patient got the wrong instructions, front desk. The clinician is running behind, front desk. The technology isn't behaving, front desk. The handoff between two departments failed, eventually, somehow, front desk.
4:37
And we ask the person sitting there to absorb all that friction without letting it change them. We think we've hired a receptionist, but we've actually hired a shock absorber, and that is an almost impossible job.
4:53
This is where I think leaders can misread what's happening. We're relieved when the front desk solves the problem. Of course, we are. The patient gets what they need. The line keeps moving. The phone gets answered.
5:05
The clinician gets what they asked for. The scan is done. Whatever it is, the day survives. We make it through. Most of those recoveries never become visible to leadership.
5:16
Then another version of the same problem surfaces and another and another, or someone's out sick for three hours, and everything crumbles. And eventually, somebody asks, "Why does this keep happening?"
5:30
Sometimes that frustration lands or points at the person doing the work, but the employee may be doing exactly what the system has trained and rewarded them to do: resolve the immediate need and move on to the next one.
5:44
The missing capability is definitely not kindness. It's not usually effort. It isn't necessarily intelligence. It's really the capacity and the time to hold two responsibilities at once.
5:57
Solve the problem in front of me and stay curious about why it happened. That second responsibility is systems thinking.
6:06
Expecting someone to perform it reliably while a patient is waiting, the phone is ringing, a toddler is diligently choosing their stickers, and three more problems are forming behind them cannot be handled by a training strategy.
6:20
This is an infrastructure problem, and this is one of the places I think AI could become genuinely useful in an operating system, not because the person at the desk should disappear, because the person at the desk has never really had an operations partner.
6:37
So let's walk through that bank interaction again. Two people arrive with a confirmed appointment that doesn't appear on the local schedule.
6:47
Instead of requiring the employee to know which systems to check, which branch to call, or which mismatch to suspect, an AI layer could reconcile the confirmation and the calendar with the assigned specialist, see that the specialist is somewhere else, and surface the discrepancy.
7:09
That gets the customer help fast. But speed isn't the most interesting part of that. The more important thing is that the system can preserve the operational breadcrumb the human doesn't have time to chase.
7:23
An appointment was booked, a confirmation specified this location, the customer arrived here, and the assigned employee arrived somewhere else.
7:31
A human being trying to keep a line moving may reasonably treat that as a one-off. That's fine. A system, however, doesn't have to. It can ask, "Has this happened before?
7:44
Was the location presented differently to the employee and the customer? Is there a calendar sync problem, a workflow problem, a training problem? Is there a pattern across branches, and does someone need to review it?"
7:58
The human can keep taking care of the person in front of them. The system can keep hold of the unresolved question. So there's a version of this future that I do not want at all.
8:10
That's the one where AI becomes the smart layer while the people working inside the organization become less capable of understanding how it all works. I want the opposite.
8:22
I want AI to build human operational capacity through cues and coaching, not replace it. We all deserve coaching at work.
8:32
The front desk is particularly hard to coach because you have to sit alongside that person every single minute while they're learning to use the decision trees in the notebook.
8:43
Once they're familiar, however, we start to peel ourselves away, and once they've built their own understanding and are good enough, we run.
8:51
Okay, we return for questions and clarification, but no one is happier in an organization than the person who was covering the front desk to leave the front desk behind.
9:03
Now, I'm writing this on a particularly fortuitous day because last night we were watching an HBO special about this year's Seahawks training camp.
9:13
And if you are anywhere in the sports world, you've already seen what I'm gonna talk about. It was a little short on inspiration.
9:20
It was fun to watch because it's close to where we live, and we go walking there, and we especially enjoyed the mixed metaphors assigned to the eagle, which included crows and hawks.
9:30
I don't know what was going on with that. But it took a turn when we cut to the scene where running back coach Thomas Hammock is coaching his team, and he is
9:42
begging them to establish some kind of edge, a physical edge, and an identity, some holy vision, literally anything other than last year's identity, which is that they were the special team that was ranked at the very bottom of all of the NFL.
10:01
So he is just begging them, "Be anything but that." It's noteworthy because there are 17 F-bombs within 30 seconds.
10:10
But this is the coach we want in our heads, telling us to think, to develop, to grow, to embrace, to be curious, to find new ways to solve old problems.
10:23
Since we can't import Coach Hammock into every clinic, and since most folks don't respond to inspired action calls drenched in every phrase our mothers banned from our homes, how can we prompt this crucial position into systems thinking without swamping the receptionist's task list?
10:44
How do we get a coach into the receptionist's ear? And today's AI can easily resolve the mismatch of why there's a person standing in the wrong place.
10:56
But what I want it to do is I want it to help the employee learn to recognize another mismatch, not with another annual training module and not by asking someone to stop mid-chaos and perform a root cause analysis.
11:09
Inside the work, at the right moment, the system might come back with something simple. "I traced that appointment problem. Do you wanna see where the handoff broke?"
11:19
Or, "This is the third time this month a customer confirmation and employee location haven't matched. Here's what they have in common." That's more than automation. It's coaching embedded into the workflow.
11:32
Over time, the employee starts learning the questions the system is asking. What was supposed to happen? What actually happened? Where did those paths diverge? Is this an exception or a pattern? Who else needs to know?
11:47
And then I can envision this creating a weekly report that the front desk person presents to the administrative team. In that way, they own the expertise.
11:58
Systems thinking becomes less of a personality trait we hope someone arrives with and more of a capability the organization deliberately builds in its employees.
12:10
In healthcare, front desk turnover and frustration are often treated as workforce problems. We let people go, and then we just search again for the right person.
12:22
Maybe we need someone warmer or faster or more organized or more resilient or better at multitasking or whatever reactionary thing to the last person that we're looking for.
12:32
And sometimes we find them, and then we place them inside a job that requires constant invisible repair.
12:39
Even an extraordinary employee will struggle in a role that asks them to absorb unlimited operational friction while staying cheerful enough that no one else has to feel it.
12:51
So maybe the training question isn't only how do we teach someone to provide excellent customer service and move through all these decision trees, but also how do we help the people closest to the friction learn to read the system producing it one incident at a time?
13:11
That doesn't mean making the front desk responsible for repairing the enterprise.
13:16
It means recognizing that they're standing at one of the richest observation points in the organization and giving them tools that turn lived friction into operational intelligence without asking them to carry the analysis alone.
13:33
I want to return to the young man at the bank this morning because I don't think he did anything wrong. I think he did everything right. He saw two people with a problem and immediately tried to take care of them.
13:46
I don't want to train that instinct out of anyone. I want to add another one beside it, help the person, and hold on to enough curiosity that the organization can learn from what just happened.
13:59
Those are not competing goals. We can provide excellent customer service and investigate the operational question. We can move the line and preserve the evidence.
14:10
We can solve today's problem without asking the person at the front desk to carry tomorrow's solution alone.
14:18
And that's one opportunity I see for AI, not a replacement for the person sitting closest to the customer, although it can and should manage a lot of mundane tasks, but a thinking partner for one of the most difficult, under-supported jobs in the organization.
14:36
One that remembers what the human does not have time to remember, traces what the human does not have time to trace, sees patterns no individual employee could hold in their head alone.
14:49
And if we design it well, it's going to help the human get better at seeing the system too, because the person standing closest to the friction shouldn't have to absorb all of it.
15:02
They should be among the best equipped people to effing help us understand where it came from. Okay, as a nod, go Hawks. One more signal, and that's your cue. I'm about to drop something extra for you, the listener.
15:18
There's one more thing I was thinking about while I wrote this. A long time ago, when GPS first came out, we had these little units that sat on top of the dashboard.
15:30
And I remember thinking it would be hilarious if you could choose a GPS voice that sounded like a mom from your own culture. Not just the accent, but the whole experience.
15:44
So you miss the turn, and instead of recalculating, somebody who talks like your mother comes on and uses culturally relevant language to tell you what to do next. Like,
16:00
my mother did not cross the ocean to see you turn left two blocks early. Put on your big girl panties and take the on-ramp, whatever it is, okay?
16:08
So something that gets you right where your heart is and speaks right to you. So I love to laugh, and I would just make myself laugh with that. That's all there is to it. There's nothing more to that story.
16:19
Maybe somebody has made this by now. I don't know. But I remembered it while I was writing about Coach Hammock because I suddenly pictured the front desk person with an AI coach in their ear.
16:31
Like the appointment doesn't match, the line is growing, the phone is ringing, and then you have Coach Hammock in your ear. Okay, what's our effing plan? Where did this break? What was supposed to happen?
16:43
What actually happened? Let's find our edge. Obviously, perhaps we don't want to deploy the full Thomas Hammock experience at every medical front desk.
16:52
But underneath that laughing is something I'm really actually genuinely curious about. We have been thinking a lot about what AI should know.
17:04
Maybe we should also be thinking about what kind of context and content helps a human think. Because a great coach doesn't just give you an answer. A great coach stays with you your whole life.
17:18
That voice in your head because they taught you to start hearing their questions and observations before they had to say them out loud. You notice the mismatch. You get curious sooner.
17:31
You start thinking differently inside the work.
17:35
And maybe someday we really will get to choose our AI reception coach, call mentor, patient teacher, F-bomb laden NFL running back coach, or your mother telling you, you missed the turn, honey.
17:49
I'd probably choose Coach Hammock or John Madden or Jimmy V or maybe even Mr. Clark, who coached my first grade soccer team and told us to run like bunnies. And that's what Harvest the Signal is about.
18:03
Thinking together about how we create a world where AI brings us new skills that are best learned through embedded mechanisms that make humans better.
18:15
So this is where I encourage you to noodle through these ideas while you're walking your dog or driving home.
18:22
If today's field note changed the way you think about the front desk role, what helps people think, or even the judicious or overuse of F-bombs, please let me know. I read every reply personally.
18:36
In fact, the next Harvest the Signal may begin with something you've stopped accepting but haven't yet put into words. You can connect with me on LinkedIn by my name or on threads at Harvest the Signal.
18:49
And let's keep this conversation moving. And speaking of moving, I would love to be the voice in your ear while you get where you're going. We can explore patterns hiding in plain sight or at the bank together.
19:03
So please hit subscribe and we'll do it again. I'm Jody Lynn Owen. Until next time, keep looking for the signal. This has been Harvest the Signal with Jody Lynn Owen. The smallest signals can change the biggest systems.
19:19
Be sure to like, follow, and share so you never miss an episode or the opportunity to compare your field notes with your colleagues.
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