A Solution Shortage
With so many focused on the reasons for a labor shortage, we're missing a way out.
The Problem
Have you been on hold for 3 hours in the past year? Has something you ordered taken a few extra weeks to arrive? Did that contractor ever call you back to provide a quote?
Popular reasoning for this has centered around a combination of three culprits:
Childcare responsibilities are preventing women from re-entering the workforce,
Stipends are reducing willingness to work,
Switching careers.
In other words, in order to solve your extended hold times, our society needs to:
Re-open faster (supply more resources),
Revoke temporary stipends (force more resources),
Pay more (attract more resources).
It’s as if the only way to even a seesaw is to push harder on one side.
I would argue that the trajectory of technology trends towards greater accessibility and increased complication and that new technology propogates as a step function - a leap up followed by gradual adoption across a wider demographic. Examples include:
Morse Code -> Telephone -> Portable Home Phone -> Cell Phone
Horse Drawn Carriage -> Oil-Powered Vehicle -> Electric Car
Heat from Biomass (wood) -> Gas -> Electric -> Solar Panels
Modem -> Broadband Internet -> LTE -> Starlink
The speed at which technological innovation occurs is closer to an exponential pattern and we’ve reached a point where in order to sustain it, we’ll require more support resources or, as I’ll argue, we’ll need to reduce demand by changing our expecations.
We’re all experiencing the effects of support resources having been outstripped by demand.
Causal Factors
Factor 1: Increases in complication create more points of failure.
In 1890, you could be alerted to a visitor at your home by an audible knock. In 1990, via an audible electronic sound, however, the electrical wiring may degrade, or the chime could break. In 2021, via a notification on your phone once you’ve downloaded the application requiring functional home wireless internet to connect to the battery powered (or electrified) input mechanism with camera mounted outside the door……..
Factor 2: Technology becomes more accessible over time.
If broadband opens in a new area, the number of support tickets should be expected to immediately increase. Or, an industry becomes newly technology-enabled (doorbell = knock -> doorbell = electrified, audible chime), requiring support resources where there were none prior.
Additional failure points increases the likelihood of failure and requires specialized knowledge to repair - both creating additional demand for support resources. Greater accessibility to technology that has many failure points is a scaling problem.
Complicating Factors
An ideal ratio is 1 support person to every 100 humans who may need it, but the proliferation of technology into all industries also segments the available support resources into specialized buckets. For example, there are Twilio and Genesys are both VoIP platforms, but an engineer who can fix a call flow with Twilio has no idea how to fix a call flow in Genesys.
Since technology proliferates at an accelerating rate, the need for support resources increases at the same or greater acceleration rate.
But there are cases to offset it, such as one support person may serve multiple supporting roles and cases where two people require the services at once but are affected by the same problem (ie: an area outage).
We can (somewhat) visualize this mathematically -
If f > 1, s = (f * 1.2) * (p*.01) where:
s is number of support resources rounded,
f is failure points of the tech-enabled solution,
p is the population that can request support
In 1990, a doorbell chime was electrified from in-home wiring or via a battery. The chime could break (+1), the electrical wiring could break (+1), so f=2 and let’s say a town has a population of 100 people.
s = (f * 1.2) * (100 * .01)
s=2*1.2*1 = 2.4 = 2 support persons (rounded) - possibly an electrician and a hobbyist or sound engineer for the chime.
Adding frequency and likelihood of technology requiring support and weighting by ‘acceptable time to resolve’ would improve the accuracy.
The Resolution
I would offer that our desired outcome when utilizing any technology is that issues are resolved in a reasonable amount of time and to a high degree of reliablility.
When our desired outcome is not being met, we may achieve equilibrium via any combination of the options below.
Increase support resources, or,
Improve support resource efficiency. Provide self-service support (de-centralize it) or utilize non-human support resources (effiency-gain) like an Amazon Chatbot. However, both still require resources (creating self service material, building automated service mechanisms) and their own support/maintenance structure, which is too meta to quantify in this line of reasoning, or,
Reduce demand for support. Adjust expectations (change the equation). Make technology less complicated or abstract complication (ie: all technology works by pressing a button.
Which, in the end, can arguably be reduced to the same equation for all problems:
The optimal state is perfect balance. If demand for support resources becomes too great, you can either (1) reduce demand or (2) increase resources to restore equilibrium. If it gets too hot, you can either (1) reduce heat or (2) increase cold. If it gets too tired you can (1) increase rest or (2) reduce factors supporting tiredness.
The straw we grasp for first, is to add resources, to add more, to enable increased complication. This is a privileged mentality that arises from abundance. What happens when you exhaust your resources?