Strip search phone call scam: Revisited
I discussed Milgram Effect in my previous post. I claimed that Milgram Effect can manipulate human minds so powerfully and it could possibly disrupt your daily decision making processes. The Mount Washington scam is one notable incident that shows how scammers make use of Milgram Effect to exert a strong influence on your mind. If you don’t know what the incident was, please, check out the Wikipedia page or read my previous post or this news article.
Besides Milgram Effect, the incident had another issue that I think is mentionable in this post. After the incident, the victim sued the fast food franchise company for $200 million claiming that the company was responsible for her damages. The lawsuit had disputes over several issues. Among them, one issue was whether the company properly warned their employees about the hoax which had occurred many times before that incident across almost 10 years throughout the country. It was clear that the company was well aware of all those scam calls. At least, it is true that they took some measures against the hoax.
- They had training manual that included a section saying “no legitimate law enforcement agency would ever ask you to conduct such a [strip] search.”
- But, according to the media, none of the employees at the restaurant say they recall seeing the section.
- Also, a voice mail message was sent to the franchise to warn possible scam calls.
- But, the manager testified that she had forgotten to mention the voice mail message to her assistant managers because it was vaguely worded and she didn’t think it was important.
Well, a couple of actions taken by the organization “in advance” didn’t work and it led to a significant disaster to the victimized poor young female and manipulated employees, who were also victims of the hoax, and the company itself.
Risk of information broadcasting
We see all sorts of information or knowledge flowing in our organization everyday. Some information flows in a top-down direction, some flows in a bottom-up direction.
Although it is not the topic of this post, let’s first think about a bottom-up flow. We, employees, are all aware that there is no guarantee that every information from leaf nodes of the hierarchy actually reaches top nodes (CEO, CTO, CFO, …) of the same hierarchy. Every organization on some scale has middle class managers here and there and they act like some sort of filters. For instance, a paper proposing new kind of innovative business model may be sleeping in a bottom drawer of one of your superior’s desk. He may think the proposal is not worth further discussion or he might’ve simply forgotten it. For whatever reasons, they have discretion in whether delivering each bottom-up information into their upper hierarchy. Every organization has more or less pyramid shaped hierarchy so this is inevitable.
And can we guarantee that any information (except confidential information) flowing in a top-down way will reach out every leaf node of the hierarchy? At least, the Mount Washington scam incident showed us an example failure. Every organization has regulations, protocols, rules or something. We usually learn them at the first day when we join the organization, and rarely learn them again. Most of training or operation manuals are too thick and boring. All these are hard problems to solve. But, more bigger problem is we all take for granted all of these situations. Every now and then, critical guidelines or policies may come down to employees, and those important things may be easily ignored when every employee is already immune to the trivial top-down information flow and they are preoccupied too much by their day to day duty. As the manager at the fast food franchise didn’t relay the voice call message to others, some important information may be lost somewhere in the pipe.
I think many organizations have some attitude that they consider it done once information has been delivered to their employees. But, properly speaking, they don’t know whether the information has been actually delivered because they usually don’t include some feedback mechanism in their system. What that famous hamburger company did was just broadcasting without any feedback that receiver has confirmed the signal. So there was no guarantee, from the first place, that every employee in the field could acknowledge the threat and danger of the hoax.
Adopting Gamification
One of my previous employers had an education program for their revised Code Of Conduct. Taking the program was a must to every member in the organization and actually the COC contained many important information and regulations that every employee should remember. The program was a kind of web service, it took more or less 30 minutes. An interesting thing was, the program employed a concept of Gamification. It was not just a broadcast or one-way course. After explanation of each COC with clear examples, the program had s simple quiz at the end. You needed to get a little bit of high scores to pass it, and if you failed, you were required to try it again at a later time. It had at least a feedback mechanism (s quiz), so I think that kind of program will work better than traditional trainings. I think it would be better to give some rewards for the best scores, the program I took had no such system, though.
A course of one or two instructors and gathering people in a big room may look right. However, you don’t know how many attendees are really listening. I attended those programs several times. I see a few people sleeping all the time. They usually have Q&A time or surveys to encourage some feedbacks from the attendees, but it still doesn’t guarantee that the information or knowledge has been acknowledged by everyone. That’s why I think web training programs employing Gamification techniques are much more useful tools in terms of information reachability.
We informed that, so we’re done.
At the lawsuit of the Mount Washington scam incident, lawyers for the company claimed that if the company’s employees had taken note of written policies and a voice mail message, the workers should have realized it was a hoax. The claim may sound reasonable at first. But, think about it. Like they argue, if everything works that well with just one time of information delivery, every human in every nation will have so much high education. Is that true? No. As you already know, our real world has all sorts of education problems. We need repetitive trainings, feedbacks, tests, and other kinds of program because that kind of simple information delivery doesn’t guarantee anything one hundred percent.
We assume that signals coming from a top-node from the hierarchy will reach every node of the same hierarchy. But, that’s an illusion. We have no guarantee of the signal delivered everywhere. More reasonably, we need to assume that the signal might be lost somewhere in the communication relay.
“We informed that, so we’re done” mind of some organizations is kind of risky to themselves. Not caring for managing information flow may lead to significant damage to organizations just like we saw what happened in the strip search phone call scam case. At least, “We informed something. What was that? Tell me” mind is necessary to reduce the risk. Encouraging feedbacks from everyone sounds so much difficult. And constructing system to support that kind of mind may demand more money. But, we have technologies evolving fast and we have new ideas (such as Gamification, Knowledge Management, etc.) giving us more insights. They will help!