The post in question was the telegraph pole up my road. One Friday a couple of weeks ago our internet connection just died. A quick check outside and the fibre cable to our house was hanging from the house as engineers had cut the cable at the post to remove and replace the telegraph pole.

These things happen – the post was over 30 years old and was unsafe. However, we had no notice about it – not even a note through the door. I had a chat with the engineers and they explained the problem with the pole and that they’d get it working as soon as possible.

A few hours later they drove off but we still didn’t have any internet. They hadn’t reconnected our line, or any of the other 13 fibre lines.

It got sorted almost a week later with a new team of very apologetic engineers.

• There were system failures – not sending a work notice to the phone operator warning of the work.
• There were communication failures – not notifying the end customers.
• There were relationship failures – not seeing the disconnected people as customers.
• There were cultural failures – the workplace culture of one organisation was not representative of the other organisations.
• There were aim and objective failures – the target of the subcontracted team removing the pole was to replace the pole. The target of the pole owner was to make the pole safe. The target of the phone operator was to maintain a service to the customer.

I can’t see any training or learning failures but would expect this is the kind of incident which would be held up as requiring training to ‘fix’ it.

If you’re being commissioned to produce training and learning material to fix these kind of issues, look for the other failures first and address them. Who knows? If the aim and objectives were integrated, consistent, transparent and agreed, maybe none of the other failures would have happened.