Posted on : 2024-04-21 20:14:48
Article : Good morning Monday Management Solution for TASK 142- The Post Office scandal proves that trust is always built from the ground up.
This is no time for the Post Office to be thinking about the transference, leverage and monetisation of its rapidly depleting store of brand trust. It is time for a long, hard, humble phase of rebuilding.
The temptation to show managerial faith in the technology must be huge, because if the organisation itself admits to internal tech-based failings, why should its customers not draw wider conclusions? Is that why, despite the mounting evidence, managers were wilfully blind to the possibility that the Fujitsu system was at fault? And, having misplaced their trust in that IT system, what alternative was there for the source of the accounting discrepancies? It could only be relocated at the human level, no matter how absurdly implausible that conclusion might otherwise have seemed.
One of the sadder aspects of this episode of ‘trust blindness’ is that it afflicted the wrongly-accused sub-postmasters themselves. As one admitted that “You started watching everybody and started feeling guilt… because I trusted the Post Office, who doesn’t? It’s a trusted brand.” The Post Office is not the first organisation with a yearning to slough off its caterpillar past to embrace its butterfly future. And it is not the first to faintly resent the fact that ugly earthbound thing is where its store of trust resides. It both needs it and reviles it at once.
Listening to leadership today, it appears that little in the organisation’s mindset has changed. As recently Nick Read, Post Office CEO, was again evoking brand trust as key to the organisation’s new technology-enabled ventures in digital ID. That was enthusiastically endorsed by its tech partner Yoti (today’s equivalent of Fujitsu). “Trust is critical in the emerging digital ID space and our plan has always been to partner with the Post Office, which I believe is one of the most trusted brands in the UK.”
Now it isn’t and with the coming public enquiry into the scandal, the saddening weight of the episode will sink more deeply into the nation’s consciousness. The organisation’s marketers must surely understand that, even if its senior managers do not.
End point- To any one’s incomprehension and dismay, is how the Post Office treated those human vessels of trust and how, over a 15-year period it prosecuted sub-postmasters at the rate of about one a month for false accounting and theft. How it wrongly attributed reported losses to them that arose from a faulty computer system supplied and maintained by Fujitsu?
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