The person facing the customer holds the decision.
principle — attributed to Colja Dams
Dams named his operating philosophy in his first months at the agency in 1998 and has not changed the phrase in twenty-seven years: decentralized context management. The person standing in front of the customer must have the authority to make the decision in real time. The moment they refer back up the chain, the customer experience has already degraded. He learned this as a teenage busboy in a Chinese restaurant in Tarpon Springs, Florida, where a language barrier and his own initiative were the entire customer-facing operation. A former project manager told him they had more decision authority at VOK DAMS than they now hold as a managing director elsewhere.
For anyone running distributed event teams where client-facing staff wait for approval. The principle is most useful when designing escalation rules; the test is whether the frontline can resolve the moment without a phone call.
frontline-authority, decentralization, customer-experience, management-philosophy