The Moccaccino Challenge

Hello everyone,

I’d like to share episode from my personal experience. Since I am always analyzing everything that is happening around me especially people behavior at their workplace I can fill this blog with numerous entries but I want to share this particular one that happened just few days ago.

I took my wife for an evening walk. On the way we dropped in to the local Second Cup and I ordered the usual Moccaccino without whip cream.

Since we go there pretty regularly I got to know most of the employees which didn’t effect the friendliness or the speed of service. They were somewhat slow and just simply polite.

When my Mocca was ready the girl who was making it brought it over wiping the sides of the cup with a napkin from over flowing foam. When she put it down I realized that there was still so much foam on top that there was no way I can put a lid on it without having all this foam all over my hands. I asked her to take off some of the foam so that I can put a lid on.

Now we get to the interesting part: the girl looked at me in confusion, looked at the napkin in her hand (that she used to wipe the sides of the cup) and began the motion of trying to attempt to remove the foam…with the napkin.

This is where I usually step in.

I asked her to stop, take the whole cup over the sink and using regular spoon just flick off some of that foam from the cup. The girl looked at me and actually had a bit of a blush on her face, sort of saying: “it’s so simple, why didn’t I think of it”.

As I left the coffee shop I was immediately thinking of what would happened if this person was working at the place where critical and quick thinking was essential in order to make a sale, solve a problem or save a life.

In my mind I always go back to the assessments system (that we use to help employers understand employee DNA), wondering about “Learning Index”, “Level of Assertiveness”, “Objective Judgment”,  “Decisiveness” and “Critical Thinking”.  There is a reason why we do the things we do. However looking at the person and even talking to them (during hiring interview for example) you can’t get to the genetic make up and predict future behavior unless proper assessment is done prior to hiring decision.

As we continued our walk my wife was the first one to hear my analysis, suggestions and just me wondering about people being wired so differently.

If you happened to have interesting (or awkward) experience, please share. Your comments are always welcome as well.