The customer experience is tested when the playbook stops working—and so is the permission we give our people.

On a Saturday morning, my husband and I took our seven-year-old to a local bagel shop. My husband had been traveling, and breakfast together sounded simple.

Then we walked in and learned the power was out.

No working register. No credit cards. The young man behind the counter looked frustrated. His answer to customers was straightforward: pay cash or download the app.

I watched people turn around and leave.

My first reaction was frustration, too. Then I found myself wondering what choices he actually had.

Had anyone told him what he could do when the register stopped working? Could he make a small exception for someone who couldn't pay? Or was he expected to keep repeating the only two options he knew?

I don't know. And I don't think it's fair to put that entire moment on him.

I imagined what might have happened if the business had made a decision before the outage: within a modest, preapproved limit, the person at the counter could offer a customer breakfast on the house when payment systems failed. He might have been able to say, “Our power is out. If you don't have cash, this one's on us. Thanks for making us part of your Saturday.”

Not every business can do that, and I don't know what was possible for this one. But I would have remembered that response. I might have told other people about it. Instead, what stayed with me was a question: When the process fails, what are the people closest to the customer allowed to do?

A lesson I heard nearly 20 years ago

I had an opportunity to ask Bill Marriott how a company as large as Marriott maintained its culture and customer experience as it grew. What has stayed with me from his answer is that culture, training, and leadership start at the top.

That conversation came back to me in the bagel shop. We can tell employees to create a great experience. We can teach them the greeting, write the service standards, and give them a script. But those things don't tell them what to do when the system goes down and the usual script no longer fits.

I've come to think of this as the Permission Gap: the distance between the experience leaders say they want people to have and the authority employees actually have to create it.

The gap isn't always visible on an ordinary day. The register works, the schedule holds, and everyone can follow the process. An outage makes the difference visible—to the employee trying to help and to the customer waiting for an answer.

When the process fails, what are the people closest to the customer allowed to do?

Culture needs boundaries and room to act

I've tried to carry that lesson into Kassy Health over the last 20 years. Our work with patients, families, and partners is not the same as selling a bagel; clinical and compliance decisions have real consequences. We have financial, clinical, and compliance guardrails for a reason.

Within those guardrails, though, I want our team to feel able to solve the problem in front of them. They shouldn't need me standing beside them to make every good decision. And when a decision falls outside their authority, they should know when and how to escalate it—not have to guess.

That's a leadership responsibility. Before the next process breaks, we need to be able to tell our people what they can decide, what they must not decide alone, and whom to call when the answer isn't clear.

I still think about the young man at the counter. I don't know what authority he had beyond the two options he offered.

Maybe the most revealing question about a culture isn't what its leaders promise when everything works. It's what their people are permitted—and prepared—to do when it doesn't.

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