How corporate self-sabotage cripples customer experience

The practice of foot binding in ancient China—often called the creation of the “lotus foot”—began around the 10th century during the Song Dynasty and continued up until the early 20th century.

It involved tightly binding the feet of young girls so they would remain unnaturally small, a sign that society associated with beauty, refinement, and social status. Though widely admired within the culture that sustained it, the process was deeply painful and permanently limited women’s mobility and independence.

What makes the practice particularly striking is not only its physical impact but how long it endured: generations accepted it as normal because tradition, social pressure, and the pursuit of status outweighed compassion and reason.

Though these social advantages were highly valued at the time, they came at the cost of lifelong pain, limited mobility, and diminished well-being. In many ways, it serves as a powerful metaphor in customer experience (CX) for organisations that often create their own form of “foot binding” through rigid internal practices, policies, and systems that look refined on the outside but cripple the organisation’s ability to move freely with the customer.

Consequently, outdated practices remain celebrated even while quietly restricting the very customers they are meant to serve. The path dependence theory provides a compelling lens through which to understand the long endurance of foot binding in China.

The theory was influentially articulated by economic historian Paul A David in 1985, who argued that early choices, sometimes made under very specific historical circumstances, can set societies on trajectories that become progressively difficult to abandon.

Social expectations

Over time, these initial decisions crystallise into powerful norms, reinforced by social expectations, incentives, and collective behaviour, until the practice persists less because of its inherent value and more because it has become the accepted order of things.

Within this framework, foot binding can be seen as a classic case of institutional lock-in: what may have begun as an elite aesthetic or status signal gradually hardened into a cultural orthodoxy.

Families continued the practice not necessarily out of conviction but out of quiet compliance with a system that rewarded conformity and penalised deviation, illustrating how tradition, once embedded in the social fabric, can acquire a momentum that reason alone struggles to arrest.

A widely discussed example of this scenario is the United Express Flight 3411 passenger removal incident in 2017, when a passenger was forcibly ejected from an overbooked flight.

From a policy standpoint, employees were following the procedure. From a customer experience standpoint, the organisation had bound its own feet.

Employees were constrained by rigid rules that prevented flexible, humane problem-solving. For years, airlines focused heavily on operational efficiency, strict policies, and compliance frameworks.

These structures were meant to create order, but sometimes they restricted employee judgement and empathy.

When policies become more important than people, companies unintentionally create “bound feet” in their customer journey. Employees lose the ability to move with agility in moments that require empathy.

Another rich example is Blockbuster LLC vs Netflix. For decades, Blockbuster dominated home entertainment.

Their revenue model relied heavily on late fees, a practice that customers widely disliked but had become normalised. In many ways, the organisation had culturally accepted this system as part of its identity, much like how foot binding became socially embedded in certain Chinese communities.

Then came Netflix. Netflix removed the friction by introducing subscription-based, no-late-fee entertainment.

What Blockbuster considered a necessary business practice was actually a customer pain point waiting to be eliminated.

The result: Netflix redefined convenience and customer control while Blockbuster struggled to adapt and eventually collapsed.

Some customer pain points persist not because they are necessary but because organisations have normalised them internally. Footbinding survived for nearly a thousand years, not because it was beneficial but because culture masked the pain.

The same thing happens inside organisations. Companies unknowingly bind their own feet through rigid policies, outdated metrics, departmental silos, and technology built around internal processes rather than customer journeys

Eventually, the organisation cannot move as fast as its customers expect. Every CX leader should periodically question: “Which parts of our customer journey are beautifully designed … but painfully restrictive?”

“Is our ladder pinned against the right wall—or have we climbed it successfully while our feet were quietly bound by our own systems?”

Because sometimes the most dangerous customer friction points are the ones the organisation has created.

- The writer is the founder, The Loop Consulting, and an adjunct lecturer at a private university