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hardScenarioDesignMidSeniorStaff

A relative telephones to tell you a customer has died. Walk me through everything your systems have to do from that call onwards.

6 min readUpdated 2026-08-15Target archetype: Enterprise Captive

Answer

Short answer

Death is a change to the person, not an instruction on one account, so it has to be recorded once and propagate to every product, mandate and communication. The hard parts are acting on an unverified notification, separating authority to inform from authority to distribute, and stopping outbound contact at once.

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  • The notification turns out to be wrong and the customer is alive. What does reversing it involve?
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