The Human Side of Freight

By: Nathan Fletcher

I've silently held this inside for years and it was something that I read today, that finally challenged me to write about it. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how freight changed over the last fifteen years.

Not the obvious stuff. Everybody sees the obvious stuff.

 

The technology.
The software.
The dashboards.
The visibility tools.
The optimization layers.
The endless promises that this new platform or that new integration was finally going to “revolutionize” supply chain management forever.

And look, to be fair, some of it did help.

I’m not one of those guys yelling at clouds because somebody invented an API.

But somewhere along the way, something else happened too.

▌Something quieter.

 

The business got faster, but somehow conversations got shorter. People stopped calling each other unless they absolutely had to.

Everybody became “too busy.”

• Too busy to answer an email.
• Too busy to pick up the phone.
• Too busy to sit down for thirty minutes and have an honest conversation about a problem before it became a catastrophe.

And if you pushed too hard trying to actually talk to someone, eventually you got treated like you were the problem.

That part always stuck with me.

 

Because I remember when relationships in this business actually meant something beyond procurement strategy and quarterly bid events.

I remember when people knew each other. Not just authority numbers and insurance limits.

▌I mean actually knew each other.

 

You knew who answered the phone at a carrier. 

You knew which dispatcher was having a rough week. 

You knew who could recover a bad load at two in the morning without turning it into a hostage negotiation.

You knew who was trustworthy before the system told you they were trustworthy.

 

And maybe that sounds old-fashioned now. Maybe it is.

But I keep thinking about this scene from O Brother, Where Art Thou?

“Well, the South is gonna change. Everything’s gonna be put on electricity and run on a paying basis… We’re gonna see a brave new world…”

 

And honestly? That’s what parts of this industry started believing too.

• That scale would solve everything.
• That automation would solve everything.
• That efficiency would solve everything.

And for a while, it looked like maybe it had.

Until suddenly everybody started acting surprised when fraud exploded.
When double brokering exploded.
When cargo theft exploded.
When negligent selection lawsuits exploded.

As if removing relationships from the system had nothing to do with it.

And no, I’m not saying technology is bad. Technology matters. Of course it does.

Verification matters too. Compliance matters too.

▌But trust matters too.

 

And trust is a strange thing because it doesn’t scale neatly.

You build it slowly.

Conversation by conversation.
Load by load.
Problem by problem.
Human being by human being.

A system can verify documents and still completely misunderstand people.

 

It can confirm an MC number while having absolutely no idea who is really operating behind it.

That’s the part I think the industry is rediscovering right now.

Not that we need less technology. We absolutely need technology.

But maybe we also need more humanity inside the technology.

Maybe we need people talking to each other again.

 

Maybe we need to stop treating every conversation like an interruption instead of part of the actual job.

Because underneath all the software, automation, optimization, and visibility platforms, freight still moves the same way it always has:

▌Through people willing to trust each other enough to solve problems together.

 

And I don’t think that’s backward.

I think that’s the part we were never supposed to lose in the first place.