Stephen Shapiro uses an airport baggage-claim anecdote to show how reframing questions yields different, often better solutions. Instead of further speeding baggage handling (expensive, diminishing returns), the airport slowed passenger flow so arrival times matched baggage arrival, improving perceived wait time and creating retail opportunities—illustrating that asking a different question (focus on wait time rather than bag speed) leads to novel solutions.
Chapters
You, we've been talking about asking better questions today. I want to give you a fun example. An airport here in the US Asks its passengers, what is your biggest complaint? And what they heard is that baggage claim took too long. It took on average, 15 to 20 minutes from the time that the cargo doors opened on the plane until the bags arrived at the baggage carousel. So they took to the task of speeding up the bags, and they invested a lot of money in conveyor belts. Faster conveyor belts, more baggage handlers, better technology, and they got it from 15 to 20 minutes down to 8 to 10 minutes. Now, you think about that. That's a huge improvement. Most people would be getting ready to declare success. They then asked the passengers of the airport, now, what is your biggest complaint? What do you think they heard? Baggage claim. It still took too long. Now, you understand, as innovators, the law of diminishing returns. If it took them that much money to get it down to 8 minutes, to get it to 7 minutes, 6 minutes, or 5 minutes would be prohibitively expensive. But then they had an epiphany. Yes, it takes eight to 10 minutes for the bags to get from the plane to the baggage carousel, but it only took the passengers one to three minutes to get from the plane to the baggage carousel. So instead of speeding up the bags, what do you think they did? They slowed down the passengers. They literally reconfigured the airport so it would take on average, 8 to 10 minutes to get from the plane to the baggage carousel. This is a great upsell opportunity because now there are stores where they're walking by, so when they get to the bags, their bags are waiting. When they ask the passengers, are you now happy? They were ecstatic. Here's the problem. They were solving the wrong problem. Speeding up bags is not the same thing as reducing wait time. They sound similar. They're not the same because wait time is made up of the speed of the passengers and the speed of the bags. And if you spend your life trying to speed up bags, you will never think to slow down passengers. Asking a different question will always lead you down the path to different solutions.
