E1: The Baggage Claim Story

What if the fastest way for finding better solutions to your most difficult problems is to stop looking for solutions? Hi, I'm your host, Steve Shapiro. Welcome to the first episode of the Invisible Solutions podcast. Each week, we will tackle a complex problem that one of our listeners is struggling to solve. And we will use the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. Now, if you don't have the book, that's cool, you don't need the book. But go to getthelenses.com getthelenses.com and you can download the 25 lenses, some templates, some videos, and a number of other items. No cost to you. Each week, we will use these lenses to solve a problem that someone is struggling with in the audience. But we will also start each week off with a tip. And this week's tip is the foundational tip. This is the important tip, the critical tip for the entire process. Stop focusing on solutions. To find better solutions, you actually want to ask better questions. You want to change the question. You want to reframe the question. You want to look at the world from a different angle. Einstein reputedly said, now, he didn't actually say this, but to paraphrase something that he said, because he's been quoted as saying this a lot, if I had an hour to save the world, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem, one minute finding solutions. And from my experience, most organizations, teams, and individuals are spending 60 minutes solving problems that don't matter. So what we need to do is not focus on building better solutions, better answers, but rather, we want to ask better questions, reframe the question, look at it from a different angle, and see if there's a possibly a different question we can ask. That's going to be the key to finding better solutions. And that's what we're going to talk about this week and every week is how do we ask better questions? How do we change the question? How do we change the problem? How do we look at the opportunity from a new angle in order to find a potentially better perspective? And so this week, I'm going to actually start off with a story from the book. If you read the book, you will have heard the story. You may have seen a video that I posted about the story because it is my baggage claim story. If you want to see a video about it, you can go to baggageclaimstory.com that's baggage claim story.com, where you can watch a highly visual version of it. But the short version of the story is like, this airport here in the US Decided that they Wanted to solve one of the problems, One of the complaints that their passengers had, and it was that their baggage claim took too long. They were waiting too long. They spent too much time at baggage claim. So when they did some analysis, they found that it would take on average 15 to 20 minutes for the bags to get from the plane to the baggage carousel. So, like, smart interface, like most of us would do, they decided to solve the problem. How can we speed up the bags? How can we speed up the bags? And they spent a ton of money on faster conveyor belts, more baggage handlers, newer technology, and they got it from 15 to 20 minutes down to 8 to 10 minutes. Now, think about that. They cut the time in half. They 2x the speed. That's pretty awesome. And if I were in their shoes, I'd probably be popping the champagne, celebrating, declaring success, and going on to the next problem. But they asked the passengers, what now is your biggest complaint? And they heard loud and clear, it still takes too long. So, look, you're smart people. You know how this works. There's a point of diminishing returns in any investment. If it took them that much time, money, and energy to get it from 15 minutes down to 8 minutes to get it to 7 minutes, 6 minutes or 5 minutes would be prohibitively expensive. And then they had an epiphany. They had an epiphany. They realized that the bags took eight to 10 minutes to get from the plane to the baggage carousel. But at this particular airport, 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? You guessed it, they slowed down the passengers. They literally reconfigured the airport so that it would take the passengers, on average, eight to 10 minutes to get from the plane to the baggage carousel. They get to the baggage carousel, their bags are waiting for them. They are happy because they experience the walking time, the busy time, differently than the unproductive wait time. What was going on? Well, they were originally solving the problem, how can we speed up the bags when in fact, maybe a different and potentially better question would be, how can we reduce wait time? Now, when we hear wait time, wait time sounds the same as the speed of the bags, but. But it's not, because wait time is made up of the speed of the bags and the speed of the passengers. And the point is, if you spend all your time trying to speed up bags, you might never think to slow down the passengers. The questions we ask have a profound impact on the range of solutions we will develop. Now, we could continue with this story, and we will continue with this story because it's a fascinating and simple example. We've already taken a simple concept of speeding up bags, and we change it to slowing down passengers, reducing wait time. But now I want to show you the power of changing just one word. The words we use in a problem statement, we typically don't give enough thought to them. We don't really spend enough time thinking about how important each and every word is. But we could go from how can we reduce wait time? To how can we improve the wait time? Well, now we're not talking about speed, we're talking about experience. And the cool thing is, in changing this one word, we've moved away from airports, and our mind automatically starts going to another place to look for solutions. So instead of looking to airports, we might look to the people who are experts in wait time. I'm talking to you from Orlando, Florida. I'm just a couple miles away from Universal Studios on one side, Disney World on the other side. These are the masters of the wait time, the wait experience. They are the masters of being able to reduce the wait time as much as possible with technology, but they are also the people who understand the psychology of waiting in line. So this is where we would look for better solutions. Not to airports. So now we can start talking to the theme parks to have a better idea of how do we create a different experience. So we've already now had four reframes. Speed of bags, speed of passengers, reduce wait time, improve wait time. But we can even go further with this because there's a lot of people. I travel a lot. At least I used to travel a lot before the pandemic. And I would always try to do carry on luggage only, and I'd get off the plane. And I always felt like I was walking forever. And so the people who carry on their luggage always say to me, why do you penalize everybody by making everybody walk longer? What if you were to only slow down the passengers with checked bags? So that's a different question. How can we. How can we slow down the passengers with checked bags? Not everyone. Well, now we can't reconfigure the airport, most likely, but maybe we reconfigure the plane. The passengers with checked bags sit in the back, so it takes them longer to get off the plane. So they're waiting on the plane rather than waiting at baggage claim. But it's a different experience of wait when you're on the plane. When you are anticipating getting off than when you're just sitting around at baggage claim doing absolutely nothing, twiddling your thumbs. Let's try one last question on this, because sometimes we can take a weight experience and not improve the wait experience, but maybe we can distract the passengers, maybe we can change the perception of the wait experience. So you get your bags, you get off the plane, or you get off the plane, you get your bags, you then go outside the airport. And many of us, the next thing we do is we pull out our phones and we call an Uber or a Lyft. And if you've ever stood waiting for an Uber or Lyft, waiting for a ride share and you look at other people who are waiting for their car, you'll notice one thing in common. Everybody's face is glued to the phone. Now, maybe some of them are checking social media, but many of them are watching this teeny weeny version of a car move slowly across the screen as it gets closer and closer and closer to where they are. And they can see the minutes tick down from eight minutes to seven minutes to six minutes. So we distract the passers. What if we did the same thing for baggage claim? Well, what if instead of having a teeny weeny car move across the screen, we had a teeny weeny bag move across the screen and we could actually watch our bags go from the plane and onto the little trams that take it to the conveyor belts and behind the scenes, then it gets onto the baggage claim carousel and out it comes. That would be really cool. It would distract us. So the point is, whatever problem you are solving, there are a lot of different ways to reframe it. And changing just one word in the problem statement can unleash a well wide range of potential solutions. So let's go back to the lenses that I mentioned earlier. And again, if you don't have them, you don't need them. But if you want to get them, get the lenses.com getthelenses.com and let me just explain to you just a few of the lenses and how that applies to this baggage claim example. So lens number 16 is the flip lens. And the flip lens says, how can we turn a problem upside down by improving a different factor. In other words, instead of solving for this, how do we solve for that? And in many cases, we're trying to solve a problem that actually has multiple factors to it. So reducing wait time has two factors. Speed of the bag, speed of the passengers. So instead of speeding up the bags, we can slow down the passengers. That's the flip lens. But then we used lens number 15, which is the substitute lens, which says, well, what if we changed a word? What if we changed a word or multiple words in the statement and we went from how do we reduce the wait time? To how can we improve the wait time? How can we improve the weight experience if you want to change two words? Well, changing those two words gave us a completely different range of solutions. And then the last lens I'll talk about today is lens number 24, which is the variations lens. And the variations lens says, let's not treat everyone the same. Let's not use a one size fits all strategy. What if we were to use different strategies for different people? And that's where we came up with the question, how can we slow down the passengers with checked bags so we're not slowing everybody down, just the people with checked bags and the variations. Lens is an incredibly powerful lens because when we start to recognize that we can treat our best customers, the most profitable customers, differently than maybe the high volume but low profit customers, well, now all of a sudden we start unleashing some new strategies. Changing the question will change the range of solutions. And here's the thing, when you change the question, you will find solutions that are right in front of you. We call the book Invisible Solutions. We call this podcast Invisible Solutions. Because the best solutions are right in front of your nose. You just can't see it because you're asking the wrong question, you're using the wrong lenses. It's like going to the optometrist and they have that huge machine and they change the magnification of the lenses and you can't read a thing on the screen until they get the right lens. And then all of a sudden, something that was right there in front of your nose is crystal clear. And that's what we're going to do each week is we're going to take a problem that you have and we're going to use the lenses to find better solutions. Some weeks I'll have a special guest with me. Other weeks it'll just be me, Steve Shapiro, here with you. But every week we will start off with the tip of the week on how you can find better solutions by changing your mindset. And then we will take a real world problem and apply the lenses to find solutions. Until then, happy problem solving. See you soon.