Stephen Shapiro recounts a short case story (from his book Invisible Solutions) about airport baggage claim. An airport reduced bag delivery time from 15–20 minutes to 8–10 minutes but passengers still complained because they reached the carousel in 1–3 minutes; the airport instead slowed passenger flow to match bag arrival so passengers perceived no wait. The story illustrates how reframing questions (e.g., from “How can we speed up the bags?” to “How can we reduce wait time?”) expands the range of solutions; Shapiro says his book offers 25 techniques for such reframing.
Chapters
In my latest book, Invisible Solutions, I share one of my favorite stories. See, I travel a lot. I travel about 150 days a year. And if you've traveled recently, one of the things you probably noticed is that the allotment for carry on luggage has gotten so small that in most cases, we need to check our luggage. Now, if you're like I am, you get off of a long flight, last thing you want to do is wait until baggage claim. But we do. So one of the airports here in the US they did a quick analysis, and they found that on average, it took the bags 15 to 20 minutes to get from the plane to the baggage carousel. So what they did was they decided to solve the problem. How can we speed up the bags? How can we speed up the bags? 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. That's pretty amazing if you think about it. If you cut the time down by 50%, you'd probably be popping the champagne and celebrating. But when they asked the passengers what was their biggest complaint, they were still complaining about baggage claim. It still took too long. Now, 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 down to eight minutes, to get it to seven, six or five would be prohibitively expensive. Then they had an epiphany. They realized that it took the bags 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 what do you think they did? Instead of speeding up the bags, they slow down the passengers. They literally reconfigured the airport so that it would take on average, 8 to 10 minutes for the passengers to get from the plane to the baggage carousel. They get to the baggage carousel, their bags are waiting. People are ecstatic. By the way, this is a great upsell opportunity because people are walking past shops and restaurants. Now, we could end the story here, but we can dig a little deeper. One of the things which I love about this example is that it's a powerful way to describe changing a question. Originally, we're solving the problem. How can we speed up the bags? When in fact, really a better question could have been, how can we reduce wait time? Now, when we hear wait time and speed of bags, they sound the same, but they're not identical because wait time is made up of the speed of the bags and the speed of the passengers. Here's the point. If you spend your time only trying to speed up bags, you will never think to slow down the passengers. The questions we ask have a profound impact on the range of solutions. Any question you're working on, any problem you are trying to solve, subtle changes to the question can have a huge impact on the range of solutions that you develop. And when you read invisible solutions, you will be given 25 different ways to take any problem you're trying to solve and look at it from a different angle. And in doing so, you'll be able to solve nearly any difficult business problem, because you're going to look at the problem from an angle you've never considered before.
