Stephen Shapiro recounts an anecdote from his book Invisible Solutions about an airport that reduced baggage delivery time but passengers still complained. By reframing the problem from "speeding up bags" to "reducing wait time" and then to "improving the wait experience," the airport solved the complaint by slowing passenger movement so bags arrived as passengers did. Shapiro uses theme-park examples and other alternative framings (e.g., seating changes, bag-tracking) to illustrate how subtle changes in the question yield very different solution spaces; he notes his book offers 25 techniques for reframing problems.
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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 at 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. But let's keep on digging. We could change just two words in the problem statement. How can we reduce the wait time and get a completely different range of solutions? We can go from how can we reduce wait time? To how can we improve the wait experience? Now, we're not talking about speed. We're talking about experience. Now, when you think about it, who creates the greatest experience? It's not an airport. I live in Orlando, Florida. It's a place where people pay $100 a day to wait in line. The theme parks there are masters of the wait experience because they've taken the time to understand, how do we speed up the line, how do we reduce the line? But also, when we can't eliminate it, how do we create this great experience? Experience. A buddy of mine works on a ride in Universal Studios, the ride the Race Through New York with Jimmy Fallon. And this is a really cool ride because it's a virtual reality simulation of a roller coaster through New York City. But what they wanted to do, and what's cool about this is they spent a lot of time and energy creating the ultimate wait experience. Unlike most rides where you're waiting in line, here you walk into a mock of Rockefeller Center. There are no lines. You wander around. You can see exhibits of NBC shows, the Tonight show, you're able to sit in comfy chairs, charge your phones, hang out with people, watch entertainment. People love this. So if you're looking at trying to improve the wait experience, you don't necessarily talk to people in your industry. You look elsewhere. Now, let's just dig a little further into this one, because if you think about the wait experience, when we originally slowed down the passengers, a lot of people telling me, great, so we're making people walk. Which, by the way, the reason why it worked was because people experience wait time differently than busy time. While we're walking, it's a different experience, but we're penalizing everyone. So the people who do carry on luggage are walking just as much as the people who have checked luggage. So we can look at it this from a number of different perspectives. For example, we could say, what if we slowed down the passengers who checked bags while everybody else is able to go faster? Well, now we can't reconfigure the airport. But what if we change the seating on planes so that if you had checked bags, you were actually further back in the plane, which means it takes you longer to get off the plane. Or if you had checked bags, there was some kind of waiting area where you could do something fun to keep yourself entertained. Or think about the last time you ordered an Uber car or a Lyft car. What makes the experience less painful is you get to look at the app and see where the car is. What if you borrowed that idea so that you can actually see where your bags are and then that changes the wait experience? The point is, 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. Sam.
