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What Are You Missing?

3 April, 2016 by James Lawther 3 Comments

I have to manage your expectations

It is a horrible phrase. I hate it when somebody says to me. It means that I am not going to get what I want when I want it. I am being softened up. There is going to be a delay.

Suddenly I am thrown into the cost or speed conundrum.  As the customer my position is simple.

“Pull your finger out and get on with it.”

But that stance rarely works, no matter how much I throw my weight about.

I hate one-dimensional trade offs.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

In his TED talk Roary Sutherland tells the story of Eurostar.

There is a train which goes from London to Paris. The question was given to a bunch of engineers, about 15 years ago, “How do we make the journey to Paris better?” And they came up with a very good engineering solution, which was to spend six billion pounds building completely new tracks from London to the coast, and knocking about 40 minutes off a three-and-half-hour journey time.

Now, call me Mister Picky. I’m just an ad man … but it strikes me as a slightly unimaginative way of improving a train journey merely to make it shorter. Now what is the hedonic opportunity cost on spending six billion pounds on those railway tracks?

Here is my naive advertising man’s suggestion. What you should in fact do is employ all of the world’s top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train, handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. Now, you’ll still have about three billion pounds left in change, and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.

His point is a simple one. Don’t just assume there is only one dimension that is important. Understand what else is important to your customers and throw that into the mix as well.

A more workaday example

We don’t all have supermodels at our disposal so here is a more down to earth example:

A team was charged with improving turnaround times at a hospital pharmacy. It took two hours for the pharmacy to give prescriptions to outpatients. They did some good work to cut the wait to 40 minutes. But that wasn’t the clever bit.

Being a patient is a soul destroying job.  Hospitals hand you off from waiting room to waiting room for hour after hour.  Another 40 minutes wasn’t the issue. The real problem was that these people had been trapped staring at hospital walls all morning.

The solution was to give every patient a beeper as they do in restaurant queues. Now the patients weren’t bored to tears in the waiting room, they were free to go wherever they wanted.

Don’t be one-dimensional

Just because you think it is important to your customer doesn’t mean it is.

What else would they value?

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Waiting Room

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Image by Craig Sunter

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: assumptions, innovation, medicine, queue, TED talks, waiting

About the Author

James Lawther
James Lawther

James Lawther is a middle-aged, middle manager.

To reach this highly elevated position he has worked in numerous industries, from supermarket retailing to tax collecting.  He has had several operational roles, including running the night shift in a frozen pea packing factory and carrying out operational research for a credit card company.

As you can see from his C.V. he has either a wealth of experience or is incapable of holding down a job.  If the latter is true this post isn’t worth a minute of your attention.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to read it and decide for yourself.

www.squawkpoint.com/

Comments

  1. Annette Franz says

    5 April, 2016 at 3:44 am

    Expectations are funny things, aren’t they?

    Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed. -Alexander Pope

    Reply
  2. Adrian Swinscoe says

    17 April, 2016 at 9:38 am

    Hi James,

    I love the Rory Sutherland story as it’s a great example that the solution is not always faster and cheaper but that there is often a better way.

    Adrian

    Reply
    • James Lawther says

      30 April, 2016 at 4:51 pm

      He does a great Ted Talk:

      https://www.ted.com/speakers/rory_sutherland

      Reply

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