Ask a different question
Sometimes we can find a breakthrough by examining our problem from a different angle…by posing a new question.
Consider this past challenge that took place at a Houston airport. Management asked passengers to share their biggest complaint, and the overwhelming response was the wait time for luggage at the baggage carousels, sometimes 30 minutes.
So airport personnel looked at ways to expedite handling. They added extra baggage handlers in order to reduce the time to 8 minutes.
But were passengers happy with the improvement? No. New surveys revealed that the speed of baggage claim was still their biggest complaint. To further reduce the time would have required a budget-busting investment, so the problem appeared to be unsolvable.
Then airport personnel had an epiphany: Although it took eight minutes for the bags to be moved from the airplace to the baggage carousel, passengers arrived, on average, in only one minute.
So the airport personnel sought to answer a different question: “How do we delay the passengers?”
They reconfigured the airport so travelers needed about eight minutes to reach baggage claim after landing. Then as passengers arrived at the carousels, their bags were waiting…and when asked about their satisfaction with the speed of baggage handling, most were satisfied.
Einstein reminds us that by asking different questions, we can often find different potential solutions to solve our perceived problems.
And we can take his good advice by assuming that the problem we are trying to solve is not the real problem (or at least not the only one!) and look for other paths toward a solution.
Sometimes we forget that we have a box, that we spend so much of our time in our box, and that we can slip outside of our box to perceive our choices differently!
Let’s try it!
1 Comment
Great job Pat!