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  building an experience culture by making everyone a design thinker

  Nowhere is the challenge of designing compelling experiences greater than in the hotel industry—and in perhaps no other industry are the stakes higher. Any traveler can recall heart-stopping moments when an attentive member of a hotel staff has turned a potential disaster into a great experience, and the reverse is probably true as well. Whereas Bank of America had only to create a onetime interface, great hotel chains rise or fall on delivering flawless service with flawless consistency. And like all experience brands, they rely on people to a great degree.

  Four Seasons Hotels are famous for their quality of service as much as for the luxury of their properties. They are also recognized within the industry for having a staff-training system in which staff members learn how to anticipate the needs of their customers and build on the ideas of their colleagues—essential qualities, as we have seen, of design thinkers. In one program, which looks like an appealing perk but is actually a very shrewd investment, qualified employees, after just six months employment, are eligible to put themselves on the receiving end of the luxury hotel experience by staying at any Four Seasons property worldwide. Employees come back from these sojourns with a first-person appreciation of the meaning of hospitality, fired up to provide the best and most empathetic experience possible. Four Seasons knows that exceptional experience starts with its own people.

  Creating an experience culture requires going beyond the generic to design experiences perceived as uniquely tailored to each customer. Unlike a manufactured product or a standardized service, an experience comes to life when it feels personalized and customized. Sometimes this feeling can be achieved through technology, in the way that Yahoo! allows people to customize their search pages. Most often it comes from the ability of experience providers to add something special or appropriate at just the right moment. This sense of timing is rarely the result of a corporate strategy developed by marketing executives working miles away and months or even years before. The design team back at home base may do a wonderful job of creating a great stage for the experience and may even create some useful scripts to help keep it moving along, but they cannot anticipate every opportunity. That is why the training program at Four Seasons includes improvisation rather than drilling the staff with canned scripts. A real experience culture is a culture of spontaneity.

  This insight inspired Ritz-Carlton, a Marriott International subsidiary and sister brand of Marriott Hotels, to ask us to help it think about how to take the building of an experience culture to scale across all of the fifty luxury hotels in the Ritz portfolio. Would it be possible to extend this idea of personalized experience to every one of the properties without losing the personal touch and sacrificing their unique character? The key to creating an integrated, coordinated experience, of course, was to avoid trying to create an integrated, coordinated experience.

  IDEO designers decided to develop a two-piece program called “Scenography,” intended to equip general managers with the tools to anticipate the needs and meet the expectations of their guests. In the first phase, they created a tool kit consisting of inspirational examples to show what a great experience culture might look like. Using visual language inspired by art and theater—scenes, props, mood—and original photography to capture a precise emotional ambience, they recast the hotelier not as operational manager but as artistic director, creatively empowered to choreograph a unique experience.

  The second phase of “Scenography” addressed the fact that each hotel operates as an independent fiefdom full of local touches and property-specific management. Rather than propose a blandly uniform corporate identity across each of them, “Scenography” developed a template to help managers judge for themselves whether or not they were meeting the high standards sketched out in the imagined scenarios and even to craft their own scenes from scratch. The hospitality industry has a record of providing discrete products and isolated amenities. We wanted them to think about service as something that happens continuously over time, with many encounters and a strong emotional outcome. We were asking them, in effect, to tell a story through an experience.

  What we learn from the hospitality industry, where brands are built on the delivery of great experiences, is that transforming the culture of an organization is every bit as important as designing the lobby or the curbside service. Empowering employees to seize opportunities when and where they see them and giving them the tools to create unscripted experiences is an essential element of that transformation. Rather than delivering a set of instructions created for them by a bunch of designers somewhere, we encourage them to become design thinkers themselves.

  executing the idea

  On a recent trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan, my colleagues and I arrived in the early evening at a new JW Marriott hotel. Expecting to grab something to eat in town, we were instead met by one of our partners from Steelcase, who informed us that arrangements had been made for us to eat in the hotel’s “stateroom.” Images of the captain’s table on the Titanic flashed through my mind. I began to feign symptoms of jet lag, but to no avail. We were escorted into the restaurant and then ushered through the serving doors into the kitchen, where we were greeted by sous chefs, pastry chefs, and waiters and led, finally, into the private office of the executive chef, where a table had been laid for us. We were deep in the inner sanctum, his private domain, surrounded by cookbooks, open wine bottles, favorite music, and all the clutter of a large-scale culinary operation. A perfect meal followed. We chatted with the chef about local produce, secrets of the kitchen, and tricks of the trade. I learned a lot about food that evening, but even more about design.

  One does not have to be the executive chef of a fancy restaurant to realize that eating is about more than food, nutrition, or diet. When friends come to your house for dinner, you give plenty of thought to the experience: What will you cook? Should we eat indoors or out? Will the seating favor a subdued conversation with old friends, or should it be designed to impress a business associate or put a foreign visitor at ease? Thinking through this process is the difference between cooking a meal and designing an experience, but it’s important not to get lost in the staging of the event: the effect will be lost if the salad is wilted, the chicken tastes like rubber, and you can’t find the corkscrew. For an idea to become an experience, it must be implemented with the same care in which it is conceived.

  A one-off experience such as a dinner party is a bit like a piece of fine woodworking: it works with the grain and bears the mark of the craftsman, and imperfections are part of its charm. When the experience is repeated many times, however, each of these elements must be precision-engineered to deliver the desired experience consistently and reliably. We can think of service design as equivalent to everything that goes into a great product such as a BMW. The designers and engineers go to great lengths to make sure the smell of the interior, the feel of the seats, the sound of the engine, and the look of the body all support and reinforce one another.

  In designing houses, Frank Lloyd Wright was famous for the fastidiousness with which he attended to every aspect of the owner’s experience. The Meyer May House, a modest residence in a suburban neighborhood in Grand Rapids, was designed to protect the privacy of owners and guests through the overall layout of the building, and detail after detail supports this overall objective. The dining room table is situated so that every person can see outside. The lighting is removed from the ceiling and placed on columns at each corner of the table to soften the light on each person’s face. The chairs, designed with high backs, create an intimate border around the gathering. Wright also demanded that no high centerpieces be placed on the table to obscure the view between diners. Throughout the house, he designed the living experience down to the last detail.

  Too much so, for many of Wright’s critics and even some of his clients; the archives bulge with plaintive letters in which they humbly request permission to replace a piece of furniture or
alter a window covering. When the wealthy industrialist Hibbard Johnson telephoned Wright to complain that the roof of his house had sprung a leak and rainwater was dripping on his head, the Master is said to have retorted, “Why don’t you move your chair?” As tyrannical as he may have been, however (it has been said that he did not have clients so much as patrons), Wright was motivated by the belief that design and execution must work together if the architect is to deliver not just the house but the experience of it.

  the experience blueprint

  In the days before large-format photocopy machines, never mind computer-aided design, technical drawings still needed to be reproduced for building contractors and workers on the factory floor. They used a chemical process that produced blue-lined prints with a strong smell of ammonia, and the “blueprint” became synonymous with the specifications used in manufacturing or construction. The blueprint reveals on a single page both the general plan and the specific detail, the final objective and the practical means of implementation. Just as a product begins with an engineering blueprint and a building with an architectural blueprint, an experience blueprint provides the framework for working out the details of a human interaction—without the smell of ammonia.

  The difference is that unlike the plans for an office building or a table lamp, an experience blueprint also describes the emotive elements. It captures how people travel through an experience in time. Rather than trying to choreograph that journey, however, its function is to identify the most meaningful points and turn them into opportunities. The concept of an experiential blueprint emerged when Marriott decided to focus on the first, and presumably the most important, point of contact between the customer and the hotel: the experience of checking in.

  Marriott had invested millions of dollars in enhancing what was assumed to be the critical moment in the customer journey. Architects were summoned. Operations manuals were prepared. Advertising agencies were put to work. There was only one problem with this strategy, however: the premise was based on assumptions, not observation. Marriott strategy assumed that when a weary traveler met a friendly face at the check-in counter, an interaction occurred that would color the remainder of the guest’s visit. A closer look at the entirety of the picture revealed that even the best check-in experience was more akin to vaulting the final hurdle than to crossing the finish line.

  To test this premise, a design team met travelers as they disembarked from their airplanes, accompanied them to the hotel in their taxis or rental cars, observed every detail of the check-in process, and then followed them up to their rooms. The genuinely important moment, they discovered, comes when the traveler enters his room, throws his coat onto the bed, turns on the television, and exhales. The “exhale moment,” as it came to be called, presented the clearest opportunity for innovation and Marriott was persuaded to shift its resources in that direction.

  As with an engineering or architectural blueprint, the experience blueprint takes the form of a physical document that guides the building of an experience. Unlike a prepared script or an operations manual, it connects the customer experience and the business opportunity. Every detail holds the potential to sour a relationship—confusing signage, an inattentive doorman—but only a few offer possibilities for an experience that is distinctive, emotionally gratifying, and memorable. The blueprint is at one and the same time a high-level strategy document and a fine-grained analysis of the details that matter.

  From airlines and hospitals to supermarkets, banks, and hotels, it’s clear that experiences are much more complex than inert objects. They vary from place to place, they change over time, and they are hard to get right. Although the design of an experience may involve products, services, spaces, and technology, an experience carries us beyond the comfortable world of measurable utility and into the hazy zone of emotional value.

  The best and most successful experience brands have a number of things in common that may provide us with some secure guidelines. First, a successful experience requires active consumer participation. Second, a customer experience that feels authentic, genuine, and compelling is likely to be delivered by employees operating within an experience culture themselves. Third, every touchpoint must be executed with thoughtfulness and precision—experiences should be designed and engineered with the same attention to detail as a German car or a Swiss watch.

  CHAPTER SIX

  spreading the message,

  or the importance of storytelling

  It’s not so easy to get the prime minister of a G8 country to become part of your corporate marketing strategy, but Makoto Kakoi and Naoki Ito, senior account executives at the award-winning Japanese advertising agency Hakuhodo, used the power of storytelling to do exactly that in their brilliant Cool Biz campaign.

  In 2005 the Ministry of the Environment, under the leadership of the imaginative minister Yuriko Koike, approached Hakuhodo for help in getting the Japanese people more involved in meeting Japan’s commitment to the greenhouse gas reduction goals of the Kyoto Protocol. The government had made several previous attempts, but they had met with limited success. Hakuhodo suggested creating a campaign that mobilized the collectivist ethos of Japanese society toward a concrete goal: working together to reduce emissions by 6 percent. Within a year, according to a survey commissioned by the Ministry of the Environment, the slogan “Cool Biz” was recognized by a staggering 95.8 percent of the Japanese population.

  The real challenge, as the Hakuhodo team recognized, was to make the campaign not only familiar but also meaningful. In pursuit of this elusive goal, they enlisted a group of experts to help them identify four hundred everyday activities that cause or reduce carbon emissions. This list was whittled down to six key practices, which included raising the thermostats on air-conditioning systems in summer and lowering them in winter; conserving water by turning off taps; driving less aggressively; selecting more ecofriendly products at the grocery store; ending the use of plastic bags; and turning off electronic products when not in use. Each of these activities was selected to create a balance of engagement and impact. They were activities that most people could integrate into their daily lives but that, cumulatively and over time, would make an enormous difference.

  The target during the first year of the program was the air-conditioning problem. Conventionally these systems were set to 26 degrees C. (79 degrees F.) so that businessmen in their suits and ties could work comfortably in the hot, steamy Japanese summer, while female office workers in their short formal business skirts often covered their laps with blankets to stay warm. This oddity would have been bad enough if not for the inconvenient truth that cooling buildings to such a low temperature requires huge amounts of energy, especially during the summer months.

  Hakuhodo created Cool Biz, a period from June 1 to October 1 every year when businessmen and women may wear more casual clothing, so that it is easier to stay cool. Air-conditioning thermostats could then be raised to 28 degrees C. (82 degrees F.) instead of 26, a small adjustment but one that created enormous energy savings. Ingrained cultural practice threatened to derail this sensible idea: how to get conservative Japanese businessmen to change the way they dress? Rather than bombarding people with a campaign of print and TV advertisements, the Hakuhodo team set up a Cool Biz fashion show at the Expo 2005 World Exposition in Aichi in which dozens of CEOs and other senior executives strutted about in casual business wear with open necks and lightweight materials. Even Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was featured in newspaper and TV stories tieless and in a short-sleeved shirt.

  The event caused a sensation. In this traditional and hierarchical society, in which people defer to the guys at the top, a message went out that it was okay to depart from convention—business dress, in this case—to protect the environment. To help reinforce the message, the government distributed Cool Biz pins to any organization that signed on. It was forbidden to criticize coworkers for wearing casual clothing if they were wearing a Cool Biz badge. For the second time in a hund
red years, the Japanese set about literally to reengineer their business etiquette. Within three years, 25,000 businesses throughout the country had signed on to Cool Biz and 2.5 million individuals had made commitments on the campaign’s Web site. In Japan Cool Biz has now thawed to become Warm Biz to help save energy during the winter months, and Cool Biz sites have begun popping up in China, Korea, and elsewhere in Asia.

  With Cool Biz, Hakuhodo turned an idea into a campaign and a campaign into a movement engaging millions of ordinary citizens and the political and business elite. Rather than relying on traditional advertising, Hakuhodo generated a conversation. Newspapers and magazines reported on the phenomenon because people wanted to know about it. The prime-time news media followed suit. Cool Biz had become a cool story.

  Many notions have been proposed to explain what differentiates human beings from other species: bipedal locomotion, tool use, language, symbolic systems. Our ability to tell stories also sets us apart. In his provocative book Nonzero, the journalist Robert Wright makes the case that consciousness, language, and society have developed an intimate relationship with technologies of storytelling throughout the forty-thousand-year history of human society. As we learned how to spread our ideas, our social structures expanded from nomadic groups to tribes to settled villages and then to cities and states, followed by supranational organizations and movements. Before long the Japanese were cooling their buildings in the summer and heating them in the winter to make it bearable to go to work wearing Western-style clothes—and telling themselves stories about it.