Early Warning Signals : Smoke Detectors Custom-Tailored to Your Work
Five #1MinuteStories on sensing and solving problems before they happen!
The world famous chef Heston Bluementhal reveals a big secret on how he knows if the chef or the restaurant that he just walked into is good or bad, even before trying the food. He knows it immediately after he sits down. As soon as the butter is brought to the table.
‘Butter..’, he says, ‘is an indicator of whether or not the chef has eaten at their own restaurant. If the butter is rock solid, if you have to tear the bread as you try to spread the butter, it signals that the chef hasn’t eaten at their own restaurant. It’s a small detail but a chef wanting to create a great experience from start to finish will always ensure that the butter is placed on the table is at room temperature - not so soft that it looks limp, but so soft that it spreads easy. It means that you’re in the vicinity of a chef who cares not just about their craft but their customer too.’;
It’s a small detail but chef Heston Bluementhal has figured his own early warning signal relevant to his work. (Source : Billy Oppenheimer’s Six By Six Newsletter)
While early warning signals are an essential element in all things we do, their value hinges on the severity of the problem and the time we get for a response. Early Warning Signals - that’s the theme for this week’s edition of #1MinuteStories..
At the very core, it begins with paying attention, having the presence of mind and taking swift action.
When 10 year old Tilly Smith saw the sea water swelling and frothing like how you get on the top of beer, she ran to alert her father, Colin Smith. The first thing that came to her mind was the lesson her elementary school teacher, Andrew Kearney, taught her class just two weeks ago on tectonic plates, oceanic earthquakes and tsunamis. She and her family were vacationing at a resort on Maikhao Beach in Phuket, Thailand. It was the 26th of Dec 2004.
At first, her father ignored her. But Tilly was persistent and pushed her father to finally approach the security guard stationed on the beach. The guard heeded their warning and immediately ordered evacuation of 100’s of tourists on the beach - far and away from the shore.
When the 9.1 - 9.3 magnitude earthquake struck the Indian Ocean off the Sumatra coast that day, the resulting tsunami devastated coastal regions and took more than 2 lakh lives with it. The 100 odd tourists on that beach owe their lives to Tilly Smith. The 10 year old who paid attention to the lesson in class and also had the presence of mind to sound an alarm. She was named Child of the Year by French youth magazine Mon Quotidien and also has an asteroid named after her. (Source: Now I Know, Dan Lewis)
Ability to frame and ask the right question is a rare skill. It is also a sure shot way to stumble upon early warning signals. Something that Ryan O’Neill, head of the customer service for the travel website Expedia, discovered in 2012.
Ryan was stunned to come across an unbelievable data point while sifting through the call centre data. For every 100 customers who booked travel on Expedia, 58 of them were placing a call afterward for help. He was baffled that a self service app was requiring almost 60% of customers calling back. Traditionally the call centre had been measured on efficiency and customer satisfaction. So the reps were trying to make customers happy and do shorter calls.
Ryan thought ‘We had been trying to reduce cost. Instead of a 10 min call, could we make it a 2 min call. But the real question was : Why 2 mins? Why any mins?’ When you spend years responding to problems, you can forget that we can prevent them too. Ryan shared the data with his boss and they dug up the reasons why people were calling back.
The number one reason people were calling was to get a copy of the itinerary! In 2012 alone, 20 million logged a call for this. 20 million calls is akin to all of Delhi metro making a call in one year. At a cost of $5 per call, it was a $100 mn expense. Why were the customers missing the itineraries? - they were reaching the customers spam folder, they made a wrong email entry or had accidentally deleted the mail. Easy tech fixes that Ryan and team got on to.
In a record time post the intervention, the support calls reduced from 58% to 15%. 20 million support calls just vanished. $100 mn was saved by Expedia team. (Source: Upstream - How to Solve Problems before they Happen, Penguin)
One could say, we may not always have that low hanging fruit to solve as Ryan and Expedia team had. Sometimes the problems need deeper analysis and accurate prediction.
Marcus Elliott, a doctor and sports trainer, joined the New England Patriots in 1999. It was a team plagued with hamstring injuries. At that time, it was commonly believed that injuries were a part of sport.
Marcus came from a different perspective that most injuries are a result of bad training. So he bought an individualised approach. He studied each player, classified their injury risk as high, moderate or low. And ensured that each of the high risk players got rigorous training during off season. The number of injuries the next season reduced from 22 to 3. It was then that people started believing sports science was a thing to trust.
Elliott went on to launch a sports science firm called P3, which had a 3D motion capture technology to micro analyse athletes when they jump and pivot. He would say ‘see when you land after a jump, you've got 25% more force coming through one side of your body - we are noticing your femur is rotating internally, your tibia is rotating externally -puts your relative rotation at 96th percentile of all athletes we've examined. And every single athlete we've seen above the 95th percentile has suffered a knee injury within 2 years..we should work on that, reassess to see how much it has changed'
Elliott’s famous line was ‘you don’t wait for a bad thing to happen, instead you look for a signal that theres a risk there and then u act on it. Because if you wait for the bad things to happen, you can’t never put things back the way they were before’ (Source: Upstream - How to solve problems before they happen? , Dan Heath)
Some early warning signals are more critical than others. And some like this, need an angel like Chen Si.
Walking one day on the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge one evening, ‘he spotted a woman - a young migrant worker like himself - on the edge, 70 meters above the water, crying and contemplating jumping’. Chen stopped to talked to her. The woman climbed down and it was only then he realised that he inadvertently saved her life’. He felt a great degree of pride and promised himself that this would be his life’s mission - to save lives in distress. It was the year 2000 and Chen was just 22 years and from then onwards he kept coming back to this bridge for the next 2 decades.
What he was not aware at that time, was that this bridge, built across city of Nanjing, held a dubious distinction of being cited as the home to the most suicide attempts anywhere on the planet.
‘It is very easy to recognise,’ he says of potential jumpers. ‘A person walks without spirit!’ He approaches those he deems at risk and talks to them, showing them that someone indeed cares and is willing to help. He’s not always successful. He has, unfortunately, witnessed people jump, but he always tries, and often with good results. At times, Chen has bought people home and helped them with money, meals, shelter and even finding them jobs.
As of July 2024, Chen has saved an estimated 469 people. In 2015, he was the subject of a documentary filmmaker who dubbed him the ‘Angel of Nanjing’!
When we can forsee a problem, we have more maneuvering room to fix it. That’s why a key question to always ask is - How can you get an early warning for a problem that you are trying to solve? Imagine them to be like smoke detectors that are custom tailored to your work. Each of the protagonists in these stories had their own. We need to set up ours.
See you next week, with another theme, and a set of #1MinuteStories to story the same.