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Now this. These two principles together can be gold for you. All you need to do is find a perception point today. Do it better than you’ve ever done it before, and you will be creating more value. Let me give you some examples.

As I said, Changi International Airport in Singapore is the most awarded airport in the world, but they had a challenge at one of the points in the process. Getting from the aircraft all the way to the taxi involves multiple steps. Arrow Bridge, transit area, immigration, baggage collection, customs, public arrival area, taxi stand, off you go. One of those points was not getting high scores in the category called friendliness, and you may not be surprised to hear that it was immigration. 

Now, immigration has a process they need to follow. Their job is to get your passport, make sure it’s you, check your visa, stamp it, say “Next.”, “Passport.” “Passport.” But Changi Airport wants to be the best in the world, and so they want every perception point to be higher on the six levels of service. So they came up with an idea. They wrote a script. They wanted every immigration officer to say to every single passenger, “Good afternoon and welcome to Changi International Airport. On behalf of everyone in the Immigration and Control Authority, I would like to welcome you to Singapore and we’re very happy you’re here. We hope you had a nice flight. May I see your passport, please?”

This lasted about 2 hours because it’s impossible to say that more than twice and be sincere. It takes time,  they have a KPI for speed, so they said that idea is not going to work. They put it aside. They came up with a second idea. They put a mirror on every computer terminal facing the immigration officer with a sticker. It said “Smile”, and it backfired. The friendly scores actually went down. Like, what’s going on here? We’re telling them to smile, we’re giving them a mirror.

You know what happened? Before the mirror was there, the immigration officer would say, “Passport”, would say “Next, next”, and then would keep eye contact with you while you walked up to be served. But the moment the mirror was there, the immigration officers started to do this: “Next”, and then they’d go like that. And in breaking eye contact, it turned out that the experience for the traveler was perceived as less friendly. So they got rid of the mirror. 

They came up with a third and final idea that actually worked well. They put a box of candy on every immigration counter and they rewrote the script, but the script now takes no time at all. It’s only two words. First word when you walk up, “Passport”. The moment you hand over the passport, they say the second word, “Sweet?” And just like that, 100% of arriving and departing passengers go, “Oh, look at that. A sweet.” And their emotional energy went up and the friendly scores went up, too. 

Now, I like to share this story because I need you to notice something. The first idea, the long script. It might have sounded like a good idea, but it wasn’t operationally effective. It took too long. The second idea with the mirror sounded like a good idea. It backfired in actual implementation. The same may happen for you. Just because you have a good idea, it doesn’t mean every idea is a good idea. So you want to generate lots of new ideas and then evaluate them together with your colleagues and then refine them and improve them and then pick the best ones and put them into action.