Daan Stevens via Unsplash
Imagine that you’ve just been appointed the head of operations for a five-star hotel in Manhattan. Your boss calls you in her office on your first day and says: “Our biggest problem is how slow elevators are. Everyone complains about it, and we can’t have that. Speed them up.”
How would you do it?
Most people intuitively focus on speeding up the elevators: installing stronger motors, modifying the dispatch algorithm, getting the doors to shut faster, or even installing additional elevators. But there is also a whole set of options that consists of giving the impression that the elevators are faster, for instance by distracting the users with windows or, on the cheaper side, with mirrors, TVs, or newspapers.
Facing a complex challenge, it’s tempting to pursue whichever option we first identify and start implementing it quickly. But relying on this kind of intuitive thinking, particularly in unpredictable environments, might result in poor outcomes —even when we have a high degree of confidence.
Instead, we should first identify the range of solutions that are available to us, which is challenging, because we don’t know what we don’t know. It’s like being an explorer a few hundred years ago who would land on an uncharted piece of land having to decide how to explore it. Well, there is a time-tested approach: map it.
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