Unlocking Insights: How to Approach and Solve Psychological Questions

The World Trade Center in Manhattan was tall. To get from the bottom to anywhere takes a lot of time. It was the tallest building in the world at the time.

Otis Elevators was asked in 1971 to put in the first commercial elevators. To solve the problem of getting up and down the building, they introduced two sky lobbies. These sky lobbies connected to the express elevators and from there you could take the elevator to the floor you wanted.

Everyone from the office staff, residents, and even nosey people were excited to use the elevators to traverse the huge tower.

However, this excitement did not last and people started to complain. And the complaints didn’t stop coming.

It took almost as long to use these new fancy elevators as it did to walk up the stairs.

The complaints kept mounting and the management office had to relent and take the issue to the board.

The board, in all its wisdom, could not find a solution. A month passed and the complaints kept coming.

Residents started moving out, and offices also got sick of it and started to move out too.

The board went back to the experts, at Otis, to see if they could come up with a solution. How could they make the elevators go faster and make the people visiting the World Trade Center happier?

What followed was a 6-hour meeting where everyone, the board, Otis Elevator President and many engineers, all threw out idea after idea. Smacking their heads against the wall trying to figure out how to make the elevator faster.

And nothing came, no eureka moment, no wonderful idea. Just blank faces and no solutions.

Then, out of frustration, the Otis Elevator President stood up and said, “Hey! Why don’t we put mirrors?”.

Everyone was tired and said why not.

You wouldn’t imagine how many complaints came in.

Zero.

No one complained, no one said anything.

People would check their outfits, fix their make-up, and adjust their ties.

The mirrors didn’t change the speed of the elevators or the journey, but it changed the experience of the journey, so people didn’t notice the length.

What can we learn from some mirrors in an elevator? You might be asking the wrong question.

Perspective

The way you look at any problem is going to constrain how you approach solving it.

We can get so laser-focused on what we think the problem is we miss opportunities to attack the issue from another angle.

An interesting approach is asking if it is a mechanical issue, or is it a psychological issue?

A mechanical issue will usually involve maths. It is something you can measure and quantify. As in the case above, the speed of the elevators. Easy to measure, so often the problem that people look to solve.

A psychological issue is about thoughts and feelings. It is about how someone feels about something, and harder to measure, hence why people avoid attempting to solve these problems.

Take the Train

The brilliant Rory Sutherland (I could listen to how he thinks all day) spoke about the Eurostar. The train that connects Paris to London. (See below).

They spent six million pounds to make the train go faster and reduce the travel time by 40 minutes.

Sutherland suggests that for 0.01% of the money they could have put wi-fi in all of the trains. This would not have made the trains any faster but would have given people something to do to pass the time.

He also flippantly offered a solution of spending 10% of the money and having all of the top male and female supermodels walk up and down the train and give away free champagne.

Joking people would want the trains slowed down.

He is reframing how to look at the problem and rather than working on a mechanical solution he is seeing if there is a psychological one.

Right Answer or Right Question?

The same thing applies to your computer. The progress bar doesn’t mean anything. It is not a representation of what is happening inside the computer, but something for you to watch to feel like something is happening and it will finish soon.

When approaching any issue with your team, ask yourself, what is the problem you are solving?

Is it something measurable, or is it experiential?

Some things are measurable. When you ask an F1 engineer, they want to make the car faster. It is not going to matter if they feel like they are going faster. The time matters.

But when your client wants the screen to load faster, or that you should optimise a process for this or that, give yourself the freedom to think about what could be the feeling we need to change rather than the mechanism that is happening when that feeling happens.

As Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.”