Hamish Taylor on innovation: think outside your industry

 

At the PMI UK Chapter Synergy conference (you can see the stage in the photo) last month Hamish Taylor spoke about innovation and getting projects off the ground by looking outside your current industry for inspiration. He is ex-CEO of Eurostar and took over there at a time when the company was facing a loss of £206m. On the day he started they didn’t even have a product to offer as a fire had closed the tunnel and stopped the service.

However, he started off his talk on innovation by introducing his experiences from working at BA. He was instrumental in the project to deliver the world’s first flat bed – while now that doesn’t seem very innovative as all airlines off them, at the time it hadn’t been done before. He started off by approaching the normal company that made their airline seats but the manufacturer wasn’t able to think creatively and the finished designs didn’t really do what Taylor wanted. So he looked outside his industry for people who were used to designing luxury in small spaces.

He ended up approaching a yacht interior designer and they went on to design what eventually became the beds that were used in First Class.

Taylor used the same innovative approach when looking at how they could improve the customer experience at the airport. In 1993 they were struggling with check in queues and customer complaints were going up. So he looked at places where queuing wasn’t a problem, and could even be fun. He got executives from Disney Parks to come and observe the airport and point out what they were doing wrong.

This was at a time, he said, when each check in desk had an individual queue, and whichever queue you chose it was always the slowest. No one was doing a ‘zig zag queue’ where you join one queue and go to the next available desk. But that’s what was happening at Disney. Taylor’s team also picked up some other useful points from the Disney visit:

• Make the queue really narrow because then it moves faster, even if it makes the total queuing time the same. People will be moving forward so they feel as if the queue is going down and be more satisfied.
• If there’s a 25 minute wait from this point, tell them it will be 30 minutes so they feel s if they’ve beaten the system when they arrive earlier.

As a result of these simple changes, customer complaints about check in time went down – but the answers weren’t available in the airline industry at the time.

Understanding your customer for projects

“We need to change the way we understand customers,” Taylor said. “We’ve got to get better generally at soft insights, not data.” Insightful customer understanding, he explained, comes from understanding the customer’s world, and to illustrate this he gave an example from his time at the helm of Sainsbury’s Bank.

The project was to set up the bank in the supermarket. The traditional approach suggested a bank information point, with leaflets and a desk staffed by people in uniform. In short, a traditional bank, but just situated in the supermarket.

It didn’t work.

The ‘soft insight’ here was understanding the customers’ mood. When you go food shopping, most people want to get in and out of the supermarket as quickly as possible. They are in a bad mood. They don’t want to have a 20 minute discussion about credit cards while the ice cream melts in their trolley. So instead, the project team created simple products marketed at the right place in the store, for example, pet insurance by the pet food.

Making it customer focused

Taylor gave another BA example in his presentation, that of a project designed to increase the amount of people travelling business class. In their first advertisement, the focus is on the fact that business class has the widest seat in the world. It’s safe, secure, extra comfy and so on. But it’s not about the customer – it’s about the features of the seat.

Then Singapore Airlines launched a seat that was half an inch wider, and the ad campaign had to be scrapped.

Two years later, the ‘BA Club World’ project team had a different focus. It was about helping travellers arrive ready to work and making their journey as smooth as possible. The whole company was engaged with the vision: “How else could you help people arrive better prepared for business?” Taylor knew this approach was working when a member of staff from the lounge called him up and suggested that they serve a meal there as an alternative to having to dine on board. This way, business travellers could get more sleep on the flight and arrive better prepared for their working day.

“Project management is the catalyst for change,” Taylor said, and while he gave plenty of examples of projects, the key message was that unless you look for innovation, you won’t stay ahead of your competitors. As project leaders, we should be encouraging innovative approaches in our project teams and supporting projects that take a slightly different approach – you never know where that might lead in terms of innovation and success.