Turning Sad Times into Happy Times

Writing a blog every month is such a good habit to get into. It makes you notice things.  After a few months where I was struggling to think of what to write about, l decided that I was going to have to develop a “system” so I started a sticky note for ‘writing ideas’ within my plethora of sticky notes and now I honestly have more ideas than I need.   I love that this practice has made me more alert to the world around me.

I guess it’s the same kind of principle as writing a diary or journal – a habit, a repetitive routine, something that helps you to reflect on events and provides you with the opportunity to improve.

This is probably the last blog that I will write as part of the Business School’s newsletter however as, come August 1^st, I won’t be the Pro Dean of External Engagement anymore – my term has come to an end within the Academic Function and Leadership transformation project.  I am still going to write my blogs though because of how valuable they are to me.  They help me make sense of the world and I love the feeling of being a detective within my own life, looking for clues about the next interesting thing to think and write about.

My last addition to my ‘writing ideas’ sticky note was made in “Olympic Way” as I queued get into the tube station at Wembley Stadium.  Me and my cousin made a VERY sharp exit as Harry Styles finished his last song because we knew of the pain of being trapped in the mega queue to even get into the tube station following the collective departure of 90,000 people at an Oasis concert.  High from the delights of revisiting our youth and singing along to all of the Oasis classics, we lingered in the post gig haze slightly too long to find ourselves at the absolute back of the departing crowd.

It took an hour and a half to get on a train. 🫠 We got to know the lollipop ‘stop’ and swivel round for ‘go’ sign very well where one of the sign holders with an earpiece would be authorised to trigger a flood of humans forward, the rush of bodies, moving that little bit closer to their final destination … until the next stop sign was encountered.

It wasn’t the end of the world, but it was just a bit of a downer after an amazing night full of love and hugs and joy and memories of brilliant times gone by.

Cut to our night with Harry and whilst we didn’t want to leave his orbit, we also knew that we simply couldn’t hang around.  As the last song “As it Was” played its final bars, we bolted towards the exit. Pounding down the stairs at Wembley, round the gigantic stadium, we started the fast pace moving down Olympic ‘Wembley’ Way to speed towards the tube.

We were doing well, we kept looking at each other, impressed with the progress we had made, quicker and quicker we paced, closer and closer to the tube.  Until….

The human held signs suddenly revolved to reveal STOP.

Together, we sighed.

We’d got pretty far though, all things considered.

As we settled in for the delay, our attention was drawn to two official looking men above us on a staircase to our right.  Next thing we know, a megaphone is positioned next to a phone and the One Direction classic “That’s What Makes You Beautiful” kicked into action, which achieved precisely what it intended, to turn the sad time, into a happy one.  Everyone around started dancing and singing. The joy that we had all collectively just experienced, wasn’t coming to an end, we were still right in the middle of it!

I grabbed my phone and I started filming because this moment felt blogworthy.

Click to see my video and hear me sing along!

They were swapping the lean waste of ‘waiting’ into something that was ‘value add’.

This is something that I often try to communicate when working with teams, that a key principle of lean and service design, particularly when you have fixed start and end points and ‘lead time reduction’ (i.e. transacting the process within a shorter time frame) isn’t an option, you need to think instead about ‘value maximisation’.  Converting as much of that start to end time as ‘added value’ as possible.

We were going to be there a while, there was nothing that we could do about it, the tube station had to be safe, so let’s turn the wait into a party!

So think about where there are ‘waits’ in your services that you can’t really do much about.  How can you turn those waits into something valuable?

I guess ultimately, the thing to think about is, how do you turn something sad, into an opportunity?