How We Work Behind The Scenes
Our guiding principles (focus on the long term, simple is better, embrace the unexpected, get lost in the moment and do the right thing) and the constraints (desirable, viable, feasible) define how we stage the goosebumps moments for our guests. These are defined in the previous section.
This section is about how we work behind the scenes to implement everything we do. It is more of a work in progress than the others with each lesson containing a list of philosophies that guide how we collaborate, work and engage our guests. Most of our staff in the early years came from similar backgrounds which meant that most of this was implied and not something we included in our staff training. As we grow and have staff with more diverse backgrounds it helps create a richer experience but also means that we need to better define how we do things.
We find that simply copying how others do things, or applying programs built for others, doesn’t create the experiences we want. That’s why we prefer to take inspiration from the work others have done while remaining flexible when it comes to incorporating these into how we work. Some of the inspirations you might recognize in this section include:
- the ski instructor program from the CSIA and the ACA’s coaching program;
- various work on design thinking and service design;
- The Power of Moments from Chip and Dan Heath;
- Simon Sinek’s Start with Why, Leaders Eat Last and Infinite Games;
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi work on flow theory;
- and many others.
One book that captures and explains a lot of what we’ve been trying to do, in different words, is Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara.
You’ll notice that many of the ideas we present in this section appear to conflict with each other: use long-form content and keep conversations short, obsess over the small details and embrace the unexpected, etc.
It would be easier to do one or the other and avoid this tension. We would be missing out however on the magic that creates goosebumps moments.
