I’ve worked and lived in London for most of the past thirty years. It hasn’t been a ‘static’ experience: One of the great things about being in London is the ricocheting around town to meet with clients, suppliers and colleagues, intersecting along the way with the many other people that make up the whole London experience.
Often the bounce from A to B to C has been by London cab. If I do the maths, that’s approximately 12,000 cab rides in three decades. And, over that time, I’ve had four trips that weren’t 5-star; the driver was rude, lost or fed up, or on one particularly memorable occasion appeared to be a fully paid-up member of the Ku Klux Klan; not what I needed on the way to a funeral.
That’s just four bad journeys out of 12,000. The other 11,996 have been great: I’ve been moved from A to B at the hands of a skilled professional with an encyclopaedic knowledge of London, usually a great line in conversation, and en route I’ve been able to look out the window and marvel at all the things the capital has to offer; the history, the scale, the architecture, the energy… The simple fact is that I love London cabs, chiefly for the consistently high level of service. It’s a track record (99.97% satisfaction if my maths is right) that the likes of British Airways could only dream of – and the most remarkable thing is that this consistent performance is delivered not by a hierarchical organisation with a regimented, top-down, metric-driven grip on its customer service, but by a loose confederation of independent business entities all randomly plying their trade on the streets of London.
Stereotyping would have us believe that the cab trade is a monoculture; an army of cloth-capped ‘cockney geezers’ who actually all went to the same school in ‘Beffnul Green’ together and operate a road-going mafia. The reality is rather different. The person sitting up front is always a surprise, and in my experience has varied from a Syrian surgeon who had fled conflict in the Middle East to a former City trader who just fancied a more freelance existence. The best one though was an academic palaeontologist who always fancied the intellectual challenge of mastering ‘The Knowledge.’
The Knowledge is the cabbie’s professional qualification. It requires them to know pretty much the entire road network within the M25 (London’s outer orbital motorway) and navigate without reference to maps or SatNav via the quickest (not necessarily shortest) route to deliver the passenger as smoothly as possible. ‘Doing The Knowledge’ (as it’s termed) typically takes a minimum of three years, as it involves driving the backstreets of London, usually on a moped, until you know every nook and cranny as well as your own back garden – or, as it’s London, window-box.
But The Knowledge isn’t just the world’s toughest geography exam. The qualifying test is as much about how you deliver the service as it is about the route from A to B: Clipping a kerb, pulling away before your passenger has sat down properly or dropping your passenger off in a puddle are just a few of the things that won’t earn you ten points for Gryffindor. The list of do’s and don’ts is as extensive as the London road network itself.
What’s my point? Headline: The world’s favourite airline, which differentiates itself on its quality of service, aspires to a track record that is actually achieved routinely by a non-hierarchical loose confederation of sole traders who come from the widest imaginable range of backgrounds and cultures, and don’t have a Chief Executive. How is that even possible? Surely, high performance is driven by high standards and firm direction from ‘up top’?
What actually binds the London cab trade together is culture. They’ve all gone through the experience of Doing The Knowledge. They’ve all ridden the same streets, day after day, on their mopeds, in the cold, the rain and the dark. They’ve all faced the (sometimes painful) pressures of keeping their day jobs going and their personal lives on the wobbly rails while they’ve been Doing The Knowledge. They’ve all faced the nerve-wracking scrutiny of the same stern, steely-eyed team of examiners with their impossibly high standards and unrelenting attention to every detail that would make a regimental sergeant-major look like a true ’60s hippie by comparison.
So, the moral(s) of the tale?
1.
Applied learning isn’t about sitting in a room staring at a very large map. You have to get on your metaphorical moped and go actually experience it, or you’ll never really learn.
2.
Those wet, cold, dark learning streets become a shared experience, and that’s the common ground that forms the foundations of a culture.
3.
Culture, not command-and-control, is what really binds teams and communities together, and underpins performance.
4.
The diversity up front, driving the cab, is what enriches the culture. Being so different and so varied and delivering to a high standard are not mutually exclusive: That deep pool of perspectives, experiences and beliefs is exactly what evolves the service to be the very best it can be.
And finally, for those of you out there delivering change, try not to drop your programme in a puddle: It could earn you a mid-season transfer to Hufflepuff.