Simple but special experiences

So where to go? Local NT places around haven’t quite got their indoor offer right. The ace Horniman Museum involves changing trains and pushing/pulling kids up Forest Hill. So the mums network kicks in - London Transport Museum it is, a direct train and 10 minutes (flat) stroll across Covent Garden. 

Lie-ins being a cherished fantasy from years gone by, it's no problem to be at the doors when they open. But we've still been beaten to it by other fake-cheerful parents calming their offspring with bribes and soft words. It is 10 am after all - there's plenty of time for that patience to wear out. 

I'd vaguely clocked LTM as a top 10 family-friendly museum, that reputation further boosted by the new "All Aboard" section last year (see review here). But hats off - this is what happens when you focus on one audience and nail it. Everything seemed to be toddler heaven with buttons everywhere to push, buses to sit up top and drive, uniforms to dress up in and staff who made a real effort throughout. With a buggy park and free cloakroom on entrance starts and a permanent kids trail, it's just very well thought out and executed. Just needs to be a bit bigger. 

On to Hamleys to complete the day. Wow, this place is hell on earth if you hate kids. Half-way round, on floor 2, my mind wandered to Tequila Girl from all the crummy nightclubs I used to go to at uni - you know, the scantily dressed temptress who'd convince you a shot of Jose Cuervo would help you dance like Justin Timberlake. Yours for £8 a pop or some similar rip-off you'd laugh out of town if you were remotely sober. At Hamleys I needed Tequila Girl or frankly even Jim the Janitor to turn up toting shots of Espresso - he/she could have made an absolute killing from all the haunted-looking parents being dragged around this hyperkinetic world of flashing lights and Peppa Pig. 

But you've got to hand it to them - despite (or because of) the thousands of people cramming the 6 floors of this toy behemoth, it's very well stage managed. Staff with cheesy grins stand on podiums launch the latest must-have gizmo into the air - and catch it nonchalantly behind their backs. Elsewhere there's a really good puppet show with The Gruffalo, and a magician passing lights through his nose and ears (yours for £20). Everything's freakingly expensive. 

She started talking about calibration - ranking your people. And said it was a load of rubbish, and worse, stifled innovation. Why? Because in a world where (if you’re Enron) you ‘rank and yank’ - i.e. rank to get a top 10% and yank out your bottom 10%, you encourage everyone to act as individuals. Worse, you’re more or less ignoring the middle 80% who carry on as they are because there’s no imperative to do otherwise. Even though that’s the bulk of your people talent. And therefore, says Heffernan, 

‘mentally, everyone gets stuck on their square of the chessboard.' 

Netflix have got rid of their annual appraisal system. So have Google, Accenture, Microsoft, Gap and Expedia. Of course they’re not abandoning performance management, just moving to different forms of appraising performance, in a more regular lighter touch way. 

Heffernan’s advice to make your organisation perform better? Look out for the helpful people. Studies show they bring the highest 'social capital’ to the organisation.That means helpfulness, resilience, trust and generosity. Why do you need that, when there are targets to be hit? In short, there will always be a project where you hit moments of abject horror, “arghh!! it’s all going wrong!” - your Valley of Despair. And if you’re not having those moments, you’re probably not tackling the right problems. To climb out of that Valley, you need help. And Helpful People learn a lot, are great at connecting the dots and like to give back. They’re the ones who’ll think “Who’s the most useful person I could introduce this person to?”. Or say, “Forget it for a while, let’s go and get some fresh air”. 

She also thought the UK Friday after work pub session was a good thing, and missed it when she moved back to the US (and tried to replicate it). Similar reasons: in the new-style organisations where people need to stop acting as individuals and collaborate more, you need more rich conversations. You’ll get more of those rich conversations in the pub on Friday than sitting at your desk.

And she finished by saying that as we move from very hierarchical, mechanistic organisations to far more organic ones, companies will get smaller. With a two year horizon the maximum timescale an organisation can have any certainty on its future (given speed of technological change, demographics etc.) our current structures are way too rigid. We may also need different skills in 2 years’ time, so will the people we rate highly now be the ones we need in the future? 

As a Guardian journo and photographer gathered info and pics for an article, I learnt why they painted the wall olive green (to make the paintings stand out more, and the room feel more intimate) and why it’s unusual to line up frames like a pyramid (normally it’s inverted). 

Here’s one simple description of an immersive environment - ‘a place where people become so absorbed, they lose track of time.’ (Warren Berger, Glimmer) 

It seems to be even harder to evoke that sense of drifting in time at visitor attractions. The moodiest, most evocative place I’ve been to in the last decade is probably Culloden near Inverness, site of the last Jacobite battle 250 years ago where backers of the British government fought Jacobite sympathisers, pitching highland clan against highland clan. The driving rain on the day I visited helped no doubt, dark clouds casting a shadow over the moor and doing more to evoke the bloodshed in that hour of battle than even the impressive surround screen show in the visitor centre.

Since then, very little. Kensington Palace’s Enchanted Palace was incredibly beautiful in places, tried too hard in others but when it worked, it was magical (such as in the Room of Tears and the long gallery below).

A recent visit to Bletchley Park, an hour outside of London, was a case in point. Home to the Codebreakers and experiencing a bumper year after the Cumberbatch effect (the film of Alan Turing’s life, The Imitation Game, made big box office and won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay) it’s a curiously soulless visit. Despite an £8M lottery-backed investment, you can see some of the internal wrangles are unfortunately playing out into the visitor experience. 

It can’t be easy - but when you’ve invested that much (public) money, you need to get the basics right. Why the hell is there a cafe selling Costa Coffee just after you've paid for your ticket - where's the spirit of place in that? And surely a bit more theatricality in the ticket selling itself would be appropriate here - why not warn every visitor of the Official Secrets Act and confiscate their phones?

To create immersion, you’ve got to suppress any intrusions that don’t belong in that world - or find a way to build them into the story. My five years as a cast member at the Paris Disneyland park taught me a lot about holding that line between ‘on stage’ and ‘backstage’, helped by walking past the enormous costuming centre every day on the way to lunch. When you see the effort made by those designers to absorb visitors into alternate worlds, you don’t want to be the one breaking the illusion. So I still checked my name badge every time in the mirrors provided in the gates between backstage and the park - even though I wasn’t dressed as Goofy or a cowboy (well I did Goofy once - it's hot in that suit).

Back to Bletchley: they’ve got authentic stories that Disney would kill for, and another useful tool in creating mood - contrasts. Plain wooden nondescript huts hiding state secrets; maths boffins working alongside decorated officers; the normality of romantic walks around the Bletchley lake whilst beyond the fence a savage war rages. These contrasts are only partially brought out, more’s the shame. 

The newly interpreted huts, reopened to give a sense of how they might have felt back when the site was host to chess champions, maths geniuses and skilled engineers all contributing their bit to the war effort - add some sense of place and time, but it’s all a bit disjointed. 

Ironically, the one place it really clicked for me was somewhere no money had been lavished. A lane at the edge of the site ending in a tall wrought iron gate, uncut grass on either side. A simple brick sentry hut, unpainted and abandoned. The glimpse of a cemetery through the railing. And a simple interpretation board telling the story of this Back Gate - where Bletchley’s despatch riders rode out in all weathers to deliver the messages decrypted by Turing and his fellow Codebreakers. The riders were ignorant of the value of those little packages, with strict orders not to stop on their journey until they handed over their precious cargo to its intended recipient. You felt that heavy cloak of secrecy, could overhear the revving of the Nortons coming and going at the gate, sense the camaraderie of the riders and in parallel the isolation of their missions.

Solid advice. I enter museums vaguely quite often, just to remind myself how much I still don’t know. As I did recently at the Wellcome Collection, the self-styled “free destination for the incurably curious." 

After a £17.5M development, it’s really upped its game. I used to struggle with its attempts to connect medicine, life and art - it all felt a bit forced and a bit, well, worthy. Now it’s a compelling place to return again and again. It also has a wonderful bookshop you too can dip into, and an equally wonderfully revamped reading room upstairs. 

Inspired, I bought a great book on being curious by Ian Leslie and read it, surprise surprise, in the reading room. He recounts how Curiosity has had a hard time throughout the ages. It started well in ancient Greece, where Aristotle believed you should investigate the world just because ‘it was interesting’, not for any utilitarian end. The Romans saw the world similarly: Cicero called curiosity the  “passion for knowing”.

Then the Catholic Church got involved: Saint Augustine saw three problems with curiosity: 1) it was pointless - desiring to know only for the sake of knowing; 2) it was perverted - it waylaid the mind just as lust did and 3) it was prideful - man’s desire to seek what was hidden from him being “an arrogant usurpation of divine authority”. 

Fast forward to the 15th and 16th centuries, birth of the Renaissance, and Curiosity makes a comeback in the hands of Da Vinci and Galileo, backed by the powerful Medicis. In the 17th century, ruling classes show off their desire for knowledge (see the fashion for Cabinets of Curiosities) with the biggest leg up given by the invention of the printing press. Suddenly, knowledge was Out There (if you were educated/had the means). 

Fast forward again,  and you get empathic curiosity through literature (Shakespeare giving you an insight into the minds of kings and queens) and in the 18th century the novel arrives. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe excites huge popular hunger for learning about the lives of others. 

Back to the Wellcome, and whilst the Institute of Sexology was interesting, I preferred the classy "Henry Wellcome: Medicine Man” permanent exhibition. 

Refreshingly, they treat you like an adult - you can help yourself to a free audio tour wand at the entrance and are trusted to return it (no bored student-on-a-placement handing over what I can only imagine they think is exotic alien technology, like you’ve never seen an iPhone or a TV remote control before, saying patronisingly  “It’s this button for English, and this one here to pause it. Here’s the volume switch. Do you understand?”). 

The walls and cabinets of the whole exhibition are set in polished fake mahogany, I guess to reflect a Victorian gentleman’s club. Even the fire extinguisher is elegantly hidden behind a wood panel so as not to disturb the smooth lines. You’re invited to open those panels to read the intro text, hear snippets of description by pulling open drawers (the sound cleverly coming from directional speakers overhead, so it doesn’t disrupt anyone else’s visit) and peruse books off the shelf. Not wildly innovative, but classily executed and it responds to our innate need to peek around and make random associations.

So curiosity sated for the moment, I returned to Leslie’s book and his summation that “Curiosity is a life force”. 

Towards the end of his fascinating journey through past and current thinking on curiosity, he highlights a beautifully written passage by T.H. White from The Once and Future King, an apt reason to keep visiting museums, reading books, talking to people and staying curious: 

Whilst the delicately scented white flowers are no longer grown here, the cultivation of Rose Centifolia and Jasmine Grandiflorum is beginning to flourish again in the area just as it did 70 years ago. A 5 minute stroll around the corner from where we stay in Plascassier is the Domaine de Manon, a family-run business that grows jasmine and the May rose exclusively for Dior, notably its J’adore perfume. On an informative guided visit to this, one of seven producers in the area, it got me thinking that a great tour is a microcosm of the best visitor experience packaged into an hour - whereas a bad one quickly leaves you wondering what’s for lunch...

Some of the key elements from all the best tours I’ve been on - from champagne and stout to historic houses , WWII tunnels and black cab tours of former troublespots, were present at Carole’s tour here in Grasse:

Your guide has a personal stake in or first hand experience of the stories they relate to you - Carole now runs the business set up by her grandparents in the 1930s

Born storytellers tell, unsurprisingly, the best stories 

Check your audience - don't assume they all start from the same level of knowledge (I couldn't tell you the ingredients of your average perfume)

Use all the senses available to you (see, touch and smell the jasmine; savour that Guinness, hear the sound of water underground)

Include some making or doing (we all got to pick the jasmine flowers, which must be done between first light and 11am to protect the scent)

Divulge some juicy gossip or trade secrets! (Dior executives are an interesting bunch, it seems)

Keep it moving (but allow some time to absorb, admire views and rest)

Finish on a high - we had a tasting of rose, jasmine and bitter orange marmelade

Imagine yourself in a locked room with your similarly clueless friends. A screen above you silently counts down your mission time, an hour, gone all too quickly, ratcheting up the pressure as you frantically glance around wondering where the hell to start. Your mission, entrusted to you by the mysterious Mr Q - destroy the satellite that Professor Blacksheep, Q’s nemesis, has targeted at Earth. And get out of the room (or rooms), faster than the other team by using the clues hidden around to unlock additional challenges. 

It’s a bleak, characterless space, devoid of much colour. Just a few items of beat up furniture, old magazines, some scratchy images of Professor Blacksheep staring down at you from the walls, and padlocks. Lots of those damn padlocks, on boxes, chests, doorways, hidden compartments..but that all adds to the atmosphere as you overturn chairs, plug in wires, break plastic globes (ok that was just me, getting a bit excited) trying desperately to find more keys, combinations and codes to keep you moving towards the target.

It’s all wonderfully - deceptively - simple, the kind of hands on, team experience that makes you stop and think “why the hell didn’t I come up with this?!” A bit of technology - not much, just the cameras in each room with which your guide nudges you with timely clues from the central control room - instead mostly relying on effective storytelling and ingenious puzzles. 

If you haven’t tried it, give it a go. It’s refreshingly different, gives your cerebral cortex an analog kick  and is a cracking example of new world meets old. There are a number in London and in most cities across the UK and worldwide.

Professor Blacksheep is waiting for you. 

The former in Dublin is a really slick operation: costing over £45M to set up, it now attracts over 1M visitors a year and plays a central role in Dublin’s tourist offer. And curious fact (but important for Diageo, Guinness’ owners): over 20% of visitors taste their first pint of the black stuff here. Here’s another one while we're on a roll - it apparently takes 2 pints to convert you to the taste, and a third of the Storehouse visitors get to pour their own Guinness while touring round. Great customer service, good mix of technology and participation - no wonder it’s a success.

But this blog’s about simple experiences that deliver superbly. The power of first person storytelling to do all that in spades is nowhere better evidenced than on this cab tour. 

The 30 year Troubles, bookended by a civil rights march in Londonderry in October 1968 and culminating in the Good Friday peace agreement in 1998, cost an estimated 3,600 lives and 50,000 maimed or injured (source: BBC). 

On this tour, Brendan, our cab driver, a Catholic local yet admirably neutral in his recounting of the major events of the time, took us to either side of the conflict lines. Naively, I was shocked to see the communities were still physically demarcated by so-called peace walls, and the brightly coloured murals, whilst a fascinating reminder of individuals still held aloft by their respective sides as heros (above, Bobby Sands, the hunger striker and MP), also naggingly felt like an open sore still visible 17 years on. 

Here’s Curators Coffee Studio in Cullum Street EC3 where the coffee’s the star but the machine’s not far behind: this teale coloured monster is a La Marzocco ‘Strada’ apparently. Like many others, CCS host coffee tasting sessions on Sundays, host art exhibitions, curate weird and wonderful types of coffee (magic mushroom anyone?) and run classes to brew your own caffeine experience. Looks like everyone’s a curator these days.