This year, I delved into Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara, a restaurateur renowned for co-owning and operating acclaimed fine-dining establishments. Guidara champions a philosophy of exceeding expectations for guests, a concept he terms “unreasonable hospitality.” He asserts that genuine hospitality forges connection, and furthermore, that “every business can choose to be a hospitality business.”
Transcending industry boundaries, any company can embody hospitality by elevating ordinary transactions into extraordinary experiences.
We appreciate restaurant analogies for approaching life and business. Our team’s organization and workflow are inspired by Dan Charnas’ Work Clean, drawing from culinary principles. Unreasonable Hospitality has remained top-of-mind, prompting reflection on the intersection of hospitality, experiences, and systems.
Hospitality, Experiences, and the Role of Systems
What’s the first thing that you think of when you hear the word hospitality? Maybe it’s a hotel stay, a delicious meal, or a visit with friends. These are all experiences–sequences of moments where we are doing, seeing, and feeling things. Hospitality and experiences are about how we make people feel.
So what is it that makes an experience stand out? When it makes people feel seen, heard, and cared for. Whether that’s through listening intently, remembering details, or going out of your way to surprise and delight. Guidara notes, “people who are gifted at hospitality tend to be sensitive.” They are observant, generous, and care deeply. People who are skilled in those areas are adept at crafting exceptional experiences because of their ability to quickly tune in to how someone is feeling and because they care to make the experience better.
System Design as Experience Design
When you design a system, you are designing an experience.
In business, we have core processes (activities a customer is paying for) and support processes (activities a customer doesn’t see but that are necessary to support the core processes), and this philosophy applies to both. Guidara highlights in his book how crucial it is to consider the experiences of employees, too. If he wanted his team to prioritize how they made customers feel, he also had to be deeply invested in how he made his team feel.
When working in operations, you’re designing the experiences that both employees and clients/customers will have. Since a process generally represents an activity that will be repeated, whether it’s the check-out process a customer goes through when they buy your product, or the reporting process teammates execute at the end of a quarter, it makes sense to try to make it as enjoyable an experience as possible. Enjoyable can mean many things depending on the context of your business and whether the process is core or supporting; engaging, efficient, precise, personalized, error-free, well-documented, and generous are some words that come to mind.
When you are designing a new system, begin by setting an intention, defining not only what your desired outcome for the system is, but also how you intend folks participating in the system to feel.
Example of a support process:
- Desired outcome: To create an onboarding system for new employees.
- Intention for how employees will feel: Welcomed, supported, and confident they understand what is expected of them and what they can expect from us.
Example of a core process:
- Desired outcome: To create a system for receiving and responding to customer feedback.
- Intention for how customers will feel: Acknowledged, supported, and delighted.
Knowing both the desired outcome and the intention of the experience will help you design systems that are more people-centric and more likely to lead to repeat customers and engaged employees.
The Dreamweaver Role: Turning Inspiration into Action
Excellent experiences thrive on having systems in place that make them seamless to deliver. Amazing experiences are often the product of spontaneity and inspiration, but how do we execute that at scale?
By putting systems in place that empower your team, cultivate creativity, and make moments of inspiration easy to act on. In Unreasonable Hospitality, Guidara describes the roll of a Dreamweaver, a person whose entire job is to find ways to go above and beyond to surprise and delight people. In collaboration with other frontline employees—all whom are practicing deep listening and keen observation—this person notices the details about a customer and what they share, draws inspiration from that, and conceives and executes plans (some elaborate, some not) to somehow make their day.
Guidara emphasizes that, “the value of a gift isn’t about what went into giving it, but how the person receiving it feels.” The experiences you create (and the systems that back them up) don’t have to be lavish, but they need to be thoughtful.
How can you anticipate all the ways your team might be able to over-deliver to customers? You probably can’t. But, what you can do is build in thoughtful systems that take you to a point and make going-the-extra-mile a little bit easier. In the case of Guidara’s team, that meant having a Dreamweaver on staff and providing them an on-site “studio” full of supplies that they could use to make their magic happen.
For your team, it might look like clearly defined processes for sharing information between employees so that those in closest contact with customers can easily trade details back and forth. It might mean having certain resources on hand or contacts in your address book so it’s easy to drop a card in the mail or have a personalized gift delivered. It could be as simple as providing everyone on your customer support team a certain budget and clear parameters so they are empowered to make things right when a customer reaches out about a poor experience, without having to clear it with management.
There are many ways to surprise and delight folks, and it will all depend on the context of your business. Designing systems that enable creativity and caring and encourage your team to operate generously is a good place to start.
Implementing Hospitality Principles in Notion: Creating Exceptional User Experiences
The key to a well-functioning Notion workspace is a strong foundational system. Designing a system is akin to designing an experience. Whether you’re working solo or on a team, the way your workspace is designed will dictate the experience those using it will have.
When designing a new dashboard, ask yourself:
- What is the desired outcome?
- What is the intention for how people using this will feel?
One of Notion’s greatest strengths lies in its flexibility. If you know what you want to build and have an idea of what you want the user’s experience to be, the sky is really the limit to what you can create. However, that flexibility can be a blessing and a curse. If you jump into a build and haven’t clearly defined the outcome and experience, you might end up with a total mess.
Example of Putting This in Action in Notion:
One of my favorite use cases for Notion is team documentation.
- Desired outcome: Build a database of standard operating procedures (SOPs) that clearly state the steps to follow to execute all of our repeatable work.
- Intention: Team members feel empowered to take action, experience minimal context switching and distractions, and feel that executing the work is easy and enjoyable.
We have tweaked our documentation system over time. However, over the years, we have gotten increasingly clear about what we are creating, why we are creating it, and how we want the user experience to feel.
One of the major refinements we’ve implemented has been to make following the system as streamlined as possible. We started using more synced blocks and linked databases so that all the information and data required to execute a process was available on one page.
You can replicate this thoughtfulness across whatever tools you use to do your work, as long as you care to elevate the experiences of those around you.
Conclusion: Continuous Refinement for Unreasonable Hospitality
I’m going to end with this quote from Unreasonable Hospitality:
“Even if you’re proud of the way you do something, even if it seems integral to the way you do business, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t do it better: more elegantly, more efficiently, more creatively.”
– Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality
Whether you apply this philosophy to hospitality, systems, or the experiences they both create, there’s always room for refinement. The intention behind what you’re doing and the degree to which you can execute it in a way that goes above and beyond for your team and your customers will fluctuate. What will always make a difference is genuinely caring about what you create and how it inspires people to feel.
