Have you ever wondered why a sandwich made in front of you tastes better than an identical one from the fridge? It’s the same bread, the same cheese and quite possibly the same tired person behind the counter. The only difference is that you watched them make it. Behavioural scientists call this the labour illusion. We value things more when we can see the effort that went into them, even when the result is exactly the same. Most businesses do the opposite. They hide the work and send only the result, and we’re as guilty as anyone. Each of our courses takes months to make, and all you ever see is the finished thing. The best example I know comes from Houston’s airport, which had a steady stream of complaints about baggage-reclaim waits. It did the sensible thing and hired more handlers. The average wait fell to eight minutes, comfortably inside industry norms, and the complaints carried on regardless. When managers looked closer, they found passengers walked one minute from the gate and then stood at the carousel for seven. People hated the standing around. So the airport moved arrivals to gates further from the main terminal and sent the bags to the furthest carousel. Passengers now walked six times as far to collect their luggage, and the complaints dropped to almost nothing. (One of our learners, Prisha, made a lovely reel about it.) “Occupied time feels shorter than unoccupied time.” David Maister, The Psychology of Waiting Lines, 1985 Websites work the same way. Ryan Buell and Michael Norton at Harvard Business School built a mock travel site where one version showed flights instantly and the other made people wait while it listed the airlines it was searching. Same flights, same prices. People preferred the slow one, and happily sat through waits of up to 30 seconds as long as they could watch it work. Too much speed can even make people suspicious. When Wells Fargo tested logging in with an eye scan, it was so quick that customers didn’t believe it had worked, so the bank slowed it down. Braden Kowitz at Google Ventures tells a similar story about a loan app that approved people instantly, and nobody trusted the approval until the designers added a progress bar saying their credit was being checked. My favourite version involves a canteen. Buell and two colleagues put in a pair of iPads, one facing the kitchen and one facing the queue, so diners and cooks could see each other on a live video link. When diners could watch their food being made, they rated it higher. When the cooks could see the diners as well, the food was rated 22% better and came out 19% faster. Knowing who you’re cooking for, it turns out, makes you cook better. The one key takeaway Don’t just send the result. Tell people what it took to get there. How to use this In your work I suspect it happens in your world too. Two days of work goes out as one chart and the words “see attached”, and gets valued like ten minutes’ work. Guinness worked this out years ago. A proper pint takes about two minutes to pour, so rather than apologise for the wait, it built its advertising around it: “Good things come to those who wait”. One of those ads, Surfer, was voted the best ad of all time. You don’t need a Guinness budget to do the same thing. The easiest place to start is wherever a customer is waiting on you. Tell them what’s going on while they wait, even if it’s only “your order’s being packed” or “we’re checking three suppliers for you”. That’s all the slow travel site did. If there’s something you do more slowly than your competitors, whether it’s a longer onboarding, a hand-checked order or a second edit, stop hiding it and tell people why. That’s the Guinness move. And now and again, get the people who build your product or write your copy on a call with an actual customer. It worked for the cooks. Just make sure the work you show is real, a fake progress bar will quickly get found out. You don’t need to work harder for people to value what you do. The work’s already done. Let them see a little of it. Want to Delve deeper So, practising what we preach, here’s a bit of our own working. We recently rebuilt Social Media and Digital Marketing from top to bottom. We went through every lesson, every link and every case study and rewrote them for a world where AI is in everything. Digital Marketing now shows you how to get recommended by AI assistants, and how to prove your ads actually paid off. Social Media is all about standing out when AI can make anything. And both are a great deal more practical than they used to be.