We all remember that great holiday.
Decent sun, decent food and a licked up tan for when you go back home.
Mine was Egypt.
Great trip except for one thing the last week I had the an iffy tummy. I came back three stone lighter and whiter than the teeth you get from Turkey.
Mostly because I was absolutely drained, and spent most the week sat on a sun lounger in the shade next to the toilets. To top it all off my flight got delayed due to staff shortage.
Now years later, ask me how Egypt was?
I would say yeah it was nice, just swerve the shawarmas and avoid the budget airline.
Our brains are brilliant at cutting out noise.
All the days where nothing spectacular happened, where I wasn’t sprinting to a bathroom or touring the pyramids, become a blurred vagueness of nice.
Our brain remembers the peaks and the ends of an experience everything else gets filed under background noise
That’s the Peak-End Rule.
Most organisations design awesome starts, the welcome, the onboarding then when an employee leaves, we ignore them like Jehovah’s Witnesses at the front door.
The exit often looks like a standard templated exit interview, the laptop return and the pass hand-in.
But if the brain mainly holds onto peaks and endings, then the ending becomes the last opportunity to shape the memory and possible one of the most important experience every organisation looks over…
I could maybe even make an argument to say it more important than an onboarding in many ways.
Disney understands this better than anyone.
As you’re leaving the theme park exhausted, feet and ankles swollen like a pregnant woman on a nine hour flight, They engineer one final moment.
The photo.
Big Mickey ears, Bigger smiles all brightly coloured all aggressively joyful. Because months later they know you won’t remember the queues.
You’ll remember that image and how happy you all look and before you know it:
“…were Disneyland baby…again”
The tiredness gets pushed into the background and the memory gets rewritten by the peak and the ending.
This is how we should think about how we design the last day. The currency of every organisation is the story shared by their customers and employees.
The exit give you one last opportunity for the story to shared in a positive way
Cheers,
Danny
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