A camp in Narok asked us to look at why their guests kept arriving at the same sighting as everyone else. They expected a routing problem. They had budgeted for one.
The problem was that four camps on the same track were leaving at the same minute. Nobody had ever written the departure times down. Each head guide decided at breakfast, and breakfast was at the same time everywhere.
We suggested a whiteboard in the guides' room with the next morning's departures on it, staggered in fifteen minute blocks, agreed with the two neighbouring camps over WhatsApp the night before.
It cost about two thousand shillings.
Six months later we went back and counted. Vehicles at the first sighting of the day had dropped from an average of four to an average of two. Guest reviews mentioning crowding went from eleven in the previous season to one.
We are not telling this story because a whiteboard fixes crowding. It does not. We are telling it because the operator had assumed the answer would be expensive, and that assumption had stopped them looking at the cheap end of the problem for three seasons.
Before you rebuild a product, check whether anyone has written down how it currently runs. Quite often nobody has.