59 THE NO-NEWS GOOD NEWS

The world’s very first underground route opened on 9 January 1863. It ran for just six kilometers (nearly four miles) between Paddington (Bishop’s Road) and Farringdon Street in London.

Nowadays, there are 11 lines and over 250 stations, but despite being the first of its kind, London Underground – or as it is more commonly known, the Tube - had a very poor reputation for many years.

Trains were crammed, stations were shabby and strikes were felt to be all too regular for passengers’ liking. The Northern line was widely known as “the misery line”.

From the end of the 1980s things began to change, however. Many commentators point to three key factors that led to the change.

The first was the horror of the 1987 King’s Cross fire, in which 31 people died. It led to the Fennell Report and the realization that years of under-investment had been at the heart of the disaster.

The second came after the Labour party was elected in 1997, when then-chancellor Gordon Brown committed himself to funding the Underground through a Public-Private Partnership.

The third factor was that the Tube became a regular and important focus in the political battle to become Mayor of London. Nationally, railways have rarely if ever been a major electoral issue, but transport is the Mayor of London’s prime responsibility and the Underground is the most crucial – because most utilized – part of that.

All of this attention began to pay off.

In 1982, fewer than 2 million people a day had been using the Underground but by 2002 figures were up to more than 3.5 million. There were-upgrades on the Victoria and Metropolitan lines; the new electronic Oyster card made payments easier and faster; and many stations had been refurbished.

Yet despite all the improvements, satisfaction ratings were still poor, and users’ perceptions more negative than had been hoped.

So the situation remained until a fourth and almost unnoticed change came into play: the “no news, good news” announcements.

For many years, only two types of announcements were ever heard on the tube. The first were those for specific platforms: “The next train is approaching”; “This train is all stations to High Barnet”; and the more famous “Stand clear of the doors” and “Mind the gap”.

The other type of announcement was made station-wide, reporting problems on the network: “Severe delays on the Victoria line”; “Please check for delays at the weekend”; “No trains on the Circle line due to planned engineering works”; “Finchley Road station is closed”; “The 8.36 has been cancelled due to lack of drivers.”…Bad news announcements.

It was a consultant to London Underground who recognized that these messages were a problem. It wasn’t that London Underground shouldn’t be making this type of announcement; in fact, best practice in customer service suggests businesses should admit and communicate problems. No, the real problem was that all these bad news announcements weren’t offset with any good news.

The solution the consultant suggested was novel: to introduce “no news” announcements. He suggested London Underground give regular service updates even when there was nothing new to say; when everything was normal.

What these no-news announcements did was to demonstrate the reality of the situation; namely that for much of the time there really was no news, simply, “a good service operating on all London Underground lines”. In London Underground’s case, no news was in fact good news and deserved to be told.

Nowadays the London Underground network carries more than 1 billion passengers a year. That’s over 3 and a half million journeys made each day, and most passengers hear regular updates on the network. Of course there are still some problems, but nowadays a traveller on the Tube will regularly hear that “there is a good service operating on all London Underground Lines”.

By 2009, London Underground had some real news to announce – and that news was good. Passenger satisfaction ratings hit a new high with average scores reaching 79 out of 100 and the Tube had just been named Best Metro in Europe, beating off stiff competition from Paris, Madrid, Berlin and Copenhagen.

And the moral is that nothing bad happening can sometimes be as good as something good happening. What performances are you taking for granted?