I love being surprised. Not the skeleton-jumping-off-the-front-porch kind or spouse hiding behind doors kind. The bud vase and horse kind.
In 2001 I bought a Volkswagen Beetle, and immediately at the dealer, I noticed the little vase built right into the dashboard with two daisies in it. A flower vase… In a car. Nobody needed that. My husband hated it — he’d pull the flowers out and chuck them in the back seat, like he’d be ruined if anyone caught him driving around town with a bouquet of flowers on his dashboard. (He never wanted to drive my “chick car” even without them) I always put them right back.
Twenty-some years later I bought a Mustang Mach-E. All electric, so zippy and never needing gas! And one night, a week or so after I bought it, I walked toward it in a parking garage and two little horses came galloping across the concrete at my feet. The car projects them on the ground to greet you.
I gasped and marveled. Alone. In a parking garage.
Here’s what I can’t stop thinking about: both of those things are completely useless. The vase doesn’t make the car go. It takes up valuable dashboard real estate. The horses don’t charge the battery. Some human thought of them, and then somehow got them past a room full of engineers trying to ship a product on a deadline. Someone had to stand up and defend the horses. Someone had to justify a flower vase in a budget meeting. And they won.
At The Village, we’ve tucked these in all over the building on purpose. There are stickers in our bathroom stalls that make people laugh out loud — loud enough that whoever’s in the next stall wants to know what they’re missing. I have seen fun 404 error pages on websites that that evoke delight instead of frustration.
Above our main doors, there are signs that say “Dramatic Exit.” Some members take months to notice those signs. And when they finally do, they turn and laugh to one of our team members, telling us they love that.
That right there is the whole point. The magic isn’t the sign. It’s the telling.
A delightful surprise doesn’t just make someone smile. It makes them an insider. They found something. Nobody handed it to them in an onboarding email. And the first thing a person does when they feel like an insider is pull someone else in — “wait, have you seen this?” You cannot buy that. You can’t run an ad campaign that produces it. It only happens when a real human bothered to put something there for no reason other than to make a stranger’s day a little better.
Which brings me to what’s been rattling around in my head lately.
We’re all using AI now, and I’m not here to tell you to stop — I use it every single day and it has made me faster at things that used to eat my whole afternoon. But efficiency and delight pull in opposite directions. Efficiency asks, what can we cut? Delight asks, what can we add that nobody asked for? Those are not the same question, and only one of them gets asked in most meetings.
Right now AI is making a lot of websites, a lot of content, and a lot of businesses look exactly the same. Competent. Polished. Interchangeable. No horses on the pavement.
And it’s not just an AI problem. Any business that’s been around a while starts optimizing instead of surprising. The flower vase is the first thing cut when you’re busy. It’s the easiest thing in the world to justify cutting, because it does nothing. Except the one thing that matters.
So here’s my challenge to you this week. Sit down with your team and come up with one — just one — delightful surprise you can add to the experience of doing business with you. It doesn’t need a budget. It needs a human.
Be the person in the room who argues for the horses.
If you are in the Denver metro area, pop into The Village to experience for yourself little surprises and delights. Grab a day pass here.