Domino’s Pizza has long been renowned for its speedy delivery service, but in the past year or so they have been struggling to maintain customer loyalty. It seems that despite putting a lot of effort into streamlining their processes, they weren’t doing enough to meet customers’ needs. That’s why they brought in new CEO Don Meij to turn things around and start making some big changes. Meij’s strategy starts with understanding the problem from the customer’s perspective. He goes out on deliveries with one of their employees and sees the struggles that they face. In doing this, he can make the necessary improvements to improve the Domino’s experience. This is what Meij calls ‘think local, act global’.
A domino is a small rectangular block of wood or plastic, usually twice as long as it is wide. It has a black or white surface that is divided into squares by lines, called pips. These resemble the spots on a dice, and may be marked with numbers or blank. A domino has a value, typically indicated by the number of pips on its two sides, which ranges from six pips to none or blank. The most common variation on the game of domino is a two-player variant where each player draws seven tiles from a boneyard, which is a stack of unplayed dominoes. The players then place these dominoes on the edge of their table, and the value of each piece is determined by the corresponding positions on their opponents’ table.
Hevesh, who is a self-taught domino artist with a YouTube channel that has more than 2 million subscribers, often creates her mind-blowing installations by following a version of the engineering-design process. First, she considers what she wants her creation to accomplish and brainstorms images and words related to the theme. Then, she tests out different sections of the installation. By watching them in slow motion, she can make precise corrections if something doesn’t work as planned.
Once she’s confident that each section is working as she wants, she begins assembling them together. The largest 3-D sections go up first, and then Hevesh adds the flat arrangements that connect them to each other.
Domino art can be as simple or elaborate as you want it to be. You can build straight lines, curved lines, grids that form pictures when they fall, or even 3D structures like towers and pyramids. But no matter what you build, a key to success is finding the “domino effect,” a single action that can trigger a chain reaction. It’s the same principle that makes a ripple in a glass of water or a drop of ketchup cause an entire plate of fries to crumble. Hevesh’s domino effects can take several nail-biting minutes to finish, but it only takes one tiny nudge for the whole thing to come crashing down. And then you can start all over again.