Redefining The Future of Flying

Exciting times: Elon Musk has officiaĺy introduced Tesla, the first electric airplane. We can now more clearly envision the future of flying and also challenges ahead to make it possible. 

https://youtu.be/VhUr--1dPWM?si=-tHWol1egQneqF9c

Can Dreams Ever Become Reality?

 

Sometimes Time Doesn't Fly

Visiting the Air Transport IT Summit was a great experience! The two day event was well organised, with lots of opportunities to meet the IT, airline, and airport executives from around the world, and exchange experiences and views about the future impact of information technology on the improvements in airline operational and cost efficiency.

The majority of speakers focused on innovative solution aimed at functional enhancements in airline operations, passenger services and aircraft emission management (mobile applications, SITA's Aircraft Emissions Manager), with too little time left to cover a wider role of technology in tackling some of the hottest industry issues like quick cost reduction and business simplification. Apart from rhetoric about the need for process simplification and further cost saving heard from several speakers, little was mentioned about the absence of management tools needed to achieve these goals.

Many airlines are struggling to get a basic understanding about where and why the organisation is losing money and what can be done about it. Leaders are left without multidimensional view of their business, essential for strategic as well as for the ongoing decision making. Current Enterprise Information Systems designed to provide this information continue to be a major headache for airline leaders, mainly because they are costly, take great deal of time to implement and then become legacy from the day they go live. In general, things like poorly designed information systems, or unanticipated difficulties in creation of common IT systems following the airline mergers are usually hidden loss generators that cannot be easily identified and eliminated. Useful insights about some of these issues and future IT trends could be found in the latest Airline Business / SITA Airline IT Trends Survey launched during the Summit.

I may have expected too much from the event, but still feel a bit disappointed that such a rare cross-industry gathering hasn’t been better used as a launch-pad for innovative IT solutions related to system, and not just functional improvements.

If you want to know what several of the key speakers said about the Summit, here is the video interview.

I will be occasionally blogging about the impact of various IT issues on airline operational disruptiveness and cost efficiency.

_________________________________________________________________

It makes me said to say that I published this article in July 2009😔

Are we frozen in time? 

It's time to reshape our conceptual mapping

We often accept routines without questioning them, even when they lead to failures.

Instead of figuring out the real causes of failures and learning form them, we exhaust ourselves in efforts to keep our organisation at the edge of failure, even calling it success. 

Profits are not necessarily signs of success of the core business, nor of its sustainability.

It is the high time to rethink our mapping system.

Honoured to be among the top 50 global thought leaders and influencers on IT Strategy for 2024. Thanks Thinkers360!

Planning: From Assumptions Through Disruptions To Validated Learning

 

Assumptions based on records from previous year(s)

Assumptions based on records from previous season(s)

Assumptions based on factors that may influence the performance in the next year

Assumptions about costs

Assumption about revenue

Assumptions about profit

Assumptions about passenger numbers

Assumptions about weather

Assumptions about….

Too many assumptions lead to too many disruptions. We tend to make company's plans look smoother and prettier, always including our desires to do things better. They last up until the company undergo the test of reality. This is the time when wrong assumptions become visible, leading to bumpier road ahead and to less control over the outcomes expressed through cost, profit, and other performance metrics. 

Majority of airlines miss this unique opportunity for learning. The road of lean airlines with simple business models is less bumpy as they can have an easier access to reality and learn about what works and what doesn't work for them. Traditional airlines, however, are more heavy - trapped in once successful but now hard to control business model accompanied with rising complexities. This makes them more and more susceptible to unexpected losses caused by even the smallest challenge.

Can we reduce number of assumptions and flatten the road ahead?

Yes we can, if embrace the practice of validated learning and:

Start thinking outside of boxed practices

Become open to learning on the go, not only from the past 

Start testing assumptions in organised way focusing on biggest diversions from flat lines created during the planning processes

Validated learning is invaluable tool for achieving resilient performance in the age of uncertainty - something that no business school or business course can teach you. 

One of the year's Most Ppopular Articles From Thinkers360 Thought Leaders 2023

Related posts/Slideshare:

Managing Costs We Don't Understand

The planning crises

How plans can go wrong

It's Time To Rethink The Airline Pricing Mechanism

Traditional airline pricing is mostly associated with stationary class differentiation based mainly on seat comfort, availability of food service, baggage allowances, or flight rescheduling. 

They don’t take into account the growing disruptiveness of air travel, especially at busiest airports. Just because it goes beyond algorithms.

Today, even the highest-fare passengers experience long delays, lose connections, queue at various stages of their journey, spend time and extra money while waiting for the departure of their delayed flight, or have to rearrange their travel. Often, they are not prioritised as expected, and getting help during and after flight cancellations is not guaranteed.  

And, with usually high load factors, chances to rebook to the next flight are becoming slimmer. 

While insurance policies may absorb some of the costs of poor experience, they cannot compensate for the frustration, stress, anger, and other kinds of emotions of fragile, robust, and even antifragile passengers associated with unexpectedly long and poorly handled interruptions to their journeys.  

Disruptions are a classless experience. There will be much more of them in the foreseeable future considering the state of the industry and how airlines are organised and managed. 

Isn’t it time to rethink the pricing policies and introduce more flexibility in passenger choices when their travel plans are significantly changed against their will?  

These could be things like: you pay a bit more for making sure that flight delays longer than xx hours will be automatically processed (rather than entering a messy procedure for compensation claims with uncertain outcome). 

Or, what about an option to stay longer in a city in which you experienced flight cancellation and reschedule your flight to a day and time that suits both you and the airline. 

Or, why not offering a discount to passengers that are flexible about their return date or even airport and be in a win-win situation. 

There are many more options that, apart from reducing the amount of stress and getting some more space for other passengers at critical times airlines can get more return passengers and count on their loyalty. A great way to  boost revenue.

The question is, can a combination of human-computer intelligence speed up this process? 

The airport lesson

Passengers love flying, but they dislike airports, something that neither airports nor airlines want to see as a business and human problem.

Ten years on and the following Seth Godin's blog 'Eleven things organizations can learn from airports' is more relevant than ever:

'I realized that I don’t dislike flying - I dislike airports. There are so many things we can learn from what they do wrong:

1.    No one is in charge. The airport doesn't appear to have a CEO, and if it does, you never see her, hear about her or interact with her in any way. When the person at the top doesn't care, it filters down.

2.    Problems persist because organizations defend their turf instead of embrace the problem. The TSA blames the facilities people, who blame someone else, and around and around. Only when the user’s problem is the driver of behavior (as opposed to maintaining power or the status quo) things change.

3.    The food is aimed squarely at the (disappearing) middle of the market. People who like steamed meat and bags of chips never have a problem finding something to eat at an airport. Apparently, profit-maximizing vendors haven’t realized that we’re all a lot weirder than we used to be.

4.    Like colleges, airports see customers as powerless transients. Hey, you’re going to be gone tomorrow, but they’ll still be here.

5.    By removing slack, airlines create failure. In order to increase profit, airlines work hard to get the maximum number of flights out of each plane, each day. As a result, there are no spares, no downtime and no resilience. By assuming that their customer base prefers to save money, not anxiety, they create an anxiety-filled system.

6.    The TSA is ruled by superstition, not fact. They act without data and put on a quite serious but ultimately useless bit of theater. Ten years later, the theater is now becoming an entrenched status quo, one that gets ever worse.

7.    The ad hoc is forbidden. Imagine an airplane employee bringing in an extension cord and a power strip to deal with the daily occurrence of travelers hunched in the corner around a single outlet. Impossible. There is a bias toward permanent and improved, not quick and effective.

8.    Everyone is treated the same. Effective organizations treat different people differently. While there’s some window dressing at the edges (I’m thinking of slightly faster first class lines and slightly more convenient motorized cars for seniors), in general, airports insist that the one size they’ve chosen to offer fit all.

9.    There are plenty of potential bad surprises, but no good ones. You can have a flight be cancelled, be strip searched or even go to the wrong airport. But all possibility for delight has been removed. It wouldn’t take much to completely transform the experience from a chore to a delight.

10. They are sterile. Everyone who passes through leaves no trace, every morning starts anew. There are no connections between people, either fellow passengers or the staff. No one says, “welcome back,” and that’s honest, because no one feels particularly welcome.

11. No one is having any fun. Most people who work at airports have precisely the same demeanor as people who work at a cemetery. The system has become so industrialized that personal expression is apparently forbidden.

As we see at many organizations that end up like this, the airport mistakes its market domination for a you-have-no-choice monopoly (we do have a choice, we stay home). And in pursuit of reliable, predictable outcomes, these organizations dehumanize everything, pretending it will increase profits, when it actually does exactly the opposite.'

Obviously, this is more about human exprience hidden behind numbers! Technology advancements are there reminding us that it is possible to make progress by combining them with human intelligence and core values. 

The thing is that this requires leaders on all sides to have mind open to making the seamingly impossible possible, to move from concepts to reality. 

Are we anywhere near to see it happening in comming years?

(A true story: Beyond Heathrow Disruptions)

Some Ways to Dance with Complexity

The main reason why leaders of complex and dynamic organisations find it hard to make decisions that benefit the system is the linear vision of nonlinear reality. Or, as Seth Godin explains, misunderstanding the difference between complicated and complex problems they are faced with, often ending up with actions that lead to unexplainable losses. Once this distinction is understood, the key is learning to dance with the complex.

‘Complicated problems have a solution, and the solution can often be found by breaking the complicated portions into smaller pieces. And complicated problems often have an emotional component, because there are parts of the problem we don’t want to look at closely, or deal with personally.’

‘Complex problems aren’t actually problems at all. They are non-determinate systems, systems that change based on how we engage with them. Push on one part of a complex problem and a different part will change the system

But this is very different from a complex problem. When facing a complex problem, it helps to embrace the fact that we’re dealing with a system that shifts over time. One where the rules and the solutions evolve in non-predictable ways.

Some ways to dance with the complex:

- Name it. If you and the team understand you’re dealing with a system, you won’t fall into the trap of treating this the way you treat other problems. We can’t fix systems until we see them.

- Blaming the complex for your little piece of the problem isn’t really helpful. Instead, we can choose to sign up to work on the entire problem, not just a symptom.

- Don’t turn away. We’re hesitant to sign up to deal with problems that seem difficult to solve. And yet, as our world becomes ever more connected, this is precisely what we’re called on to do.

- One way forward is to isolate part of the system if you can and turn that part into a complicated problem that we can figure out how to solve. And then learn, evolve and repeat.’

Airlines can and should do better

Airlines can and should do better in measuring their operational performance including costs, on-time performance, and true value of pricing (linked with passenger experience).  

Together with industry reporters (KPI producers) many have mastered the art of deluding the outside world (and themselves) with widely accepted performance measures that say nothing about their company's internal turbulences and business threats destined to emerge at a later stage. The later stage always comes as a surprise, allowing the blame to be shifted to external events or steer internal conflicts, thus allowing problems to accumulate.

 

Those who truly wish to get a good insight into their business can do so without much effort and huge investments. Measuring and tracking system inefficiencies is a great way to identify, address, and heal deeply hidden wounds across the networked organisation. 

Starting with visible systemic problems such as high impact disruption events and getting to know their underlying causes is the best way to initiate the process of healing. Depending on the kind of disease and its stage, this process could sometimes take time, be even painful, but can save lives.

 

It is up to us to decide whether we want to remain prisoners of the past or to pioneer the future.

Don’t fear uncertainty! It drives innovation.

 

The Role of Technology In Simplifying Business Complexity - The Key To Understanding How The Work Works And Improving The Way We Communicate And Make Decisions

If you haven't already had the chance to listen to Yves Morieux’s talk about how to simplify complexity, now is the perfect time to do so. In his dynamic and motivational talk, Yves, the Director of BCG's Institute for Organization, discusses the concept of "smart simplicity" – a crucial approach for reimagining how we communicate and make decisions.

Here are some highlights:

- People feel so miserable and disengaged at work because today's businesses are increasingly and dizzyingly complex -- and traditional pillars of management are obsolete. 

- What happens is that it is left to individual employees to navigate the rabbit's warren of interdependencies.    

- When there are too many layers people are too far from the action, therefore they need KPIs, metrics, they need poor proxies for reality. They don't understand reality and they add the complicatedness of metrics. 

-  Create direct feedback loops that impel people to do their own work today in a way that also contributes to the satisfaction of performance requirements that matter in the future. 

- Now, in front of the new complexity of business, the only solution is not drawing boxes with reporting lines. It is basically the interplay. How the parts work together. The connections, the interactions, the synapses. It is not the skeleton of boxes - it is the nervous system of adaptiveness and intelligence.

- The real battle is not against competitors. This is very abstract. Where do we meet competitors to fight them? The real battle is against ourselves, against our bureaucracy, our complicatedness.

So what can be done to overcome this traditional way of thinking about work? The following are some of the key rules Yves suggests us to follow to manage complexity without getting complicated: 

- Understand what others do. What is their real work? We need to go beyond the boxes, the job descriptions, beyond the surface of the container, to understand the real content.

- Reinforce integrators. Integrators are not middle offices, they are managers, existing managers that you reinforce so that they have power and interest to make others cooperate. How can you reinforce your managers as integrators? By removing layers.

-  Create direct feedback loops that impel people to do their own work today in a way that also contributes to the satisfaction of performance requirements that matter in the future. 

The question is how to make these concepts actionable so that managers in any organisation can deal with day-to-day challenges?

So far, most efforts and some successes appeared to be short lived. The problem is that companies usually start doing it well, but after a while they stop because they think that change is a one-off event. It is because we think about change in terms of structure. But beyond the structure you have the normal system that needs to be continuously nurtured by cooperation. 

Turning these general ideas into practical actions is challenging. Since all performance problems arise from people's actions, both systemic and individual decisions, and interactions, they form the basis for solving organisational issues, from innovation and growth to organisational culture. This kind of information needs to be visualized to be understood better in a wider, relational context.

For this to work, we need technology companies to do more than just offer specialized software for specific functions. They should provide connective technology that simplifies the complexity of interactions, makes them transparent, and supports integrative decision-making.

This highlights the need for stronger connections between airlines and technology companies. The current view of technology is focused on serving individual functions. Here, the technology company doesn’t just sell the product, the software, but service. To make the most of technology, experts on both sides need to collaborate as long as necessary to ensure this new integrated process succeeds.

It comes down to the tried and tested triangle of people, processes, and technology – one is not optimised without the other two. Without the right processes in place, the technology won’t function. When combined effectively, both lead to new way of thinking and chances to spot new opportunities.

How do these overarching concepts relate to the intricate challenges that airlines face on a daily basis, especially when they lack the support of connective techniques and tools? Let's draw inspiration from the points discussed in my article ‘Cutting Through Complexity: A Practical Guide for Connected Decision-Making’

Cutting Through Complexity: A Practical Guide for Connected Decision-Making

If we are to point to the most critical problem airlines are facing today, it would be capability to align strategy with operational reality. This topic regularly comes up in conversations with airline leaders. More concretely, it is about the growing gap in communication between leaders responsible for creating strategy, and people responsible for its implementation. Without a shared understanding of the complexities that arise from interactions between data, people, and processes across the organisation, leaders cannot reach the crucial stage of connected decision-making.  

Over time, I have realised that explaining the problems this complexity creates, and ways to tackle it, is best done through experiential real-life examples, scenarios that airlines of all kinds commonly face and find easy to understand.

 

So in this article let’s first deconstruct the complexity of cross-functional interactions behind a disruption event. We will start with a seemingly simple real-life event, where the cause of disruption was reported as a scheduling error and dig deeper. 

Learning from disruption events

 

A fast-growing airline was experiencing a high and growing number of operational disruptions. Senior executives were keen to do whatever it took to reduce the number of operational changes, which were seen as contributing to already significant losses. The management team decided to carry out a pilot project, to thoroughly examine three days of disruptions caused by a single reported cause. 

 

They wanted to know how much this event cost the airline, how many passengers were affected, and the underlying causes of problems hidden behind codes published in delay reports.  

 

The following real-life example illustrates the scope of the disruption related problems, starting with identifying the cost and consequences of changes in planned operations and their impact on passengers. From there, the focus shifts to the underlying causes up to strategic levels, all as a part of a Systemic Reality Check, the process that will be described later in more detail.  
 

At the beginning of the winter schedule, several aircraft were pulled out of service by the maintenance department due to a scheduling oversight, without notice. The overview of direct consequences shown here is based on data collected from various sources inside the airline. 

 

Bringing together the data and information relevant to this event required a good understanding of cost structuring and their sources located in different parts of the organisation: some were duplicated, some didn’t match, some were inaccurate, some stored in local spreadsheets and some in local software. It took quite a time to make sense of these data, but along the way it was a great opportunity to learn about what the disconnect of cost data really means. 

Collecting data related to passengers experiencing disruptions was an additional challenge, as was the information about subchartered aircraft. This said, a lot about the quality of cost data used to make decisions at all levels can be questioned, in particular those related to strategic choices. Similar applies to sources of revenue inputs.

 

The following is a high-level summary of relevant data collected during the initial phase of disruption diagnostics.

The question was: what actions could be taken after examining data of this kind to reduce costs and improve passenger experience? All too often, efforts to that end result in individuals defending their decisions and positions, blaming other people or situations. By doing this, whatever our position, we contribute to new complexities and potentially more losses that, on occasion, lead to more pay cuts, more layoffs, and more losses. 

 

To understand what caused most of the problems we had to dig beyond data to identify patterns that led to disruption events, things that algorithms alone cannot provide. This was done by talking to people involved directly or indirectly. 

 

Communication and cultural issues      

-Lack of experienced professionals created gaps in communication even at management levels. In the case of the example event, a newly hired scheduling manager was left to make decisions without sufficient support and supervision.  

-Communication links, particularly between the Scheduling, Operations, and Maintenance departments, proved ineffective.  

-The Operations Department has been granted authority to make decisions without clear guidelines on commercial priorities. Responsibilities were not well defined, leading to confusion about who was responsible for what and how their decisions affected other processes. 

-Inexperienced staff often resorted to trial-and-error approaches when solving ongoing problems.  

-A blame culture hindered the resolution of many issues, as serious problems were not openly discussed with management.  

-Management reporting system did not provide sufficient information related to costly operational issues that needed wider attention.  

   

Network and fleet planning 

Over-optimistic growth and high fleet utilisation aimed at ensuring high aircraft productivity created lots of operational problems and consequently poor passenger experience. 

 

Scheduling issues    

The event highlighted problems at several airports, such as short turn times, late arrivals at airports with night curfews, and inappropriate block times. For example, problems with turnaround times on inbound flights from a major airport resulted in extremely low punctuality of 46% with cascading effects on other flights, compared with 76% on outbound sectors.  

    

Operations Control Centre (OCC)     

-Operations managers lacked awareness of commercial and other relevant priorities, which led them to set their own rules for schedule recovery. The recovery list prioritised flight cancellation as an option for delays longer than four hours. Depending on circumstances, it would also justify aircraft rentals. However, because of concerns about the high cost that may be incurred, these policies were not consistently applied. Decisions were made with hesitation, and by the time a problem was resolved, new problems would arise, exacerbating the situation. 

-Numerous errors were spotted in various areas of operations and schedule planning. For instance, many crew changes happened due to the input errors and omissions made during frequent schedule changes. Additionally, the accuracy of movement messages was questionable. Much of the information about delay reasons crucial for actionable feedback was missing, more than half of reported reasons were labelled as reactionary.  

-A lack of discipline in filling out voyage reports prevented access to useful insights and affected the quality of operational information. In complex operational situations, the Operations Control Centre (OCC) expected instructions from higher-level authorities, while the higher-level authorities expected recommendations from the OCC. These unresolved issues created additional pressure on operations controllers and contributed to unnecessary disruptions. 

-Communication within the OCC department was poor, with individuals often using emails for communication even within the same department. 

-Discussions aimed at resolving problems collectively were infrequent.  

-There were issues related to the exchange of information between 

Operations and Ground Services. The Ground Services team frequently complained about the lack of timely information related to disruptions from OCC resulting in delayed actions.  

 

Operational information

Delay reports were regularly distributed to top management, but contained only basic and often distorted aggregate data, excluding travel disruptions and their true root causes. Cancelled and diverted flights were not included, nor the number and costs of hired replacement aircraft. Operational data input was not supervised, resulting in inaccurate information and consequently poor decisions. 

    

Ground operations  

-The quality of service provided by third parties at outstations was poorly managed, lacking proper supervision and causing frequent inconvenience to passengers.

-There was a lack of control over third-party invoicing at outstations, including expenses for hotel accommodation, meals, and transportation during operational disruptions. These costs were fully managed by agents without any feedback to the airline. While a refund policy was defined, there were some implementation issues.  

-The procedures outlined in the ASP (Airline Services Procedures) Manual were not regularly updated, resulting in inconsistent services. Moreover, the ASP was not aligned with Conditions of Carriage Manual used by the Call Centre.  

-Managers were unaware of the extent of irregularities occurring at base airports and outstations, as well as their impact on passengers and costs.  

-Commercial priorities were not clearly specified, leading to confusion and inconsistent decision-making.  

-Communication with technical bases provided by third parties was sporadic and lacked sufficient supervision.   

    

Passenger experience   

-There was nothing to suggest the length of passenger journey and their experience following long delays and cancellations.  

-Passenger compensation claims were ignored or resolved with lengthy delays.  

 

Software issues 

- Available software was not used to its full potential. People were not fully trained which created additional problems during decision making.

 

Even though these insights may look unrelated at first, the more we look at them through the lens of leaders and specialists, the faster we will be able to grasp the T-shaped knowledge and skills and understand the system interdependencies crucial for ensuring a healthy growth.   

 

While this insightful but infrequently assembled perspective proved helpful in keeping people inspired to create informal cross-functional channels and improve internal relationships, the full benefits of the approach can only be realised through integrating it into daily practice, a topic we’ll examine next. 

 

Systemic Reality Check - a practical guide for connected decision-making

 

The integrative approach to collaborative decision-making best described as a Systemic Reality Check fosters a transparent work culture of giving and receiving consistent feedback. It promotes healthy communication among specialists, generalists, and people who lead them, and encourages collective actions across many boundaries to achieve a shared purpose. It ensures continuous, actionable feedback between strategy and operations, no matter the level of complexity. 

 

Systemic Reality Check inspires a shift in management attention: from looking at sum totals and averages of disconnected financial and operational data that only surface problem areas, to understanding the underlying causes of things that don’t work as expected. This is essential for assessing emerging problems and taking collective and timely actions to narrow the gap between what we wanted to achieve and what we can deliver, and so creating a growing community of loyal passengers. 

 

The five-step approach shown below lays the foundation for a more adaptable, resilient organisation, conscious of complexities and its own capabilities to sustain forthcoming challenges. It shifts perception of the purpose of planning and strategy, moving the focus leaning toward emergent, context-related problems. It elevates us above limitations imposed by organisational structures and management practices, engaging collective intelligence when making decisions that require constant adjustments in a continuously changing environment. 

This is the space where cross-functional issues and ambiguous information related to loss making disruptions are collectively discussed, coordinated and, whenever possible, resolved. This inspires creative dialogue that interrogates real problems, provokes learning, resolves tough issues, and promotes collaboration. It is the place to begin building a higher level of competence.  

Depending on the context, collaborative decision-making sessions can include executives, strategic, corporate, network, fleet, schedule, commercial, operations planners, and technology experts. It can also initiate constructive dialogues with airports, service suppliers, and regulators. These discussions lay the foundation for a new way of thinking, seeing problems from new perspectives, and opening new channels of informal communication that strengthen with time. This in turn develops the ability to anticipate problems before they happen, to see what is coming next and get ahead of it. The result is incremental improvement in areas that truly matter.  

Back to the real-life example described earlier. Running the regular sessions of Systemic Reality Check would have helped discover weaknesses in communication at early stages and initiated collective action to improve it. It would also have helped leaders and strategists to better align their expansion plans with airline capabilities to deliver what was expected. And if they were to decide to do what the airline proved unable to deliver, they would have known that they took a calculated risk against known benefits and could ensure that the negative impact of such decisions on customers, partners, and employees was minimal.

Once the Systemic Reality Check becomes embedded in daily practices it can be used to run scenarios covering different topics.

This approach is positive as it focuses on foresights based on relevant collective experiences that transcends organisational boundaries. It inspires open dialogues and questions the way forward. This changes the culture from separation and protection of departmental interests, to encouraging people to say what they really think. Here, there is no perfection. It is about surfacing problems before they manifest, doing things better each time, and spotting new opportunities for improvement and growth. 

Successful outcomes of these events depend on skilled integrators, people with multidisciplinary knowledge and diverse experiences, who are technology literate and able to move freely between operations and senior management, translating the requirements of each into a language and behaviour that is acceptable to, and understandable by the others. They organise these events, bringing people together around high impact disruption events caused by systemic issues.

The biggest challenge is to make discussions meaningful and avoid functional and personal biases. What helps with this is that the whole thing is not about who but what caused the system to underperform. Starting from indisputable facts and insights is important for avoiding generalisation and shallow judgements.

Each of these collaborative events results in a call to action presented in relational action maps where interdependencies between departments and flow of work become visible and easier to understand and revisit while measuring progress. This process can be described as an initial phase of transition towards a new breed of organisations where work flows naturally, and flaws are easy to notice and act upon at early stages. Running scenarios and looking for opportunities further amplifies the benefits of this process, paving the way toward a truly adaptive organisation.

The process of Systemic Reality Check inspires a culture of togetherness with clarity of shared purpose that cannot be replicated by competitors. The goal is to improve passenger experience at a competitive cost. In this way, we elevate the customer experience to a new level and reduce cost-increasing practices and so generate more revenue at lower cost. We map the way forward by leveraging the best of what human relationships and technology can offer.

The entire process is dependent on the use of the right technology. The innovative role of technology is to ease the access to information resulting from numerous interactions by visualising the results. Spotting the pain points in need of action, and monitoring progress in such a complex context are challenges beyond the capability of a single human mind. Current perception of the role of technology focuses on serving individual functions. Here, the technology company doesn’t just sell the product - the software - but service. To make the most of technology, experts on both sides need to work together for as long as necessary to make sure that this new integrative process works successfully. 

It’s time to embrace a fresh approach to decision making and elevate the airline's performance to new levels by cutting through complexity, reducing costs, and making flying a better experience.  

Let’s start building a connected airline. It is about pioneering a new era in airline management and decision making which is all about joint efforts.