Let's Talk Crewing, Its True Nature That Interacts With The Rest Of The Airline

Crewing has always been one of the most complex and consequential parts of airline operations. 

Together with fuel and maintenance it accounts for a major share of airline operating costs, and the decisions made in each area are deeply interconnected.

Technology has made crew planning increasingly sophisticated, helping airlines manage enormous numbers of rules, constraints and competing objectives. But optimisation within one area cannot, on its own, reveal the full consequences of the decisions being made.

A crew plan that looks efficient on paper may become expensive when exposed to operational reality. Tight connections, limited reserves, schedule changes, aircraft swaps, maintenance events and airport disruption can quickly turn planned efficiency into delay, cancellation, passenger disruption and lost revenue.

The problem is not necessarily the crew plan, nor the technology supporting it. It is our ability to understand what happens when crew decisions interact with the rest of the airline.

This is an issue I have explored for many years in my book and articles: the real cost of disruption rarely sits where the disruption is recorded.

Understanding these relationships and feeding what actually happens back into planning is becoming increasingly important as airlines depend more heavily on optimisation, automation and AI.

This is where a Systemic Reality Check can add another dimension: connecting technological intelligence with operational experience and the economic reality of the airline as a whole.

Systemic Reality Check: A Practical Guide To Connected Decision Making https://beyonddisruptions.blogspot.com/2023/07/cutting-through-complexity-practical.html?m=1

Intetested in a wider context? Visit astuteaviation.com

How predictable is the future of flying?

How are we doing with predictions these days? 😃 

Making Peace With Flight Disruptions 2

In 2014, I wrote an article about Southwest Airlines and Herb Kelleher titled Making Peace with Flight Disruptions.

It wasn't really about what Southwest did differently. It was about something much harder to copy: the leadership conditions that made people behave differently.

Competitors can copy processes, procedures, technology and even business models. What they cannot easily copy is a tone - a culture built over time on trust, cooperation and the freedom of people to do the right thing when things go wrong, and to do it in synchrony. These days it is more important than ever.

Here is the original text of the article:

Yes, flight disruptions are an inevitable, often unpleasant part of air travel and we are going to see more of them in future. But that doesn't mean that they always have to be associated with feelings of helplessness and resentment on passengers’ side. Even the worst disruptions could be made tolerable if handled by people who care, who tirelessly work to soften these unpleasant experiences.

This is something that cannot be done by orders or written procedures created in atmosphere of fear. It can be achieved by nourishing values of trust and cooperation shaped by conditions inside the organisation where the leader sets the tone – like in the case of Southwest Airlines where quality is ingrained in daily activities with direct involvement of their leader and his management team.

In his powerful TED talk 'Why good leaders make you feel safe', Simon Sinek, a renowned leadership expert describes the value of culture where people don't fear their leaders.

'I was flying on a trip, and I was a witness to an incident where a passenger attempted to board before his number was called. And I watched the gate agent treating this man like he had broken the law - like a criminal. Shee was yelled at this passenger for attempting to board too soon. 

So I said something. I said, "Why do you treat us like cattle? Why can't you treat us like human beings?" 

And this is exactly what she said to me: 

"Sir, if I don't follow the rules, I could get in trouble or lose my job." 

All she was telling me is that she doesn't feel safe. All she was telling me is that she doesn't trust her leaders. 

The reason we like flying Southwest Airlines is not because they necessarily hire better people. It's because they don't fear their leaders. 

You see, if the conditions are wrong, we are forced to expend our own time and energy to protect ourselves from each other, and that inherently weakens the organization. When we feel safe inside the organization, we will naturally combine our talents and our strengths and work tirelessly to face the dangers outside and seize the opportunities.' 

Airlines Are Designed Like a Symphony But They Have to Survive Like Jazz

Being deeply immersed in the orchestration of airlines, particularly in the relationship between strategy and operations, I cannot help thinking how much these experiences and thoughts resonate with connection between symhonies and jazz music.

Whenever I see and listen to a symphonic orchestra, I am amazed by the sound of the music. So many different instruments, played beautifully by musicians, all in sync. And the whole is masterfully orchestrated by the conductor, touching the feelings of those listening.

Then my thoughts often slip to the artistry of jazz musicians — full of improvisation, with no conductor, yet self-synchronising in the moment.

The airline is designed like a symphony, but it has to survive like jazz.

Symphony gives structure. Jazz gives adaptability.

Doesn't that describe the relationship between strategy and operations?

Jazz isn't random improvisation. Great jazz musicians have extraordinary individual expertise, but that alone isn't enough. They are constantly:

• listening to one another,

• sensing changes,

• anticipating where the music is going,

• responding without losing the whole,

• and creating something collectively that no individual musician could have predetermined.

Isn't that remarkably close to what effective airline operations require?

The challenge and the opportunity is to combine the two.

Airlines need the structure and shared direction of the symphony, while developing the collective awareness and adaptability of jazz.

This is where Systemic Reality Check, which emerged from my diverse experiences across the airline system, can serve as a practical guide towards systemic intelligence.

Systemic intelligence is the ability to understand, navigate and act within complex, interconnected systems. It brings together systems thinking, awareness of feedback and deep pattern recognition, helping us address root causes rather than repeatedly responding to symptoms.

Systemic Reality Check makes this practical by bringing people, operational reality and organisational knowledge together — continuously asking:

What is?
What matters?
What is possible?

It is simple to start. What it ultimately depends on is an airline's readiness to look openly at its own reality and commit to building a better present and future for air travel.

And that requires something no system or technology can provide on its own: openness to fresh thinking and art of adaptability to ever changing circumstances.

Setting the ground for #groundedAI #systemicintelligence

Air Travel and Telecoms Revisited: Different Disruptions, Same Management Problem - In Conversation with Martin Geddes

About ten years ago, I published my interview with Martin Geddes, a fresh thinker in technology with a personal connection to the airline industry. The interview was part of my preparation for the second edition of my book, Beyond Airline Disruptions – Thinking and Managing Anew.

It is fascinating to see how deeply Martin’s responses still resonate with the open questions I raised about industry issues that remain unresolved today.

The interview is full of unconventional ideas that invite deeper thinking about what needs to change and what we can do differently to make air travel a better experience.

Perhaps today’s emerging AI can help us break that cycle, but only if it strengthens our systemic knowledge and skills rather than simply automating the thinking and practices that kept us there.

Rereading the interview helped me recognise some of the roots that contributed to the development of the Systemic Reality Check, now consdered as an integral part of Systems Intelligence.

Here is the link to my conversation with Martin Geddes

Thinkers360 recognition

Glad to see my blog article ‘Breaking Through Airline Compensation Denials’ listed as one of the year’s Most Popular Articles by Thinkers360 Thought Leaders (1H’26). 

It carries an important message for passengers: they need to be more inventive in challenging the rigid interpretations of passenger compensation rules that allow biased interpretation by airlines.

The post            The music    

The issues with AI moving too quickly

As Bill Gates said,  ”AI is moving too quickly to be treated as a future problem. We need urgent, coordinated action now to make sure the benefits of this technology reach as many people as possible while reducing the disruptions along the way.”

In reality, everybody is talking about generic AI solutions, not those tailored to the realities of organisations where work and value are created every day. 

To break away from this practice detached from reality, effective AI requires people with deep experiential systems knowledge, an understanding of an organisation's economic and core values, and insight into how it fits within the wider system.

This leads to the need for continuous reality checks, viewing each organisation as part of a larger interconnected system. 

Only then can augmented, human-centred technology operate in context, where better decisions and lasting value are created.

The Pike Syndrome Revisited

Our intelligence is shaped by the boundaries we have learned to live within. Formed through our experiences, beliefs, and habits, these boundaries can sometimes obscure our vision of reality and even  become harmful. This state was named the Pike Syndrome after the results of the following experiment carried out by Dr Mobius.

In 1873 a German zoologist Dr Karl Mobius conducted a famous experiment with a pike – an aggressive fish predator. Dr Mobius put a glass divider in the middle of a tank. On one side he dropped small prey fish, and put a pike into another. The pike started to charge the minnows. It charged over and over, and each time it would hit hard into the glass wall. It persisted even when impact was so strong that it would float upside down for some time before recovering and finally gave up after three months. After six months the glass wall was removed and the pike roamed freely among the minnows, peacefully sharing the tank. The pike survived by eating the food given by Dr Mobius. Other researchers have repeated Mobius’s experiment and results were the same. Some have actually allowed the pike to starve to death while minnows swam safely around. 

                   

To free ourselves from the Pike Syndrome we need to become aware of and question routines that no longer serve us before they put us in serious trouble. The same applies to organisations when their core business values are being unknowingly eroded by actions driven by inherited, ineffective habits and practices. 

It's time for a reality check.

***

The Pike Syndrome was first published ten years ago and has since become one of my most viewed posts. To me, this signals something important: people, leaders, and organisations can silently become trapped by habits long after reality has changed.

The question is no longer only whether we can recognise these invisible barriers, but how quickly humanised AI, guided by context, values, and human judgement, can help us break through them.

The Leadership Challenge Airlines Can No Longer Ignore

On the surface, it may look as though airlines dig deep, analyse, reengineer, and make thoughtful changes, but it appears they are not doing so in the right way strategically, as evidenced by the growing losses in their core business.

With that in mind, here are a few observations that may inspire fresh thinking.

I found the following observation by Seth Godin particularly insightflul:

"In a competitive market, if you do the work to lower your price by 10%, your market share grows.

If you dig in deep, analyse, reengineer and make thoughtful changes, you can lower your price another 10%. This leads to an even bigger jump in market share.

The third time (or maybe the fourth, or even before then), you only achieve a 10% savings by cutting safety, or quality, or reliability. You cut corners, certainly.

The last 10% costs your workers the chance to make a decent living, it costs your suppliers the opportunity to treat their people with dignity, and it costs you your reputation.

The last 10% isn't worth it. We're not going to remember how cheap you were. We're going to remember that you let us down."

This quote is taken from Seth Godin's blog post ‘The tragedy of the last 10%’, as it touches on the core issues of the competitive, value-destroying race for growth in the airline industry.

Most airlines and airports have been operating within this zone for quite some time, approaching nonlinear reality with a linear mindset and unaware of its wider consequences.

Airlines are obviously trapped in a system that has no future and need to find the way out themselves. The practice of Systemic Reality Check can help leaders to get a better vision of reality, ready to lead with the core purpose in mind.

It is meant to replace the idea that passengers will be tempted to fly if offered the rock bottom prices in exchange for undignified and costly travel experience. And consequently, that they can indefinitely pack more flights at congested airports. Relying on AI unaware of relational nature of human and economic values  will only slow down the process.

A strategy fit for the future will require leaders to develop new skills and embrace new tools. Among the most important is the ability to fine-tune strategy by learning from disruptions, a principle that lies at the heart of my work.

Leaders need to inspire practices that connect people, processes, and technology in service of what is, what matters, and what is possible.

#AirlineLeadership #AirlineStrategy #Aviation  #SystemsThinking #DecisionMaking #FutureOfAviation

 

Are you ready for human friendly AI agents?

The next shift in technology is AI agents. And the gap between people who understand them and people who don't is about to get very expensive, says Sandeep Swadia, theMITmonk, a technology executive, board member, and investor who has helped build and scale companies that collectively created more than $40 billion in value.

In this video, he is delivering good news that agents are much simpler than most people think. He shows exactly how they work, when to use them and how to start before everyone else catches up. He explains that AI prompt and AI agents are completely different and yet, most of us are still stuck with old habits.

Here are a few insights pointing to the need of shifting our perception of AI in practice - seeing it as a deeply collaborative, human-centric system:

- Agents aren't just going to be engineers, they will be the people who understand their work deeply enough to define it precisely. Most companies want AI everywhere. The ones actually winning are obsessively narrow. If clarity is the bottleneck then the opportunity is not broad intelligence it's narrow ownership.

-The winners won't build the broadest agents first. They will build the one that understands one workflow, one market, and one kind of user pain better than everyone else.

- The question is not whether the shift happens, it is whether you shape it or get shaped by it. The most valuable person is no longer the one who can think the fastest. It is the one who can define good work, spot bad work, and know when to trust an agent and when to trust the human.That is where your value is going to move.

It’s time to take systemic reality checks to a new level.