I
would like to share with you some more excerpts from my book ‘Beyond airline
disruptions: Thinking and managing anew’ in hope that they will inspire you to start
rethinking the way you work, and discover hidden opportunities for improvement.
You
won’t find lots of data and statistics in this book. This is because you already
have too much of them. You will rather learn how to make sense of numbers aggregated
in your company’s reports, understand where do they come from, and how to create
a platform that supports decision making in complex and dynamic airline system.
I invite you to embark on this exciting journey and hope
that the following excerpts will give you a better idea of what this is all about:
We
need to recognise that inherited management methods and information systems can
no longer serve the purpose. Traditional planning and forecasting are not suitable
to keep the pace with what is happening in the real world. We need to find a
new way of system management that acknowledges its dynamics and interactions, and
constantly balances between profit and quality. The key to managing such a
system is understanding of operational changes, especially when they exceed the
acceptable level built in the company’s plan and start generating additional
cost and decline in service quality with longer term consequences. These
changes – that we will refer to as disruptions – are the sweet spots where the
results of all systems activities, for better or for worse, become visible, measurable,
including their deeper origins. They are the place from where we can start
connecting instead of counting dots.
By
making decisions based on too many assumptions, we unknowingly create more
problems elsewhere and are unable to measure their impact on the system due
their complexity. When we compare the planned and actual results published in
company reports, we cannot say what is beyond these figures, what really
happened and why, and what we need to improve. Regardless of amount of data we
collect and analyse, sometimes the impact of our decisions is minor, and
sometimes it can have longer-term implications on the system performance that
we wouldn’t be aware of. This is because the system we are in is not designed
to manage things we are facing in real life.
Complexity arises from interactions between people and processes that
are the very nature of airline business, but existing information systems and
management do not recognise it. Hence the detachment between strategy and
operations, plans and reality.
Getting
to know disruptions is the process of discovery, learning, doing and aligning
with what really matters to airlines and their customers. It changes the
thinking about how the system works, what doesn’t work and why. It is an
insightful approach to management that brings more clarity into decision making
when faced with complex system issues. It also enhances communication and
collaboration between people in different departments and their understanding
of dependencies and contribution to achieving the common goal.
We need to change
our learned views and introduce new measures related to disruption experience.
We need to look at them in a positive way – see them as a guide to reality that
tells us what to improve. This is because when you learn how to get to their
origins, you will see the whole new world of interconnections between
employees, customers and service suppliers. They tell leaders how far the
company is from the desired course, help them see people beyond numbers, see
costs as a result of movement and interactions, and understand the validity of
assumptions made at the top and across the organisation. In addition, getting
the insight into the cultural issues will inspire ideas for improvement in the
relationship with employees.
Disruptions are a
systemic issue resulting from interactions of numerous internal and external
influences. Knowing about disruptions is not as important as understanding
their relational causes.
Without reflecting
on differences between what we had planned and what actually happened and
looking more deeply into avoidable causes of problems, we will not know what to
improve. Wilful ignorance of disruptions eventually leads to poor service,
dissatisfied passengers, higher costs and loss of revenue.
Traditionally,
costs derived from financial reports are statistically distributed to business
units in order to be calculable at functional levels and easy to control. As
soon as the ‘budget schedule’ starts to change (normally months before the start
of a new scheduling season), it triggers changes in the cost matrix, making the
planned costs even less suitable for decision making. Such practice ignores the
fact that costs are more than just numbers – they are non-linear, interrelated
and consequently cannot be measured in a conventional way. This is why answers
to questions related to true effectiveness of saving measures, route network,
aircraft and hub operation, outsourced services or investment in additional
resources remain not only the stumbling block for improvement in cost
efficiency and operational performance, but a source of additional costs and
poor service.
The main objective
of a disruption information system is to empower airline managers with the
knowledge about the cost of operational changes and their underlying causes and
help them to understand the impact of their decisions on the overall
performance including passenger experience.
The task of
establishing the relationships between strategic plans, operational decisions
and airline financial performance may look too complex, especially in big
organisations, and may put off many managers from even trying to understand
these connections. However, managing an airline effectively without this
knowledge is not possible. The system that we are about to introduce is aimed
at simplifying this process by enriching operational information with elements
of cost and revenue. This is meant to enable airline executives to be continuously
informed about the cost- and quality-critical operational issues and their
origins.
By becoming more
familiar with causes of disruption events, decision makers can learn about
organisational, managerial, cultural, interdepartmental and a whole range of
other internal issues that they would otherwise not be aware of. These insights
can be more important than accurate information about the costs involved in
single events.
Complexity
increases the number of trivial activities, making it difficult for senior
managers to recognise and focus on things that deserve their attention. They
can get easily involved in ad hoc operational problems that could be resolved
locally, instead of spending their valuable time more effectively by making a
small number of powerful interventions that can have a massive positive impact
on operational performance.
Complexity itself
is not the problem – it is organisational detachment and top-down management
that channels work against its natural flow. When we start thinking in a new
way, we can realise that the only way to understand the workflow is to start
from outside, from operational reality where the results of all activities
become evident. It then depends on where we then turn our attention to. In this
case, we will be
focusing on causes
of hidden strategic, organisational and management issues that are continuously
and consistently hindering operational performance. looking at critical
variations in service delivered to passengers
EU regulation EC261 on passenger protection has passed the burden of collective negligence and wilful ignorance about the problem onto airlines. They are seen as
a culprit in a highly interdependent industry in which airports, politicians
and regulators also bear responsibility for the growing decline in quality of
passenger services.
While it was
obvious that the flawed Regulation could not improve flight punctuality and
regularity, nor better protect passengers, it has most certainly incurred
additional cost for airlines.
The value of disruption management from leadership perspective is that it provides not only tangible
information but also the insight into internal relationships between managers
and employees, and between employees in the environment where sharing the
common goal is not ingrained in the company’s culture.
Applying the principles
of disruption management can improve these relationships: the method brings
together people from different sides of an organisation around the same
real-life problems and builds up the understanding of their interconnections
and how the results of their individual and collective work affect the end
result. The result is improved quality. By improving quality, we reduce costs
and increase revenue naturally. This is how we can make a lasting improvement
without forcing organisational changes and changes in management.
We should keep
reminding ourselves that in this imperfect, hard-to-manage system burdened with
lots of historical baggage, it is only people who can hold things together and
make it work in difficult, unknown situations. It is the people who create
bridges that reach beyond departmental boundaries and beyond what they are
trained to handle. This is what people can do when they are driven by a sense
of togetherness and belonging and when they are inspired to work towards the
same goals – the kind of culture that can be built starting with collaborative
gatherings that we talked about in this book. This is how our actions can
become value-aligned.
