Habit of Behaviorrors

During one of the early morning flights out of Mumbai, There was a huge queue at the check-in counter of the budget airlines, on which I was traveling.

On enquiring, I was told by the Airlines staff that the systems are down. Hence, there will be delay in checking in.

“Systems down? How is this possible?” was the first thing popped up in my mind.

This note is exactly what went through my mind, and what I observed during the waiting period in the queue.

1. BEHAVIORROR

Behaviorror is the behavior of errors.

Any system to fail completely needs to have the errors/mistakes/defects repeated consistently over a period of time. The errors/mistakes/defects are often over looked, not observed, not monitored, not rectified and the compounding effect of it results in total systemic failure.

I am sure any airline MUST have sufficient redundancies at the infrastructure level – hardware, software, networking and all the connecting dots in between.

If things still fail, then the systems/processes created to ensure a high availability environment is clearly not adequate.

In the highly competitive airlines industry, it clearly leads to customers dissatisfaction and loyalty attrition. And gain of customers to the competition. Double whammy!

A large system will not crumble, with just one or two errors. It takes a whole lot of time and repetitions for the systems to degrade and finally collapse.

Remember the Titanic? It did not sink like stone in water. It took really lot of time for the water power to over come the forces of buoyancy of the ship.

What safe guards does the management create to watch for errors happening consistently as a behavior?

Does the airline management have the mechanism in place to ‘see’ and ‘observe’ behaviorrors?

2. "Tell me Jack – what do you do?”

The above line is how Dennis Hopper taunts Keanu Reaves in the movie “Speed”.

When the systems were down, the staff members were all tensed up. Each counter, had a queue depth of 10-12 passengers.

The senior staffers were firing instructions to the young counter staff.

Much of the counter staff looked fresh in the job and they did not exhibit confidence. They did not have eye contact with the customers. Instead they were just staring at their console screens. The smile was forgotten!

Did the airline prepare their employees for such eventualities? I bet, no!

If they had been trained, then the employees would have handled the problems with confidence – as stated in their Standard Operating Plan manual.

Even if they were trained, it had not been reinforced in to their behavior, while responding to such crunch situations.

Net result, unsmiling, grim and anxious employees who broke every rule of their service manual – an obvious behaviorror.

3. Course Correction – not only for pilots

If things are going right, who is the one in the hierarchy looks out for potential problems? Who foresees problems, before they happen? The Early Warning Signalist - the lead indicator?

Who plans for the contingencies - “what-if” scenarios and builds the Standard Operating Procedures accordingly to handle any kind of foreseeable problem?

Were they created by a non-descript person, seen as a theoretician who was never accepted by the ‘so-called practical ones’ in the Operations and Customer Service teams?

Was there a mechanism built for collective learning – with inputs from the field?

Any organization, whatever its vintage, in an ever changing marketplace, has to build in mechanism to cope with change – and course correct themselves.

This will ensure, transitions are responded with agility and in a much smoother manner.

Outdated and stiffer rules that has lost relevance also result in a behaviorror called “Dinosaurism” – collectively marching towards extinction.

4. Cultural conditioning that accepts change

That brought up the question - did the organization promote an open culture to accept ideas for improvisation from any where in the ranks - More so from the customer facing employees?

Because, the process what they followed when systems were down, were not smart enough.

The airline resorted to free seating. Even for customers who had pre-booked their seats through Tele/Web check-in, were denied at the boarding point.

I could see lot of frequent flyers, grumbling and visibly dissatisfied.

Thankfully none of the customers were in a mood to raise voice or fight.


5. What could the airline do?

1. Failure proofing operations with the participation of all the departments
2. Re-train employees in handling crunch situations.
3. Standardize scripts to handle customers at the time of failures.
4. Empower employees to take decisions appropriate to their level of hierarchy. A senior employee should not interfere in junior level decisions and vice versa. There should be clear demarcation of who takes what decisions at every level of hierarchy, when responding to crisis and it should be weaved into their SOP Manual.

The boarding was delayed by over 30 minutes. Consequentially, the flight push back and the arrival at the destination were delayed by over 40 minutes.

The incident *spiced* up the grey cells, to write it up for everyone’s benefit.

The views in this article are strictly the personal opinion of the author