The decision by the FAA to reduce flights tomorrow by 10% at 40 major airports across the country is an example of a fundamental best practice for managing a crisis: do what you can to ensure that the crisis does not get any worse or leads to a new crisis.
The federal agency took the unprecedented action “to maintain travel safety as air traffic controllers exhibit signs of strain during the ongoing government shutdown,” the Associated Press reported. The airports include those in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington DC.
While the headline-making decision was driven by operational and safety concerns,“informing people early on about something that will disrupt their plans is always a good idea and allows affected parties, such as airlines and travelers, to plan accordingly,” Vishakha Mathur, a public affairs strategies and vice president of SKDK, told me in an email message.
Not The First Time
The FAA took similar preventive steps last year when it immediately grounded Boeing 737 Max 9s after the blowout of a cabin door on a new Alaska Air plane. “In a statement, Alaska Air Group CEO Ben Minicucci said the airline’s fleet of 65 MAX 9s would be grounded and inspected to ensure safety. ‘Each aircraft will be returned to service only after completion of full maintenance and safety inspections.’” Minicucci said. The company executive said he was “personally committed to doing everything we can to conduct this review in a timely and transparent way,” the Seattle Times reported
There are other examples in the corporate world of companies being proactive to help prevent a bad situation from getting worse. In 2018, two Black men who were waiting for a friend in a Philadelphia Starbucks were arrested after a manager called the police. The company said it would close 8,000 stores for a day in order to provide training to employees about unconscious bias, according to The Guardian.
Organizations should consider identifying and establishing crisis triggers that will require prompt action before a situation worsens. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford cited “‘voluntary safety reports from pilots indicating growing fatigue among air traffic controllers.’ These early warning signals—similar to customer complaints, employee satisfaction scores, or quality control deviations—should trigger predetermined intervention protocols,” Evan Oshan, an aviation attorney with Oshan & Associates, told me in an email interview.
The Right Priorities
The cost of proactive intervention, such as cancelling flights, inconveniences consumers, and losing revenue “is always lower than the cost of catastrophic failure (crashes, deaths, and complete system collapse). Business leaders should ask: ‘What early indicators would justify temporarily reducing operations to prevent total failure?,” he recommended.
The decision to cut back the number of airplane flights, while commendable from the perspective of crisis management, should not obscure the reason why the move was necessary in the first place. “The FAA’s decision addresses the immediate symptom (controller fatigue) but doesn’t solve the underlying problem (3,000-controller shortage, 36-day unpaid work period, chronic understaffing). Crisis management must distinguish between stabilization and resolution. The 10% flight reduction stabilizes the immediate safety risk but doesn’t resolve the workforce crisis. Business leaders must implement both: emergency measures to prevent immediate collapse and strategic initiatives to address root causes,” Oshan pointed out.
An important lesson from the government shutdown and the efforts to ensure the safety of airline passengers is for business leaders to ask these two critical questions: “‘What do we do today to prevent failure?’and ‘What do we change structurally to prevent this crisis from recurring?’ The FAA answered the first question but is constrained by political realities from answering the second,” Oshan concluded.
Companies should test their crisis management plans against worst-case scenarios on a regular basis. By identifying what could trigger a crisis at their organizations, executives might be able to be proactive to ensure that a hypothetical does not become a reality—and that additional proactive steps will not be necessary.