Every Airbus pilot carries a little card on his person at all times. It simply enumerates the four golden rules to handling a system as complex as a modern airliner.
It made me wonder, given the complex nature of managing modern enterprises, whether these are relevant in our context and what useful lessons we can derive from it.
Let's look at each of these four golden rules, one by one.
1. Fly, navigate and communicate
Task sharing should be adapted to the prevailing situation and tasks should be accomplished in accordance with the following priorities:
- Fly (Aviate): Pilot Flying (PF) must concentrate on flying the aircraft to capture and maintain the desired targets, vertical flight path and lateral flight path. Pilot Monitoring (PM), must back up the PF by monitoring flight parameters and by calling any excessive deviation.
- Navigate: Select the desired modes for navigation, being aware of surrounding terrain and minimum safe altitude. This rule can be summarized by th following three 'know where..." statements of situational-awareness:
- Know where you are
- Know where you should be; and,
- Know where the terrain and obstacles are
- Communicate: Effective crew communication involves communications between flight crew and controller, between flight crew members and between flight crew and cabin crew. Communication allows sharing of goals and intentions, and enhancing crew's situational awareness.
Of course, managing the continuation of the flight is always the "operational" priority, and this includes:
- Managing aircraft systems; and
- Performing applicable emergency and/or abnormal procedure(s).
Takeaways
Managing modern enterprises is quite akin to managing modern airliners. The primary difference lies in the system response time. In modern fly-by-wire airliners, every known contingency and an idealized response is programmed into the flight management computers (FMC) to keep it safely within the performance envelope. But the pilots may choose to ignore, reduce or even take manual control when required, overriding the systems. Humans remain the ultimate arbiter. And the aircraft responds immediately to control or other inputs.
In enterprises, the equivalent of the pilots is the executive, and the FMC is the management tier. And while many processes are systematized, giving the management a dashboard view of critical enterprise parameters, corrective actions take time as all such input needs to be communicated to the management or supervisory level, who then implement or execute the task. Unless of course, it is a known event in which case, it is operationalized at the appropriate management, supervisory or employee/worker level. Feedback, however, is not real-time. Yet, within a "reasonable period", ranging from a few hours to a few weeks, the effect of control inputs begin to show.
Enterprise events have varying degrees of uncertainty. What you most definitely want to do is to operationalize all of the most obvious event handling processes. And these encompass most of a modern enterprises operations functions including Sales & Marketing, Finance, HR, IT etc. Events that these functions handle are mostly routine, with best practices emerging over time and with team experience.
Above the most obvious, events need to be analyzed before suitable course of action can be determined. This is the domain of middle management in most organizations. Above this lies the domain of complex events, where cause-effect relations, hence organizational response, is not self-evident. These events need experimental probing to determine what works and what does not work, and is thus the domain of senior management.
Beyond the complex, is the domain of Chaos, which companies hope they never have to face and yet occur more frequently in a volatile, ambiguous world. Maturity, experience and the ability to act immediately and decisively are the hallmarks of leaders who manage events in this domain. The desired outcome is a contained situation, simplified and moved back to complex or complicated domain so that senior managers can take charge, define new processes and systems and gradually institutionalize the learning from such events.
2. Use the appropriate level of automation at all times
On highly automated and integrated aircraft, several levels of automation are available to perform a given task. The correct level of automation depends on the task the be performed, the flight phase and time available. The correct level of automation is often the one the pilot feels the most comfortable with, depending on his/her knowledge and experience of the aircraft and systems, skills and confidence. To summarize:
- Understand the implication of the intended level of automation
- Select the intended level
- Confirm the aircraft responds as expected
This leads us to Golden Rule #3.
Takeaways
Appropriate level of automation - there is real beauty in this rule! Of course, it implies that you cannot always rely on data if other indications are contradictory. So what do you do?
You are expected to take manual control of those "in doubt" parameters until a resolution is reached. It indicates events, potentially outside the performance envelope, hence accompanied by high risk.
But then, the human mind is only capable of juggling so many variables. Any more variables beyond this threshold, and you reach a condition commonly referred to as analysis paralysis, or decision paralysis. The trick is in knowing which signals or data to rely on and which to ignore, until you can determine a course of action.
So what is situation normal?
While operations sits firm in the domain of the Obvious (where Rule #1 is applicable constantly), the governance should be at the boundary between complicated and complex, with adequate leeway and authority given to mid-level and senior managers to experiment.
Experimentation costs. So it is not just sufficient for the Executive to delegate experimentation authority, it should be backed-up with sufficient resources in terms of people and funding. Indeed, at any given time, multiple, parallel, safe-to-fail experiments would be in progress with the executive monitoring, and available for both mentoring and advice while retaining the option of stepping-in if needed.
However, there is a critical difference. Even while the PF can take partial to full control by applying the appropriate level of automation, the system as a whole continues to monitor a whole host of other critical parameters.
These sensors send data to the FMC where it is processed continuously, and it also continues to responding appropriately within in-built tolerances, and where it exceeds these tolerances, flashes appropriate notification to the pilots.
This is the event handling, and exception handling and escalation mechanism of organizations, a part of the governance structure.
But what happens when events lie outside the performance envelope of the organization? These unknown-unknowns, as it is referred to in risk management?
This factor highlights another essential difference between airliners and organizations. Most of the design of an airliner happens upfront. That is, the design effort is front loaded. Whereas in the case of organizations, the initial design of the structure and dynamics evolves continuously to market and competitive actions.
One would therefore imagine that organizations would have the ability to monitor many more parameters than airliners. And since the events it needs to handle over its lifetime (read in perpetuity), it would continuously be designing and deploying sensors to monitor new events both within the organization, and outside, in the environment.
In reality however, this is where most organization fail. A sensor in an organization is comprised of its people, processes and systems. The active directive element is always a human. The sensing workload is continuous, ubiquitous and overwhelming.
Yet managers rarely give sufficient thought to designing and implementing sensors or governance structures that can facilitate fast feedback as well as its evolution. Neither do they co-opt the entire organization into this process. It is not difficult to discern the reasons why. In the operational domain, people rarely have the time to focus on anything outside their narrow briefs. Their entire workload has a time horizon of here and now.
How then can they be brought into the fold as discerning, effective sensors? Yes, it needs a different level of capability, and talent. That is a problem that unfortunately has been fully delegated by the Executive to the HR function who merely refers to it as the talent shortage.
So what do they - the HR's talent acquisition sub-function - do? They have targets, so they compromise. They compromise on the "good-to-have" job criteria in order to meet the numbers with just the threshold "must have" capabilities.
It is benign neglect by the executive, and mediocrity by design. And this unfortunately brings with it a level of complacency as it solves the immediate problem, relegating future needs to a later date.
While most HR systems test all threshold criteria, modern HR management insists on testing three levels of skills or competence and aptitude - one that is immediately needed, one that can provide differentiation and one that will be needed in the future.
Nearly 80% of job-seekers will only have varying levels of competency in threshold skills. About 15-18% will have differentiating skills and a miniscule 2-5% will have the basic skills and aptitude for the organization's emerging needs, that is, skills that are immediately utilizable to shape the organizations future.
3. Understand the FMA* at all times
The Flight Mode Annunciator (FMA) is the feedback mechanism on such aircraft, the manner, so to say, in which the aircraft speaks to the pilots.
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The panel of a modern jetliner.
FCU is the knobby unit (orange highlights) above the row of glass displays |
All inputs to the Flight Control Unit (FCU) should immediately be crossed checked with the FMA or data on other displays.
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| FMA (boxed in yellow) above on the PFD |
Any anomaly may indicate a major problem as this
article highlights. At all times, the PF and PM should be aware of:
- The armed or engaged modes
- The guidance targets set
- The aircraft response in terms of attitude, speed and trajectory, etc
- Any mode transitions or reversions.
To sum up:
- Monitor your FMA
- Announce your FMA
- Confirm your FMA
- Understand your FMA
And if any problem occurs, refer to Golden Rule #4.
Takeaways
The most obvious notifications to the executive are issues being escalated by managers. More the centralization of decision making, more the escalated issues.
Outside of formally escalated issues is the micro-narrative. This is the informal information that moves around social informal networks in the organization - the gossip channels, the coffee group, the lunch group, discussions around the water-cooler. This is the pervasive undercurrent and is an element of culture.
While formal notifications are the tip of the iceberg, the micronarrative is the whole iceberg! It is that important. And culture determines whether the executive is even in the loop of what is propagating in the organizational gyre.
This aspect is critical enough to influence organizational performance. And to stick a probe into this information flow, the whole structure of governance needs to be redesigned ground up.
4. Take action if things do not go as expected.
This is straightforward. If the aircraft does not follow the desired flight path or target, the crew should react without delay:
- By PF changing the level of automation:
- From managed guidance to selected guidance
- From selected guidance to manual flying or
- By PM taking action:
- Questioning, and if that is not enough
- Challenging, and if that is still not enough
- Taking over
In abnormal or emergency conditions:
- Understand the prevailing condition before acting
- Assess the risks and time pressure
- Review and evaluate the available options
- Match the response to the situation
- Manage workload
- Create a shared problem model with other crew members
- Apply recommended procedures and other agreed solutions
Takeaways
Rule #4 is about preparing the organization for a crisis. Both the Board and the Executive suite will be well seized of this, however, in most organizations, the structures needed to handle crisis is either poorly developed or non existent.
This is the Chaos domain events and occurs when events occur outside the performance envelope of the organization.
It is also the domain in which the maximum learning occurs, albeit, a little too late for some organization to survive as amply demonstrated by the likes of Enron, Worldcom and some Wall Street icons like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.
The crash of 2008 is a classic Level 4 event when the entire financial world teetered at the edge of chaos, with many of the "too-big-to-fail" institutions only being saved in the nick of time by state intervention.
What is critical here is quick, visible and decisive action, to the exclusion of almost all other considerations.
Conclusions
There is no doubt that the four golden rules are very much applicable in the world of enterprise, often to a larger range of variables.
In designing machines, even as sophisticated as modern airliners, one can not only define a desired performance envelope, but also build in mechanisms to respond to a large number of variables.
Enterprises on the other hand, need to be perpetually on the drawing board even while being in operation. This calls for a very different talent pool from the one that is currently available with most organizations.
So how can organization respond and create a pool of talent to handle the spectrum of potential events? The path forward appears to lie in open organizations with a global talent pool.
Already, in the more advanced economies, the trend indicates a greater reliance on outside pool of contract workers providing a specialized set of skills for a defined period of time.
And when the need passes, contracts can be terminated and new talent can be onboarded. Some of the competencies of the contract workforce gets transferred to employees thereby enriching the in-house pool. The mix today is already at 60-40. It won't be long before this inverts to 40-60.
And as the Golden Rules underlines, remember to always...
Fly the aircraft.........Fly the aircraft..........Fly the aircraft
Or is it?
Sounds familiar?
