Dear Mr. Skapinker,
You mention that the report lays out 4 important lessons. The main lesson the report misses is this:
Public Utilities should never be privatised. The purpose of a utility in an economy is to serve its consumers only. It is diametrically opposite to the profit-only motive of the private debt-laden over-leveraged companies.
That is the biggest lesson. But unfortunately, in the Ango-American form of Capitalism, nothing can be done about it. After each disaster, Committees will be formed, Reports will be generated. But nothing will happen.
Regards,
Pradeep Kabra
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Dear Pradeep,
Many thanks for your email. Of course, public utilities do have their problems too.
Regards,
Michael
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On airlines, snow excuses and gobbledygook
By Michael Skapinker
Published in FT on 29-Mar-201
It took an hour for the spring sunshine to burn away the early morning fog in London on Thursday – too long to prevent a clutch of flight cancellations. There was a queue at the Swiss International Air Lines desk at London City airport and, in the absence of any apparent alternative, I joined it.
An airline employee called out some passengers’ names. I asked whether he could tell the rest of us what was happening. Apparently not. Eventually, one of his colleagues passed along the line, handing out a telephone number. “Can I still get to Basel today?” I asked the not-particularly-interested person who eventually answered my call. He could get me on to a Lufthansa flight via Frankfurt, but I would need to be at Heathrow in an hour.
It was 7.20am, the traffic was thick, so I sent apologies to the five companies I was meant to be seeing and headed to the office, wondering why no one had said: “Ladies and gentlemen, we will try to sort you out, but we are unlikely to get you away before early afternoon. If that doesn’t work for you, please accept our apologies. This is the number to call to arrange your refunds.”
Why don’t companies do the simple things? Because they do not think the problem is their fault (true, in this case), because their staff do not have enough training, information or authority, or because, as organisations, they lack “situational awareness”.
I picked up this bit of jargon in a 76-page report that appeared on the day I missed my meetings. The report came from an inquiry into a far more consequential weather-related snarl-up: the snow that almost shut Heathrow for two days in December, exposing Europe’s busiest airport to worldwide ridicule.
The inquiry was an internal one, headed by David Begg, a transport expert and non-executive director of BAA, Heathrow’s owner. But this was no snow job: BAA invited former airport chief executives from Montreal, Zurich and Chicago to join the inquiry, as well as Roy Williams, who was head of New Orleans International airport when hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.
The report provides an illuminating insight into BAA’s inadequacies, but the lessons extend beyond airports. The principal one is how vital “situational awareness” is. It means more than knowing what is happening. It means having the organisational ethos and systems to anticipate and deal with problems before they get out of hand, whether the threat comes from storms, product failures, consumer dissatisfaction or political upheaval. Companies that lack situational awareness often know a problem is coming, but appear unable to deal with it until it has damaged their business and reputation.
Heathrow knew bad weather was on the way; forecasters had said so. It also knew the snow would strike at the busiest time of the year – the weekend before Christmas. Indeed, with almost every seat sold, the airport was heading for the busiest weekend in its 64-year history.
Measured over that period, the storm was not remarkable – the kind of snow London can expect every five years. It did fall particularly fast, but it did so over the rest of Europe too. On the worst day, Sunday December 19, when Heathrow ran only 5 per cent of its flights, Paris Charles de Gaulle managed 44 per cent, Frankfurt 48 per cent and Amsterdam, recovering from a poor performance two days previously, reached 81 per cent.
There were almost no flights for the 9,500 passengers who spent the Saturday night at Heathrow without enough blankets and water. BAA tried to bring in more blankets, but the lorry could not get through. It was only two days later that Heathrow opened heated marquees with toilets and information screens.
The report lays out the lessons. The first is to have an ambitious, overarching goal: in Heathrow’s case, that it should never close, except for safety or other emergency reasons. Every organisation should have its equivalent. A second lesson is to have a crisis team from key parts of the organisation (including, in Heathrow’s case, passenger welfare). A third is that it have a roster of on-call trained staff.
Fourth, and most important, is to have a single, authoritative source of information to relay to staff and then to customers. The most common complaint in these situations is that no one seems to know what is happening. Heathrow had some barely believable communication barriers: for example, the “crisis support team” could not see the airfield and relied on telephone or handheld radio reports from snow-clearing squads.
Once an organisation has the right processes in place, it should be applying them every day, starting with the smallest problems. I am sure the Swiss airline people are used to snow. But having watched them at work last week, I am not sure I would like to be in their hands in a real crisis.
michael.skapinker@ft.com
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